Former Senate candidate Rick Taylor’s aunt inquired about his Thanksgiving plans last week.
“[S]he mentioned she voted for Trump,” Taylor said. “I told her my home is not open to traitors, and I would not go to theirs.”
Taylor’s comment exemplifies a phenomenon statistician Nate Silver discusses in his postelection analysis. Silver, arguably the most influential election modeler in the United States, writes about an “asymmetry” he observed in Republican and Democratic partisans who responded to his models.
“Republicans are generally happy when you agree with them partway or half the time,” says Silver. “Democrats, however … often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them.”
Silver contends this helps explain why Trump won the election. Whereas Trump and his base were “happy to take on all comers,” even if they had salient political differences, Democrats “will have you cast out as a heretic” for disagreement on any given hot-button matter.
Silver’s use of the word “heretic” might seem hyperbolic, but it’s accurate in a literal sense. Based on the French word eretique and the Latin haereticus, a heretic is one who “differs in opinion from established dogma.”
We often think of dogma as being religious in nature, but this is not always the case, and the COVID-19 pandemic is a prime example. From mask and vaccine mandates to the origins of the virus and treatments such as Ivermectin, we saw, in the words of the Harvard Crimson, “the mob [move] from one dogma to the next, sometimes in direct contradiction with the last.”
To disagree on government policies during a period of panic is natural. Less natural is banning family members from the holiday dinner table if they disagree with you. Three years later, the ostracizing phenomenon has not abated. If anything, it’s getting worse.
“I’m seeing a lot of online cult-like behavior with people cheering strangers to abandon family, including parents and grandparents, because they voted for a different person,” one clinical psychologist observed. “This is not the way to effect change.”
Of course, people have the right to associate (or not) with whomever they choose. However, disassociating from people who don’t think like you is a sign of extremism, and the phenomenon increasingly infects not just individuals but U.S. institutions.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) recently discovered this. The father of two told the New York Times that he does not like the idea of his daughters playing sports against “a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
The response was swift. A staffer reportedly resigned, protests erupted outside Moulton’s office in Salem, and Tufts University allegedly terminated student internship opportunities with the congressman’s office. (The university reportedly has since changed its position.)
Moulton’s experience is not an outlier. Conservative pundit Shermichael Singleton tried to make a similar point on CNN, saying, “There are a lot of families out there who don’t believe boys should play a girls sport.”
A fellow panelist didn’t just disagree. He shut down the discussion and accused Singleton of using a slur.
All of these examples support Silver’s claim that many progressives are treating disagreement as heresy.
“That’s not a good way to build a majority,” the FiveThirtyEight founder writes, “and now Democrats no longer have one.”
This may explain why many left-leaning pundits and politicians, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), are saying progressives need to rediscover empathy for people who think differently and actually talk to them. However, it may not be that simple.
In The Closing of the Liberal Mind, Kim R. Holmes explores how the New Left transformed intolerance into a virtue, largely by abandoning classical liberal virtues such as free speech and replacing Marx’s conception of economic class warfare with identity warfare. The result was something many today would call “wokeism”: A toxic mixture of social justice, intersectionality, and neo-Marxism, all cloaked in compassion for the poor and oppressed.
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Many adherents of this philosophy celebrate being “intolerant in the cause of tolerance,” a phrase Holmes used nearly a decade ago. His hypothesis is vindicated by writers who’ve since argued that true inclusivity requires “[getting] comfortable with exclusion.”
Some prominent thinkers on the Left argue it’s time to stop the “doomed politics of shunning” and embrace civil, open discourse and free expression. It won’t be easy to rekindle these values, but there is reason for hope. By rediscovering the virtue of tolerance and a willingness to engage thoughtfully with those we disagree with, we have a chance to build bridges that can sustain communities through ideological differences — and enjoy those turkey dinners with loved ones regardless of political differences.
Jon Miltimore is a senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
