...If You Can Keep It

Eighty years ago, philosopher Karl Popper put forth his Paradox of Tolerance. He posited that a tolerant society that extends its tolerance to intolerance will eventually be dominated and then subsumed by the intolerant. The paradox lies in the conclusion that the only means to preserve tolerance is not to tolerate intolerance. Otherwise, totalitarianism will eventually win at the ballot box, and then all the mechanisms of a tolerant society will be cast aside.

How that non-tolerance of intolerance (that’s quite a mouthful) is to be carried out is something that has been debated ever since, but the “how” does not undermine the necessity of doing so. Wait too long,

I’m sure you, dear reader, already understand that many Western societies are experiencing Popper’s paradox today. I fear nations such as the UK are already lost, having first bent the knee to the intolerant (in their case, un-assimilating Muslim immigrants), and then abandoning core values of Westernism in favor of locking people up for posting things they deem offensive on social media.

America was headed in that direction under the “tolerant” eye of the Woke before enough of us woke up (pun intended) to reject the Democratic Party that has been subsumed by the intolerant. While Trump’s GOP and the MAGA crowd are far from paragons of tolerance, they are a reaction. In that reaction, we have two separate silos of intolerance, with moderates getting subsumed and with tolerance absolutists getting screwed.

This intolerance has manifested in many ways across the past decade or two, coalescing around the concept of “woke.” I wrote this definition of woke years ago:

>Woke is coercion. Woke is divisiveness. Woke is a demand for submissive conformity. Woke is racism, sexism, and a fistful of other bigotries. Woke is the dehumanization of all who don’t agree with you, so you feel less averse to treating them like shit, denying them their rights and liberties, and kicking them out of ‘your’ society. Woke is a club, in two ways: a weapon with which to smite your enemies, and a restricted space where undesirables are denied entry.

Progressivism coalesced its message around several focal points. All of which seem to be as much about poking a finger in the MAGA eye as anything else. Those include:

• A no-borders, no-enforcement approach to immigration.

• A no-enforcement, ignore-the-victims approach to low level crime.

• An absolutist stance on transgenderism, elevating it above all other social matters, including women’s rights and women’s safety.

• A reflexive defense of all things Islam, including siding with murderous, oppressive regimes and deferring to the most fundamentalist versions of the religion.

Their tolerance for these (and more) manifests as:

• Aggressive and sometimes violent opposition to immigration enforcement.

• Non-prosecution of unrepentant recidivist criminals, and a blind eye to the violence those they refuse to hold or prosecute perpetrate on others.

• Dismissal of women’s safety concerns in women-only spaces such as locker rooms, shelters, and prisons. Rejection of basic scientific reality in women’s sports.

• Advocating for the elimination of Israel and for the victory of the Iranian theocracy over America.

Again, all these positions are staked out as being born of tolerance, and there is no discussion to be had, let alone middle ground to be found, with anyone who might disagree even in part. Intolerant tolerance, if you will.

The reflexive Right pays this back with its own absolutism, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Close the border, round up every illegal (including those who’ve been here decades), reject the notion that anyone might actually be transgender, ban all Muslim immigrants and deport any Muslim they can manage to, and carpet-bomb the Middle East.

This has had, and will continue to have, the unfortunate effect of making our government a see-saw. Whoever is in ascendance will hit UNDO on all previous policies, and whoever is in opposition will do anything they can to gum up the works.

This is not what the Founders intended. This is not how governance is supposed to work. About the only thing the parties can agree on these days is that deficits and the debt are not their problem. Oh, and some instances of Horseshoe Theory. The Angry Left and the MAGA Right are increasingly of a mind about Israel, albeit for different reasons, and no matter that Israel is both an ally and the only Westernized society in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, any attempts to pull the angry fringes back from their extremes are deemed traitorous weakness or selling out, and moderates are called nasty names by the true believers.

How do we find our way out of this Manichaean polarity?

I have no idea. The blindly tolerant opened the door for the intolerant, both external and internal, and abandoned our society’s core values in the process. The intolerant have taken charge, and they’re not about to cede their power.

The best we can do is hammer home the fact that our society’s core values matter. That we cannot give them up in the name of tolerance or multiculturalism or moral relativism. That there are better ways and worse ways, that the better ways are rooted in liberty, and that we expect the liberty we offer to others to be returned in kind.

As the aphorism goes, “when in Rome...”