Most people, independent of political faction, can't have civil political disagreements. This effect tends to be exacerbated when they are surrounded by like-minded people and mitigated when they are surrounded by political opponents. Conservatives in elite academic environments are usually in the latter category, so I do think they will tend to be more civil in political disagreements than their liberal counterparts. However, I suspect that this situation would be reversed in, say, a military environment, although I have no experience with the military.

You could look at Fox News, where conservative contributors are generally far more bombastic and partisan than their liberal counterparts. Many liberals allege that Fox News deliberately hires milquetoast liberals in order to make liberalism look bad, but I don't think we need to posit a top-down agenda to explain the "Fox News liberal" phenomenon. It's simply the case that people are much less comfortable expressing their political views vigorously when they see themselves as being in enemy territory, especially if they need to make a home in that territory, rather than just briefly visiting it.

Yeah, environmentalist attitudes towards e.g. GMOs and nuclear power look awfully purity-minded to me. I'm not sure whether I want to count environmentalism/Green thought as part of the mainline Left, though; it's certainly not central to it, and seems to be its own thing in a lot of ways.

(Cladistically speaking it's definitely not. But cladistics can get you in trouble when you're looking at political movements.)

Maybe it's about rationalization. The same feeling could be expressed by one person as: "this is a heresy" (because "heresy" is their party's official boo light) and by another person as: "this could harm people" (because "harming people" is their party's official boo light). But in fact both people just feel the idea is repulsive to them, but can't quickly explain why.

I imagine that most people in the US would find such a transaction rather unnerving, regardless of political leanings, so this is not a good test of liberal views. Do you have a better example of a correlation between valuing political correctness and liberal views?

Haidt acknowledges that liberals feel disgust at racism and that this falls under purity/sacredness (explicitly listing it in a somewhat older article on Table 1, pg 59). His claim is that liberals rely on the purity/sacredness scale relatively more often, not that they never engage it. Still, in your example, I'd expect the typical reaction to be anger at a fairness violation rather than disgust.

I don't think it matters of it's racial. The general principle of having someone try to buy out a government's espoused moral principles sounds Very Bad. The reasoning is that if the government can be bought once, it can be bought twice, and thus it can be bought in general and is in the control of moneyed donors rather than the voting populace, proof by induction on the naturals -- so to speak.

Economics being what it is, this is evidence that your hypothetical segregationist throwback is expecting to get more than a billion dollars of value out of the deal. That doesn't quite establish that someone's trying to screw the city, but it does gesture pretty emphatically in that direction; actual political sentiments hardly enter into it, except insofar as they provide exploitable tensions.

(If I were the mayor, I'd take the money and then build the fountain as part of a practical exhibit in a civil rights museum.)