Practically tolerant

Amid all the divisiveness, there's still one position that a solid majority of Americans can get behind, it seems: Damn, we just can't abide tolerance.

It was never a strong suit for conservatives, of course; when your ideological principles include hewing to traditional social standards and yielding to authority, and you're only comfortable in homogeneous communities, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to give a very cold reception to even the idea that people who flout those standards should be allowed to live their own lives unmolested. On the liberal side, tolerance is supposed to be a core principle, but let's face it, a broad swath of the left has been finding excuses to kick it to the curb for a solid half-century now, consistency be damned. And as we get more hyperpartisan, the intolerant are naturally only getting more so.

The big problem, it seems, is that a large number of people have somehow convinced themselves that there's an alternative to tolerance. But there really, really isn't.

Here are some of the lies about those supposed alternatives that we've been telling ourselves:

We can somehow change other people's principles so they agree with ours. Well, every major political persuasion has long had control of allegedly opinion-shaping major institutions in our society: For example, the left is believed (at least by the right) to rule much of the media, the university system and the public education system, while the right is likewise credited with holding the reins of many churches, the military and law enforcement. These institutions have power, even if it's not as much power as their allies hope for or their foes fear. But despite the influence these institutions have had on multiple generations, they have converted decisive majorities of ... well, almost no one on the Other Side. Yup — for all that they teach, lecture, propagandize, scold, shame and shriek, we still have comparable numbers of people on the left and right, the middle and the extremes. In fact, as noted above (and by everyone with open eyes, as well), hyperpartisanship is growing, hell, thriving. But go ahead, tell yourself the next revival, movement or series of public service announcements will do the trick. Eventually, I hope, society's scolds will get as tired of haranguing as their listeners are of hearing them.

We really have a strong majority of supporters provided we can motivate them to come out and support us. This one is trickier because it appears to work sometimes — until your success is used by the Other Side to motivate their silent supporters. What's actually happening, I think, is simply that once either party gets cocky enough to believe they've got a permanent majority, its members decide it's time to double down on the more "out-there" parts of their platform, which slowly start to repel everyone but that particular party's more devoted followers. It eventually happened with "Great Society"-style social services, and now the bell may finally be tolling for "supply-side" strengthen-the-rich tax policy. But regardless of how it happens, history has pretty much laughed at the idea of the Permanent Majority for any political party or ideology. In fact, the big political question now seems to be "will either party survive in its current shape or is there a big political realignment on the way?"

Our only problem is in the political infrastructure; if we could make this one change, voting would more accurately reflect the will of the people: that Our Side should win. Gerrymandering! Buying Votes! Rigged Voting Machines! Widespread Voter Fraud! Well, at least there have been documented examples of the first two, but there are people who (without anything that would constitute actual evidence) believe that one or the other of the second two are also happening all the time. Which raises the question of why it doesn't work all the time. I mean, control of the White House and both houses of Congress has actually changed hands in the past decade, and pundits believe there's a reasonable chance it'll happen again in the next couple years. So I think the impact of these flaws in the system is at least a little exaggerated. And don't get me started again with the arguments over changing constitutionally built-in systems such as the Electoral College; I've already vented about the practicality of that ever happening.

If we can't convince them, then at least we can suppress them. This is what we come to once we've hurled tolerance under the bus. Our faithful mistress History tells us we've tried this before, in various degrees. We're trying it now, in the forms of left-wing "Political Correctness" (which these days is usually called "Social Justice") and the right-wing counterpart that some call "Patriotic Correctness." The fact that both major political factions have their own concurrent movements dedicated to hounding the ideologically problematic — to the extent of getting the transgressors kicked out of their positions and/or shamed on social media — suggests that at most, each is inflicting comparable damage. And honestly, suppression movements always end up making themselves so obnoxious that for every wound they inflict on their opponents, they're shooting themselves in the foot twice.

If all else fails, we can literally battle it out. Y'know, we tried this once, over issues that frankly were a lot more substantial than the ones we squabble over now. And the American Civil War was far and away the bloodiest we've ever had, leading to the deaths of nearly 2.4% of the nation's population at the time. An equivalent war with today's population would kill nearly 8 million people. But that's the optimistic scenario. A modern repeat of the Civil War would be fought with the kind of weapons that let one guy kill 58 people and wound 422 in Las Vegas last October. And in our current conflict, the partisans on each side are so geographically entangled that before we could have a War Between the States, we'd have to have the Wars Within the States first, as, say, Texas bombed its more liberal cities into submission while, say, Massachusetts rounded up and shipped its conservatives to internment camps. I realize there are people out there so stoked with bloodlust that they genuinely hope for the chance to settle their issues with violence, but I'm cautiously optimistic that there aren't enough of them to start Civil War II. (God, I hope I'm right.)

So ...

... let's sum up: Every way we can think of to re-educate, suppress or eliminate the people — the fellow Americans — who disagree with us, have different values from us, or simply have different kinds of lives that have different needs ... none of those ways work. None of them have ever worked. So what's left when, after we've declared that some kinds of people just don't have any right to exist, and tried to make them go away, they continue to exist?

The only rational, adult thing to do in that case is to accept that since there are always going to be people whose lives and values are different from ours, we might as well learn to live with it even if we don't like it. And maybe once we stop obsessing over the differences, we'll discover that we have things in common as well. If we can get to this stage, then maybe, just maybe, we can start to make American politics work again.

Or we can just all keep on being assholes in the name of Standing Up for Our Values.