The Myth Of The “Tolerant” Liberal
“You Liberals think that you’re SO tolerant until it’s things you don’t like!”
A woman that I went to high school with realized that I had unfriended her on Facebook and this was what she DMed me. She seemed to not realize that I had already tolerated plenty of her postings. Seen through the lens of Facebook, her viewpoint had taken a paranoid far-right bend since I saw her last. It got to be where every time I saw that she posted something, I had a “What now?” shudder. She was convinced that President Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim and anything on the internet that reflected this echo made it to her timeline.
So much of what she posted as “facts” and “quotes” were easily disproven by the most basic googling, but her retorts ran along the lines of, “Oh, you cuddly liberal, this man is trying to destroy America.” Tired of the condescension and ugliness, I unfollowed her.
In drafting my response to her accusations of intolerance, I almost indulged a cruel impulse by responding, “I don’t call the cops on the crazy people yelling on the street corner, but I don’t stick around to hear what they have to say either.” I ultimately went with a more diplomatic response.
The thing that sticks with me is how she assumed positions that I had never actually expressed. From my protestation that Barack Obama wasn’t an actual demon, she had extrapolated that I was a liberal, thus subject to all the pre-judging that label meant to her. To be fair- from her perspective- I may as well be Marxist, but my politics are a bit more nuanced. The unwritten rule I was breaking was that I wasn’t conforming to the liberal stereotype of absolute open-mindedness, inclusiveness, and equality. Not that these aren’t all admirable traits that I personally strive for in my thinking, but I can’t help but fall far short of this. This isn’t because I’m a bad liberal, it’s because I’m a normal human. Our tolerances are a bit more nuanced as well.
People are biased and tribal by nature. Conservatives have no problem expressing this; framing every argument as “Us against Them”( “them” being everyone outside of their belief system) has been a successful Republican campaign strategy and the basis of many of the political debates I’ve had on and off-line. Compassion, impartiality, acceptance? That’s the Democrat’s burden alone; something to made fun of when it’s attempted and an opportunity to yell “HYPOCRITE!” when they don’t meet an over-broad interpretation of “tolerance”.
In the wake of Trump becoming president, the myth of the perfect tolerant Liberal has come up time and again, with op-eds and articles suggesting that so many people might not have voted for him if Liberals weren’t so darn mean and disrespectful to Conservatives. I have a one-word rebuttal for this: Libtard.
Fareed Zakaria had a video that dealt with this after the Notre Dame grads walked out of Mike Pence’s speech. This has a little more to unpack because I think he makes some good points. These university students that stop conservatives from speaking on campuses are doing themselves a disservice. “If you don’t understand your opponent’s argument, you don’t truly understand your own,” is literally the most useful thing I learned in college. Also, protesting to the point of violence and cancellation serves people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter well because they cause an impact much more significant than if they had actually spoken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqo4v-GiMYc&t=104s
It’s where he talks about the Mike Pence walkout where I see things a little differently. Mike Pence is a politician. He is the vice-president in an administration whose agenda will scale back policies and protections it has taken decades for some communities to build. He was Governor of the state Notre Dame is in. In this capacity, he signed into law policies that legitimize discrimination by calling it religious freedom and required women to bury or cremate any stillborn or aborted babies. Those reasons are enough for me to understand the motivation; they didn’t have to hear anymore because they had heard enough from him already.
No, liberals are not all-tolerant or all-accepting, never were. Like I hear Conservatives say all the time, people should be judged by their character, not the circumstances of their life. But I realize that saying that isn’t a spell that’s going to magically make that happen and this is a world that will simply not allow that. To be prejudiced means you are “pre-judging”. It is something I fight in myself, and you are more than welcome to criticize me if I fail. However, I (like all Americans) reserve the right to POST-judge the shit out of you.
