THE PARADOX OF TOLERANCE

My mother used to tell us, "if you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything at all." Same with my father. Neither of them said anything bad about the other. It is how you raise small children to be tolerable adults. It hasn't worked for a number of reasons. None of them are because I have a hard time being silent. 

Back in the 1930s, a philosopher named Karl Popper contributed to the long history of humanist essays, "The Parodox of Tolerance". At the time he wrote this, Fascism was stretching its muscles, in Italy, Germany, Spain-where it was actively taking the country, and Turkey. Concurrently Germany had been bribing US legislators to spread fascist propaganda through Congressional Franking Priveledges, free mail. Henry Ford was handing out free copies, with each car he sold, of The Learned Elders of Zion. The purpose of this influx of German influence peddling was to keep America out of the war Hitler was preparing for.

Think about the title of that essay describing what was about to become obvious, The Paradox of Tolerance. Why was it not, The Paradox of Intolerance? Intolerance can certainly be paradoxical. The simple answer is that intolerance doesn't care about your sissy tolerance. Even worse, they don't give a flying you-know-what whether you can not tolerate their intolerance. Nor are they inclined to be convinced to cooperate with you in even a small way. "It's my way or the highway", love it or leave it.

Expressed by Herr Popper, the Paradox of tolerance suggests that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very thing that makes us tolerable. Are there any examples we can find to confirm this? Like the MAGA party? This is why it is tolerance where the paradox lies. We are socialized to be tolerant, religious or atheist we are taught at school, at church, and at home to be accepting of kids, who are different. Some of us do not retain that lesson beyond high school. Those people, become MAGA and take over a party of weak-minded demogogues. They are insistent that we should succumb to their political, social, or spiritual viewpoint. Succumb, not tolerate. When they attain political office by election (usually as Republicans), as Newt Gingrich did back in the late 80's, they begin indoctrinating people from within the party, that bi-partisanship is the moral equivolent of date rape. Most of us, even those who are not facile in the way we use language, know that there is no equivalence-moral or otherwise-between bi-partisanship and date rape. Most of us understand that democracy is made possible because of bi-partisanship. But they don't care. If they lose an election, they don't aspire to be the people most people would vote for next time, they try to change the state election laws to favor them next time. In the case of the piece of shit that brought us to this paradox, a President who lost the 2020 election, he never admitted defeat, accused democrats of cheating, with no basis in fact, and when he eventually won the election of 2024-thanks to the help of billionaires- who aspire to be oligarchs in the Russian manner, he goes after democrats who oppose him as if they were criminals. And with the entire legal apparatus available to a President. But that's not all. He becomes,with the tacit consent of a party needing billionaire bucks to overcome the objections of otherwise tolerant people, a dictator. And his party, just barely in the majority of both houses of congress, tacitly allow their Constitutional responsibilities to be assumed by the dictator-in-chief, who speaks for the oligarchs that elected him.