The paradox of tolerance

The paradox challenges us to find a balance between upholding principles of openness and protecting ourselves from ideologies that threaten our foundational values. Trump may test those values.

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To start, I clearly missed the mark with my two “Why Trump won’t win” posts in January and last month. I was assuming enough undecided, independents, and Trump-skeptical Republicans were rational. Like Liz Cheney and The New York Times’ conservative columnist Bret Stephens, they would set aside any disagreement with a Harris agenda for the greater good.

I was wrong. Very wrong. In a way, perhaps they were rational: they apparently assigned their personal experience with the cost of eggs and bacon above more abstract notions, like democracy. I doubt they considered that there is nothing Trump or any president could do about the cost of eggs and bacon. Or that inflation is way down, wages are up, jobs stable. That’s my rationality, but it seemed not that of a significant number of voters. Mea culpa.

Trump and tolerance

So, what now? I had planned to write about charitable giving this week. But I couldn’t get my head into it when I was thinking about the storm coming following Tuesday. Rather, I will discuss the paradox of tolerance, which I see as being quite relevant given the agenda Donald Trump has promised.

I subscribe to Preston King’s characterization of tolerance as occurring when one objects to but voluntarily endures certain acts, ideas, organizations, and identities.

The concept of the paradox of tolerance is usually credited to the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. In his work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, with Nazi Germany fresh in mind, Popper writes in an extensive footnote:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.

The paradox of tolerance thus challenges societies to find a balance between upholding principles of openness and protecting themselves from ideologies threatening their foundational values.

A neo-Nazi comes to Maine

A case study of tolerance recently played out in rural Maine. In 2022 a neo-Nazi named Christopher Pohlhaus, aka Hammer, bought 11 acres in Springfield. His plan was to create a haven, operational center, and training ground for white supremacists, the Blood Tribe. His goal was to “plant the seed of a white ethnostate, and they would engage in violence, if necessary, to nurture it.”

Among Pohlaus’ depravities was his extreme misogyny:

Hammer doesn’t trust women. It’s fair to say that he doesn’t even like them, especially if they’re white and liberal. “I do find them to be enemies to us,” Hammer has said. “They should be treated as such.” Hammer promotes claiming women as “war brides,” which involves taking away the “rights and control of how their reproductive system is to be utilized.” To his mind, stripping women of their bodily autonomy, and deciding when and how they have children, is a masculine imperative and an urgent matter of racial survival.

When the good folks of Springfield, population 300, got wind of Hammer and his project, they were not pleased. One post on the social media platform Reddit summed up the general local attitude: “[T]he more I realize we need to make it ABUNDANTLY clear that Chris isn’t welcome here. [He] lost the right to feel safe and should honestly be run out of the state, sooner rather than later.”

However, not everyone was ready to run Hammer out of town. Kathie, a woman in a nearby town, advocated for tolerance: “I am not a Nazi sympathizer or supporter, but I still thought this country allowed people to have different opinions without being accused or canceled.” Her position faced considerable pushback. “Wow, someone drank the Kool-aid,” said one. Less circumspect, another wrote, “Eat shit Kathie,”

The United States, with its strong First Amendment protections, has generally been more tolerant of hate speech than many other democracies. This approach has led to ongoing debates about where to draw the line between protected speech and harmful intolerance. So what should the folks of Springfield, Maine, have done, if anything? Should they tolerate the hate in their midst? Or try to run it out of town?

Reverend Will’s sermon

Reverend Will Green, the pastor of a small flock in a church on Peaks Island, Maine, got wind of the confrontation brewing across the state. In a sermon last year, he offered his take:

Reverend Will used Hammer to illustrate his point that, by accepting all types and all sides, whatever our intentions in doing so, we give oxygen to those who would cause irreparable damage to our polity and civil society. “We should be very concerned about a neo-Nazi training camp in our neighborhood,” Reverend Will said from the pulpit on a cool morning. Even if Hammer was exercising his constitutional rights to free speech and privacy, even if he had committed no crime, constructive intervention was still possible. “Rather than hiding behind tolerance, we should do the hard work of helpfully intervening for the sake of our community,” Reverend Will continued. “That requires both spiritual self-examination and social, political engagement. It isn’t spiritual to rise above it. Instead, our spirituality should equip us to get down to it.”

Our congregation nodded enthusiastically as he spoke. “Everything isn’t a shade of gray. Jesus is not pleased with Christians using the word tolerance to give the Devil equal airtime on Sunday morning,” Reverend Will added. “We can be tolerant and have moral clarity. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”

In short, if we tolerate hate, do we run the risk of tacitly supporting it?

Intolerance vs. free speech

Of course, tolerance bumps headlong into free speech. In recent years, many campuses have faced dilemmas when deciding whether to allow speakers with extreme or intolerant views to give talks. Some argue that all voices should be heard in the name of free speech, while others contend that platforming intolerant ideas threatens marginalized groups.

For example, let’s examine this semi-hypothetical. A university group invites a speaker who has been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza and the devastation it has brought to the Palestinians living there. They may even refer to it as a genocide. They advocate for the U.S. to withdraw its military aid to Israel, a quick end to the war, and pressure for a Palestinean state in Gaza and the West Bank.

In another scenario, the invited speaker has been outspoken in condemning the Zionist entity—Israel— for the war and the genocide, defending the “resistance” and justifying the Oct. 7 pogrom that killed 1200 civilian women, children, and men while kidnaping and holding as hostages hundreds of others. They advocate for the creation of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” after wiping out the Zionists (aka, Jews).

Both speakers would have a free speech argument for their positions. However, if one accepts a paradox of tolerance framework of morality, the second speaker is essentially promoting a displacement—in the most charitable view—or killing of the 7.2 million Jews in Israel. “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant,” according to Popper, thus justifying not offering such a person a platform at the university.

Indeed, countries like Germany and France have strict laws against hate speech. These laws represent a legal embodiment of intolerance towards intolerant ideologies.

Circling back to Donald Trump

Our past and future president, Donald Trump, is, of course, notorious for his hate speech, misogony, racism, incitement, and overall intolerance. Most of it falls within the purview of free speech. However, the speech ends when it leads to certain actions, whether neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, or an attack on the Capitol in Washington.

This latter was at the heart of the January 6 Congressional hearings, as well as the federal case brought by the Special Prosecutor. In case you overlooked it, on January 6, 2021 Trump told a roused-up crowd, "You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can't let that happen." He then said, “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,” ending with exhorting the crowd to march to the Capitol. Which they did, halting the counting of Electoral College ballots.

To what point do we tolerate the intolerant?

The U.S. voters, in their choice to re-elect Trump, despite his track record of intolerance¹, is essentially a very different response than that of Reverend Will on the paradox of tolerance. Philosopher John Rawls, writing in 1971, further outlined this paradox in his book, A Theory of Justice proposing that a just society should generally tolerate the intolerant, reserving self-preservation actions only when intolerance poses a concrete threat to liberty and stability.

With Donald Trump back in the White House, we will be without many of the guardrails that may have mitigated some of the worst of his impulses in his first term. In addition, having even won the popular vote and absorbed the lessons he and his sycophants internalized from his previous incumbency, we are likely to test the “concrete threat to liberty and stability” boundary of tolerance of intolerance.

1. Or perhaps as a reward for his intolerance.