essay on democracy teaches us tolerance

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By Sarah Peterson

Originally published in July 2003, Current Implications added by Heidi Burgess in December, 2019

Current Implications

When Sarah wrote this essay in 2003, social media existed, but it hadn't yet become popular or widespread.  Facebook and Twitter hadn't started yet (Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006.)  More .... 

What is Tolerance?

Tolerance is the appreciation of diversity and the ability to live and let others live. It is the ability to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards those whose opinions, practices, religion, nationality, and so on differ from one's own.[1] As William Ury notes, "tolerance is not just agreeing with one another or remaining indifferent in the face of injustice, but rather showing respect for the essential humanity in every person."[2]

Intolerance is the failure to appreciate and respect the practices, opinions and beliefs of another group. For instance, there is a high degree of intolerance between Israeli Jews and Palestinians who are at odds over issues of identity , security , self-determination , statehood, the right of return for refugees, the status of Jerusalem and many other issues. The result is continuing intergroup conflict and violence .

Why Does Tolerance Matter?

At a post-9/11 conference on multiculturalism in the United States, participants asked, "How can we be tolerant of those who are intolerant of us?"[3] For many, tolerating intolerance is neither acceptable nor possible.

Though tolerance may seem an impossible exercise in certain situations -- as illustrated by Hobbes in the inset box on the right -- being tolerant, nonetheless, remains key to easing hostile tensions between groups and to helping communities move past intractable conflict. That is because tolerance is integral to different groups relating to one another in a respectful and understanding way. In cases where communities have been deeply entrenched in violent conflict, being tolerant helps the affected groups endure the pain of the past and resolve their differences. In Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis have tolerated a reconciliation process , which has helped them to work through their anger and resentment towards one another.

The Origins of Intolerance

In situations where conditions are economically depressed and politically charged, groups and individuals may find it hard to tolerate those that are different from them or have caused them harm. In such cases, discrimination, dehumanization, repression, and violence may occur. This can be seen in the context of Kosovo, where Kosovar Alabanians, grappling with poverty and unemployment, needed a scapegoat, and supported an aggressive Serbian attack against neighboring Bosnian Muslim and Croatian neighbors.

The Consequences of Intolerance

Intolerance will drive groups apart, creating a sense of permanent separation between them. For example, though the laws of apartheid in South Africa were abolished nine years ago, there still exists a noticeable level of personal separation between black and white South Africans, as evidenced in studies on the levels of perceived social distance between the two groups.[4] This continued racial division perpetuates the problems of intergroup resentment and hostility.

How is Intolerance Perpetuated?

Between Individuals: In the absence of their own experiences, individuals base their impressions and opinions of one another on assumptions. These assumptions can be influenced by the positive or negative beliefs of those who are either closest or most influential in their lives, including parents or other family members, colleagues, educators, and/or role models. 

In the Media: Individual attitudes are influenced by the images of other groups in the media, and the press. For instance, many Serbian communities believed that the western media portrayed a negative image of the Serbian people during the NATO bombing in Kosovo and Serbia.[5] This de-humanization may have contributed to the West's willingness to bomb Serbia. However, there are studies that suggest media images may not influence individuals in all cases. For example, a study conducted on stereotypes discovered people of specific towns in southeastern Australia did not agree with the negative stereotypes of Muslims presented in the media.[6]

In Education: There exists school curriculum and educational literature that provide biased and/or negative historical accounts of world cultures. Education or schooling based on myths can demonize and dehumanize other cultures rather than promote cultural understanding and a tolerance for diversity and differences.

What Can Be Done to Deal with Intolerance?

To encourage tolerance, parties to a conflict and third parties must remind themselves and others that tolerating tolerance is preferable to tolerating intolerance. Following are some useful strategies that may be used as tools to promote tolerance.

Intergroup Contact: There is evidence that casual intergroup contact does not necessarily reduce intergroup tensions, and may in fact exacerbate existing animosities. However, through intimate intergroup contact, groups will base their opinions of one another on personal experiences, which can reduce prejudices . Intimate intergroup contact should be sustained over a week or longer in order for it to be effective.[7]

In Dialogue: To enhance communication between both sides, dialogue mechanisms such as dialogue groups or problem solving workshops  provide opportunities for both sides to express their needs and interests. In such cases, actors engaged in the workshops or similar forums feel their concerns have been heard and recognized. Restorative justice programs such as victim-offender mediation provide this kind of opportunity as well. For instance, through victim-offender mediation, victims can ask for an apology from the offender and the offender can make restitution and ask for forgiveness.[8]

What Individuals Can Do

Individuals should continually focus on being tolerant of others in their daily lives. This involves consciously challenging the stereotypes and assumptions that they typically encounter in making decisions about others and/or working with others either in a social or a professional environment.

What the Media Can Do

The media should use positive images to promote understanding and cultural sensitivity. The more groups and individuals are exposed to positive media messages about other cultures, the less they are likely to find faults with one another -- particularly those communities who have little access to the outside world and are susceptible to what the media tells them. See the section on stereotypes  to learn more about how the media perpetuate negative images of different groups.

What the Educational System Can Do

Educators are instrumental in promoting tolerance and peaceful coexistence . For instance, schools that create a tolerant environment help young people respect and understand different cultures. In Israel, an Arab and Israeli community called Neve Shalom or Wahat Al-Salam ("Oasis of Peace") created a school designed to support inter-cultural understanding by providing children between the first and sixth grades the opportunity to learn and grow together in a tolerant environment.[9]

What Other Third Parties Can Do

Conflict transformation NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and other actors in the field of peacebuilding can offer mechanisms such as trainings to help parties to a conflict communicate better with one another. For instance, several organizations have launched a series of projects in Macedonia that aim to reduce tensions between the country's Albanian, Romani and Macedonian populations, including activities that promote democracy, ethnic tolerance, and respect for human rights.[10]

International organizations need to find ways to enshrine the principles of tolerance in policy. For instance, the United Nations has already created The Declaration of Moral Principles on Tolerance, adopted and signed in Paris by UNESCO's 185 member states on Nov. 16, 1995, which qualifies tolerance as a moral, political, and legal requirement for individuals, groups, and states.[11]

Governments also should aim to institutionalize policies of tolerance. For example, in South Africa, the Education Ministry has advocated the integration of a public school tolerance curriculum into the classroom; the curriculum promotes a holistic approach to learning . The United States government has recognized one week a year as international education week, encouraging schools, organizations, institutions, and individuals to engage in projects and exchanges to heighten global awareness of cultural differences.

The Diaspora community can also play an important role in promoting and sustaining tolerance. They can provide resources to ease tensions and affect institutional policies in a positive way. For example, Jewish, Irish, and Islamic communities have contributed to the peacebuilding effort within their places of origin from their places of residence in the United States. [12]

When Sarah wrote this essay in 2003, social media existed, but it hadn't yet become popular or widespread.  Facebook and Twitter hadn't started yet (Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006.) 

In addition, while the conflict between the right and the left and the different races certainly existed in the United States, it was not nearly as escalated or polarized as it is now in 2019.  For those reasons (and others), the original version of this essay didn't discuss political or racial tolerance or intolerance in the United States.  Rather than re-writing the original essay, all of which is still valid, I have chosen to update it with these "Current Implications." 

In 2019, the intolerance between the Left and the Right in the United States has gotten extreme. Neither side is willing to accept the legitimacy of the values, beliefs, or actions of the other side, and they are not willing to tolerate those values, beliefs or actions whatsoever. That means, in essence, that they will not tolerate the people who hold those views, and are doing everything they can to disempower, delegitimize, and in some cases, dehumanize the other side.

Further, while intolerance is not new, efforts to spread and strengthen it have been greatly enhanced with the current day traditional media and social media environments: the proliferation of cable channels that allow narrowcasting to particular audiences, and Facebook and Twitter (among many others) that serve people only information that corresponds to (or even strengthens) their already biased views. The availability of such information channels both helps spread intolerance; it also makes the effects of that intolerance more harmful.

Intolerance and its correlaries (disempowerment, delegitimization, and dehumanization) are perhaps clearest on the right, as the right currently holds the U.S. presidency and controls the statehouses in many states.  This gives them more power to assert their views and disempower, delegitimize and dehumanize the other.  (Consider the growing restrictions on minority voting rights, the delegitimization of transgendered people and supporters, and the dehumanizing treatment of would-be immigrants at the southern border.) 

But the left is doing the same thing when it can.  By accusing the right of being "haters," the left delegitimizes the right's values and beliefs, many of which are not borne of animus, but rather a combination of bad information being spewed by fake news in social and regular media, and natural neurobiological tendencies which cause half of the population to be biologically more fearful, more reluctant to change, and more accepting of (and needing) a strong leader. 

Put together, such attitudes feed upon one another, causing an apparently never-ending escalation and polarization spiral of intolerance.  Efforts to build understanding and tolerance, just as described in the original article, are still much needed today both in the United States and across the world. 

The good news is that many such efforts exist.  The Bridge Alliance , for instance, is an organization of almost 100 member organizations which are working to bridge the right-left divide in the U.S.  While the Bridge Alliance doesn't use the term "tolerance" or "coexistence" in its framing " Four Principles ," they do call for U.S. leaders and the population to "work together" to meet our challenges.  "Working together" requires not only "tolerance for " and "coexistence with" the other side; it also requires respect for other people's views. That is something that many of the member organizations are trying to establish with red-blue dialogues, public fora, and other bridge-building activities.  We need much, much more of that now in 2019 if we are to be able to strengthen tolerance against the current intolerance onslaught.

One other thing we'd like to mention that was touched upon in the original article, but not explored much, is what can and should be done when the views or actions taken by the other side are so abhorent that they cannot and should not be tolerated? A subset of that question is one Sarah did pose above '"How can we be tolerant of those who are intolerant of us?"[3] For many, tolerating intolerance is neither acceptable nor possible." Sarah answers that by arguing that tolerance is beneficial--by implication, even in those situations. 

What she doesn't explicitly consider, however, is the context of the intolerance.  If one is considering the beliefs or behavior of another that doesn't affect anyone else--a personal decision to live in a particular way (such as following a particular religion for example), we would agree that tolerance is almost always beneficial, as it is more likely to lead to interpersonal trust and further understanding. 

However, if one is considering beliefs or actions of another that does affect other people--particularly actions that affect large numbers of people, then that is a different situation.  We do not tolerate policies that allow the widespread dissemination of fake news and allow foreign governments to manipulate our minds such that they can manipulate our elections.  That, in our minds is intolerable.  So too are actions that destroy the rule of law in this country; actions that threaten our democratic system.

But that doesn't mean that we should respond to intolerance in kind.  Rather, we would argue, one should respond to intolerance with respectful dissent--explaining why the intolerance is unfairly stereotyping an entire group of people; explaining why such stereotyping is both untrue and harmful; why a particular action is unacceptable because it threatens the integrity of our democratic system, explaining alternative ways of getting one's needs met. 

This can be done without attacking the people who are guilty of intolerance with direct personal attacks--calling them "haters," or shaming them for having voted a particular way.  That just hardens the other sides' intolerance. 

Still, reason-based arguments probably won't be accepted right away.  Much neuroscience research explains that emotions trump facts and that people won't change their minds when presented with alternative facts--they will just reject those facts.  But if people are presented with facts in the form of respectful discussion instead of personal attacks, that is both a factual and an emotional approach that can help de-escalate tensions and eventually allow for the development of tolerance.  Personal attacks on the intolerant will not do that.  So when Sarah asked whether one should tolerate intolerance, I would say "no, one should not." But that doesn't mean that you have to treat the intolerant person disrespectfully or "intolerantly."  Rather, model good, respectful behavior.  Model the behavior you would like them to adopt.  And use that to try to fight the intolerance, rather than simply "tolerating it." 

-- Heidi and Guy Burgess. December, 2019.

Back to Essay Top

---------------------------------------------------------

[1] The American Heritage Dictionary (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994).

[2] William Ury, Getting To Peace (New York: The Penguin Group, 1999), 127.

[3] As identified by Serge Schmemann, a New York Times columnist noted in his piece of Dec. 29, 2002, in The New York Times entitled "The Burden of Tolerance in a World of Division" that tolerance is a burden rather than a blessing in today's society.

[4] Jannie Malan, "From Exclusive Aversion to Inclusive Coexistence," Short Paper, African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), Conference on Coexistence Community Consultations, Durban, South Africa, January 2003, 6.

[5] As noted by Susan Sachs, a New York Times columnist in her piece of Dec. 16, 2001, in The New York Times entitled "In One Muslim Land, an Effort to Enforce Lessons of Tolerance."

[6] Amber Hague, "Attitudes of high school students and teachers towards Muslims and Islam in a southeaster Australian community," Intercultural Education 2 (2001): 185-196.

[7] Yehuda Amir, "Contact Hypothesis in Ethnic Relations," in Weiner, Eugene, eds. The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: The Continuing Publishing Company, 2000), 162-181.

[8] The Ukrainian Centre for Common Ground has launched a successful restorative justice project. Information available on-line at www.sfcg.org .

[9] Neve Shalom homepage [on-line]; available at www.nswas.com ; Internet.

[10] Lessons in Tolerance after Conflict.  http://www.beyondintractability.org/library/external-resource?biblio=9997

[11] "A Global Quest for Tolerance" [article on-line] (UNESCO, 1995, accessed 11 February 2003); available at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/fight-against-discrimination/promoting-tolerance/ ; Internet.

[12] Louis Kriesberg, "Coexistence and the Reconciliation of Communal Conflicts." In Weiner, Eugene, eds. The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: The Continuing Publishing Company, 2000), 182-198.

Use the following to cite this article: Peterson, Sarah. "Tolerance." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/tolerance >.

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Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance

Essays in honor and memory of yitzhak rabin.

How to prevent the enemies of democracy from using its freedoms to attack its existence

Look Inside

Table of Contents:

• The legacy of Yitzhak Rabin / Lea Rabin
• The cost of communicative tolerance / Frederick Schauer
• Protest and tolerance: legal values and the control of public-order policing / David Feldman
• Freedom of speech and political violence / Owen Fiss
• Boundaries of freedom of expression before and after Prime Minister Rabin's assassination / Raphael Cohen-Almagor
• The dual threat to modern citizenship: liberal indifference and nonconsensual violence / Harvey Chisick
• The paradox of Israeli civil disobedience and political revolt in light of the Jewish tradition / Sam Lehman-Wilzig
• Should hate speech be free speech? John Stuart Mill and the limits of tolerance / L.W. Sumner
• Holocaust denial, equality, and harm: boundaries of liberty and tolerance in a liberal democracy / Irwin Cotler
• The regulation of racist expression / Richard Moon
• Freedom of the press and terrorism / Joseph Eliot Magnet
• Reporting on political extremists in the United States: the unabomber, the Ku Klux Klan, and the militias / David E. Boeyink
• Pragmatic liberalism and the press in violent times / Edmund B. Lambeth
• Protecting wider purposes: hate speech, communication, and the international community / David Goldberg
• Riding the electronic tiger: censorship in global, distributed networks / J. Michael Jaffe.

Description

An irony inherent in all political systems is that the principles that underlie and characterize them can also endanger and destroy them. This collection examines the limits that need to be imposed on democracy, liberty, and tolerance in order to ensure the survival of the societies that cherish them. The essays in this volume consider the philosophical difficulties inherent in the concepts of liberty and tolerance; at the same time, they ponder practical problems arising from the tensions between the forces of democracy and the destructive elements that take advantage of liberty to bring harm that undermines democracy. Written in the wake of the assasination of Yitzhak Rabin, this volume is thus dedicated to the question of boundaries: how should democracies cope with antidemocratic forces that challenge its system? How should we respond to threats that undermine democracy and at the same time retain our values and maintain our commitment to democracy and to its underlying values? All the essays here share a belief in the urgency of the need to tackle and find adequate answers to radicalism and political extremism. They cover such topics as the dilemmas embodied in the notion of tolerance, including the cost and regulation of free speech; incitement as distinct from advocacy; the challenge of religious extremism to liberal democracy; the problematics of hate speech; free communication, freedom of the media, and especially the relationships between media and terrorism. The contributors to this volume are David E. Boeyink, Harvey Chisick, Irwin Cotler, David Feldman, Owen Fiss, David Goldberg, J. Michael Jaffe, Edmund B. Lambeth, Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Joseph Eliot Magnet, Richard Moon, Frederick Schauer, and L.W. Sumner. The volume includes the opening remarks of Mrs.Yitzhak Rabin to the conference--dedicated to the late Yitzhak Rabin--at which these papers were originally presented. These studies will appeal to politicians, sociologists, media educators and professionals, jurists and lawyers, as well as the general public.

Herbert Marcuse

Repressive tolerance (full text).

The Freedom Writers Diary

Erin gruwell, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The students at Wilson High School are used to navigating racial and ethnic divisions. The rivalry between black, Asian, and Latino gangs affect their everyday lives, constantly making them potential victims in a war where only external appearances and group loyalty matter. As a consequence, at school and in their neighborhood, students learn to remain within the confines of their own identity group. However, when Ms. Gruwell begins to teach her class about the historical consequences of ethnic violence around the world, focusing on the stories of Anne Frank in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Zlata Filipović in contemporary war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, her students are forced to confront the horrific consequences of ethnic hatred. Inspired by Anne and Zlata’s experiences, Ms. Gruwell’s students learn to see beyond the barriers of race and ethnicity, discovering that peace and tolerance are infinitely greater goals than remaining focused on people’s different identities. Ultimately, the Freedom Writers commit to focusing only on everyone’s inherent humanity, concluding that there is only one race that matters: the united human race.

The students at Wilson High School are immersed in the urban world of Long Beach, where racial tensions and a vicious gang war divide the population along ethnic and racial lines. As a result, one’s social identity and appearance determine one’s entire life, from one’s friend group to one’s chances of survival in the street. Erin Gruwell begins to teach in a historical context of racial tensions. Two years earlier, in 1992, officers in the Los Angeles Police Department were filmed brutally beating Rodney King, an unarmed black man, before arresting him. When the police officers were acquitted for this act, six days of violent rioting erupted in Los Angeles, protesting the long-standing discrimination and abuse that the African-American community has suffered from the police. This long stretch of rioting had a severe effect on increasing racial tensions in the area, and Ms. Gruwell notes that the tension could be felt in the school itself. Later events, such as California’s Proposition 187, meant to prohibit illegal immigrants from using various services in California (including health care and public education), only heightened the sense of discrimination and exclusion that many minority communities experienced at the time, in particular Asian and Latino immigrants.

Ethnic and racial communities were also in direct rivalry with each other, as African-American, Asian, and Latino gangs engaged in a ruthless war for power and territory. To remain safe, people generally stayed loyal to their own group, as one could be shot at for the mere fact of having the wrong skin color—regardless of whether or not one actually belonged to a rival gang. At Wilson High School, these divisions are strikingly visible. The school quad is divided according to color and ethnicity, as people mostly make friends with members of their own identity group.

This ethnic hatred and violence affects all students. Most of them have been shot at, have directly witnessed gang-related violence, and have seen their friends die over the course of the years due to gang rivalry. After Ms. Gruwell questions a student about the rivalry between the Latino and Asian gangs, trying to make that student realize that this war is just as senseless as that of the Capulets and Montagues in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , the student comes to realize that Ms. Gruwell is probably right. Yet even though he cannot justify the gang’s divisions, he still abides by their logic: “[Ms. Gruwell] always tries to corner you into accepting that there’s another side, when there really isn’t. I don’t even remember how the whole thing got started, but it’s obvious that if you’re from one family, you need to be loyal and try to get some payback.”

Through Ms. Gruwell’s teaching, the students discover that racial and ethnic tensions have deep historical consequences in other places in the world. Reading the diaries of Anne Frank, who was killed in Nazi Germany for being a Jew, and of Zlata Filipović, a young girl caught in the contemporary Bosnian war, divided among nationalities and religions, allows the students to examine ethnic divisions from a distance. They come to realize that peace and tolerance are much more inspiring messages than ethnic hatred and rivalry.

When, as a student teacher, Erin Gruwell intercepts a racist caricature of an African-American boy in her class, she becomes furious and tells her students that such stereotyping is precisely what led to horrific events such as the Holocaust. She soon realizes that most of her students have never heard of the Holocaust. As a result, she decides to devote her teaching to the promotion of tolerance. When her students discover the stories of two fellow teenagers, Anne Frank and Zlata Filipović, they come to terms with the devastation that ethnic divisions can cause. During World War II, adolescent Anne Frank is forced to hide for years and is ultimately sent to a concentration camp, where she ultimately dies—all because of the mere fact that she is Jewish. In early-1990s Bosnia and Herzegovina, another young girl, Zlata, is forced to hide in a basement to escape the brutal ethnic war that is tearing her country apart. Ms. Gruwell’s students soon note similarities between their own lives and the senseless violence that these two young girls had to endure. Inspired by these young diarists’ messages of tolerance, the students become inspired to write their own diaries, chronicling their lives in a world where racial tensions and gang violence are rife.

It is when the students delve into a geographically closer past, that of the United States, that they find the inspiration to make a commitment against racial violence and injustice. They read about the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights activists—seven black and six white—who rode a bus across the American South in the early 1960s to protest the segregation of public buses. In Alabama, the Freedom Riders were violently beaten by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members. When Ms. Gruwell’s students discover that these black and white activists were ready to sacrifice their lives to champion equal rights, they realize that they can use this episode in American history as inspiration in their own fight for diversity and tolerance. Making a pun with the original activists’ name, they decide to call themselves the “Freedom Writers.”

After long months of studying the historical consequences of racial hatred, the Freedom Riders conclude that dividing people according to their appearance or group identity is absurd and dangerous. They commit to the ideal of unity, based on the premise of recognizing everyone’s humanity. The students come to terms with the fact that separating people among racial or ethnic groups can generate injustice and harm. In Diary 33, a student recounts a time when she had to testify in court. After having seen her friend Paco kill another man, she is supposed to defend Paco and lie about his involvement in the murder, so as to defend her fellow Latino “people,” her “blood.” However, in court, she sees the despair in the eyes of the accused man’s mother—who is black—and realizes that this woman reminds her of her own Mexican mom. In this moment, she realizes that both sides of the conflict are affected by the same, senseless violence, and that protecting injustice in the name of her group identity will only tear more families apart. In a courageous move, she decides to tell the truth and accuse Paco of murder, therefore going against her presumed loyalty to Latinos in order to defend a greater ideal of justice. This decision demonstrates her commitment to recognizing everyone’s humanity and dignity, regardless of their race or identity.

However courageous and inspiring the Freedom Writers’ messages of diversity and tolerance might be, the young students often experience resistance from close-minded adults. When the Freedom Writers invite Zlata to come to the United States, she gives a speech at the Croatian Hall where she talks about her experience of ethnic hatred in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even though she is a direct survivor of severe ethnic violence, some adults still ask her what her ethnicity is: Serbian, Croatian, Muslim? The adults’ reaction demonstrates their resistance to conceiving of the world in a color- or ethnicity-blind way. Yet Zlata boldly answers: “I am a human being” and the Freedom Writers stand by her, confirming that people’s humanity—and not their nationality, religion, or skin color—should be the only thing that ever matters. In Diary 17, a Freedom Writer reiterates this conclusion in her own words: “As long as I know that I am a human being, I don’t need to worry about what other people say. In the end, we all are the same!”

Race, Ethnicity, and Tolerance ThemeTracker

Race, Ethnicity, and Tolerance Quotes in The Freedom Writers Diary

I asked, “How many of you have heard of the Holocaust?” Not a single person raised his hand. Then I asked, “How many of you have been shot at?” Nearly every hand went up. I immediately decided to throw out my meticulously planned lessons and make tolerance the core of my curriculum. From that moment on, I would try to bring history to life by using new books, inviting guest speakers, and going on field trips.

My P.O. hasn’t realized yet that schools are just like the city and the city is just like prison. All of them are divided into separate sections, depending on race. On the streets, you kick it in different ’hoods, depending on your race, or where you’re from. And at school, we separate ourselves from people who are different from us. That’s just the way it is, and we all respect that. So when the Asians started trying to claim parts of the ’hood, we had to set them straight.

I’m not afraid of anyone anymore. Now I’m my own gang. I protect myself. I got my own back. I still carry my gun with me just in case I run into some trouble, and now I’m not afraid to use it. Running with gangs and carrying a gun can create some problems, but being of a different race can get you into trouble, too, so I figure I might as well be prepared. Lately, a lot of shit’s been going down. All I know is that I'm not gonna be the next one to get killed.

[I]t’s obvious that if you’re from a Latino gang you don’t get along with the Asian gang, and if you’re from the Asian gang, you don’t get along with the Latino gang. All this rivalry is more of a tradition. Who cares about the history behind it? Who cares about any kind of history? It’s just two sides who tripped on each other way back when and to this day make other people suffer because of their problems. Then I realized she was right, it’s exactly like that stupid play. So our reasons might be stupid, but it's still going on, and who am I to try to change things?

“Do not let Anne’s death be in vain,” Miep said, using her words to bring it all together. Miep wanted us to keep Anne’s message alive, it was up to us to remember it. Miep and Ms. Gruwell had had the same purpose all along. They wanted us to seize the moment. Ms. Gruwell wanted us to realize that we could change the way things were, and Miep wanted to take Anne’s message and share it with the world.

I have always been taught to be proud of being Latina, proud of being Mexican, and I was. I was probably more proud of being a “label” than of being a human being, that’s the way most of us were taught. Since the day we enter this world we were a label, a number, a statistic, that’s just the way it is. Now if you ask me what race I am, like Zlata, I’ll simply say, “I’m a human being.”

When I was born, the doctor must have stamped “National Spokesperson for the Plight of Black People” on my forehead; a stamp visible only to my teachers. The majority of my teachers treat me as if I, and I alone, hold the answers to the mysterious creatures that African Americans are, like I’m the Rosetta Stone of black people. It was like that until I transferred to Ms. Gruwell’s class. Up until that point it had always been: “So Joyce, how do black people feel about Affirmative Action?” Poignant looks follow. “Joyce, can you give us the black perspective on The Color Purple?”

I believe that I will never again feel uncomfortable with a person of a different race. When I have my own children someday, the custom I was taught as a child will be broken, because I know it's not right. My children will learn how special it is to bond with another person who looks different but is actually just like them. All these years I knew something was missing in my life, and I am glad that I finally found it.

As I got older, people who heard my story would ask me how I dealt with the idea of death and dying. I would think about it for a minute and reply, “See, being poor, black, and living in the ghetto was kind of like a disease that I was born with, sort of like AIDS or cancer.” It was nothing I could control.

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Why Tolerate Intolerance?

It’s easy to cancel political opponents with harmful views—it’s also dangerous to democracy.

Crop of Jean Dubuffet’s “ Houle du virtuel ” (“ Swell of the Virtual” ) (1963). Courtesy of Flickr/jean louis mazieres.

by TAYLOR DOTSON | November 15, 2021

Is it better to tolerate seemingly prejudiced political opinions, or should we be intolerant of people whose views on diversity, equity, and identity strike us as harmful?

I am an advocate for radically tolerating political disagreement, even if that disagreement strikes us as unmoored from facts or common sense. One reason is that dissent makes democracy more intelligent. While many believe that vaccine skeptics misunderstand the relevant science and threaten public health, their opposition to vaccines nevertheless draws attention to chronic problems within our medical system: financial conflicts of interest, racism and sexism, and other legitimate reasons for mistrust. People should have their voices heard because politics shapes the things citizens care about , not just the things they know .

Tolerating disagreement also ensures the practice of democracy. Otherwise, we may find ourselves handing off ever more political control to experts and bureaucrats. Political truths can motivate fanaticism. Whether it is “follow the science” or “commonsense conservatism,” the belief that policy must actualize one’s own view of reality divides the world into “enlightened” good guys and ignorant enemies who just need to go away.

But what about beliefs that seem harmful and intolerant? You might question , as the political philosopher Jonathan Marks does, whether a zealous belief in the idea “that all men are created equal” is so problematic. Why not divide the political world into citizens who believe in equality and harmfully ignorant people to be ignored? The trouble is that doing so makes actually achieving equality more difficult.

Marks’ challenge to divide ourselves around equality makes me think of the great 20th century Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance,” or at least the meme version of it. This edition of the paradox holds that tolerating the openly intolerant leads to the destruction of tolerant people and tolerance. While the meme depicts the literal Nazis, it is less clear who else it should apply to. Should it extend to dangerous misinformation from right-wing politicians?

Popper’s actual writing departs from its depiction on social media. He argued for the suppression of intolerant ideas only if those speaking them were not willing to engage in rational argument, if their followers “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.” The philosopher’s tolerance was less about combating internalized prejudice than the willingness to practice democracy.

The underlying issue when it comes to tolerance in the public square is the tension between liberalism and democracy. Although liberalism is often equated with leftism, liberal philosophy is far more encompassing. Right-wing liberals champion property and business rights, while left liberals see inclusion and equal outcomes as more important.

Liberalism often conflicts with democracy, because each proposes a different way to protect rights and ensure equality. Democratic solutions seek to broaden public participation and diversify the representation of interests in the policy process, while liberalism’s answer is to protect rights by guarding them from legislative debate. The U.S. Supreme Court, for instance, is thought to be a more reliable steward of the rights of Americans to free speech, abortion, and firearms, because justices are presumed to be far wiser, more virtuous, and less “political” than voters and representatives.

Such liberal guardianship is dominant in left-wing politics. Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi has advocated for a constitutional amendment establishing a “Department of Anti-Racism,” an expert body with the power to review and veto legislation that seems poised to exacerbate racially unequal outcomes. For instance, if new zoning laws in New York City seemed likely to decrease rates of Black homeownership, this agency could intervene to prevent their passing.

“No-platforming,” the effort to prevent controversial speakers from presenting their views, seems far removed from judicial and expert bodies, but it guards rights in a similar way. Take Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve partly attributed the racial achievement gap to genetic inheritance. When a student club invited him to Middlebury College in 2017, the chants and yells of protestors prevented him from publicly speaking. A group of students justified this in light of Murray’s views not merely being factually dubious but also “[denying] the basic equality” of audience members. No-platforming posits that some ideas harm people’s rights, even if not directly inciting violence or the loss of political freedoms, and that an audience knowledgeable about these harms can prevent people from speaking in order to momentarily safeguard equality.

Karl Popper would find Kendi’s proposal, no-platforming, and perhaps even the Supreme Court inconsistent with open societies. They all rely on the idea that people with certain authoritative knowledge ought to be allowed to constrain democratic practices, whether in legislatures or briefly within an auditorium. They presume that some matters are too important to be decided, or even discussed, by unenlightened citizens and their representatives.

The work of German American philosopher Herbert Marcuse offers another, more contextual way of looking at the question. He argued that “the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced.”

Abstract tolerance is a good thing, contended Marcuse, but it falls short in practice. The first reason was that citizens are “manipulated and indoctrinated” and lack “authentic information” and the ability to think “autonomously.” The second reason was that media, educational, and other social institutions are hopelessly monopolized by conservative thought, blocking change. Because tolerance really just “[served] the cause of oppression” in the absence of equality, Marcuse advocated “new and rigid restrictions” and “the withdrawal of toleration of speech” to restore “freedom of thought.”

While there is no doubt that citizens ought to be more often challenged to rethink the status quo, Marcuse proposed an extreme version of liberal guardianship: an “educational dictatorship,” a class of people, namely Marcuse and those who agreed with him, who can think rationally and autonomously.

Despite the democratic deficits of such a regime, it is strikingly close to what we hear from establishment voices today. After all, the presumption that some people disagree only because they are misinformed, if not completely deluded, is at the core of our current political predicament. Just consider the public controversy over how schools should teach students about race. One side claims that parental concerns over the influence of “critical race theory” on education are steeped in myth and misinformation, while the other side accuses schools of peddling “indoctrination in ahistorical nonsense.”

Such statements fail to account for a very important historical fact: it has often taken civil disobedience, from groups of citizens drawing attention to a state of affairs they believe is no longer tolerable, to break the monopolistic grip of status quo thinking. Whether it is via teachers introducing challenging ideas into the classroom or via parents pushing against school boards and teachers’ unions appearing to overstep their authority, disobedience drives political change. But liberal guardianship seeks to establish new monopolies, rather than to promote productive disagreement. That’s the dynamic in media and higher education today, where “no-platforming” is aimed at out-of-fashion political thought.

Still, no-platforming is appealing in part because political progress in addressing inequality is so frustratingly slow. Charles Murray’s racial ideas rightfully feel menacing, because they might justify even less representation of Black people in politics and higher education . Liberal guardianship looks attractive when democracy is dysfunctional, as a way to compensate for the persistence of social inequalities, not to mention ineffectual governance. Perhaps those shouting down their opponents hope that loudly opposing problematic utterances within social media and on college campuses will lead to chronic diversity issues finally being resolved. But it hasn’t worked that way.

We are seeing, right now, that liberal “thought guardianship” leads to a winnowing in the range of acceptable opinions. Each side becomes fanaticized around their own notion of justice, and public conversation becomes narrowly focused on policing the boundaries of heresy. The problem of institutions falling short of realizing equal treatment gets blurred with the issue of too many citizens thinking and saying the wrong things.

The political philosopher Robert Talisse, a Vanderbilt professor, articulates a similar concern. A consequence of ongoing political polarization is people’s partisan identities becoming core to their sense of self. In turn, they demand more conformity of belief from friends and allies.

One could call this “intolerance creep.” Efforts that begin with no-platforming more obvious opponents of equality like Charles Murray later target potential allies. For instance, geoscience professor Dorian Abbot’s recent disinvitation from speaking at MIT was not because he opposed addressing diversity problems at universities but because he believes that affirmative action is the wrong tool to use.

One problem with intolerance creep is that a range of views on equality are compatible with democracy. Philosophical debates about equality of opportunity, outcomes, status, and capabilities have persisted for centuries, with no signs of forthcoming agreement. But when citizens embrace their own version as Truth, partial allies become political enemies. The variegated, “big tent” coalitions that traditionally helped to end harmful and discriminatory politics are rendered impossible. Polarized politics leads to gridlock, not victory.

How can we avoid intolerance creep? Consider the starkly polarized debate over trans rights. Progressives’ political goal seems clear: equal treatment. Yet the conversation is dominated by ontological claims. “Trans men are men” and “Trans women are women,” insists the ACLU when issues like restroom access arise, while opponents chant “sex is real” in response. Each side is only further fanaticized by the belief that “science” vindicates their own position, as if we could just get citizens to accept certain facts, certain truths , then the thorny policy disagreements will disappear.

Some parts of the debate are not spectacularly complicated, even if they are contentious. For instance, which currently sex-segregated spaces should allow trans people entrance without intrusive forms of questioning? In other cases, discerning equal treatment is less clear-cut. Controversy over sports participation and hormone treatments for minors are beset with overlapping dilemmas and trade-offs concerning autonomy and fairness, largely obscured by competing ontological claims. For instance, a “sex realist” approach gets natal women kicked out of the Olympics, while extending transition rights to teens would mean being willing to use governmental authority to revoke parental custody. Again, politics is a matter of caring, not knowing.

This might seem like a pedantic distinction, but it’s important. As Popper wrote, “‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision , and it is quite independent of the theory—which is probably false—that ‘all men are born equal.’” Citizens need not believe anything specific about the nature of equality or that transwomen are women. They only need to be willing to listen to people’s reasons for caring about an issue, to share their own experiences, and to make policy compromises and concessions. And studies of political canvassing show that this kind of democratic talk actually works for trans rights issues.

This looked to be the approach Nancy Kelley hoped to take when appointed chief executive of Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ human rights organization. “We don’t have to convert everybody to our way of understanding gender,” Kelley said in an interview, “for the experience of trans people’s lives to be more positive, and for them to have lower levels of hate crime, better access to health services and more inclusive schools and workplaces, we don’t need people to agree on what constitutes womanhood.”

A society that tolerates political disagreement invariably tolerates some risk of harmfully intolerant beliefs. But dissent isn’t just some abstract democratic value. As a buffer against intolerance creep, it helps ensure progress against harmful policies. We tolerate some of the opinions that strike us as distasteful because it pays off later.

So, we should resist the impulse to demand conformity in order to compensate for current democratic deficiencies. People whose speech directly promotes or inspires violence should be prevented from entering politics, but extending that intolerance to those who simply see equality differently deprives us of potential allies. As uncomfortable as it may be to talk to people whose beliefs fall short of our own, it is a discomfort that I hope more of us can learn to live with.

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Explaining the Paradox of Tolerance

An essential element of a democratic society is the universal tolerance of all political perspectives. Through tolerance, interactions between the multitude of perspectives within the spectrum take place. Democracy is the product of these interactions being expressed at the ballot. 

It is because of tolerance that political ideas can coexist and that no one perspective is held sacred. Citizens are free to form opinions and vote based on those opinions. However there exists a concept that has become increasingly relevant in the past decade, the idea that universal tolerance is dangerous. 

In his influential work The Open Society and Its Enemie s, Karl Popper posited a self-contradictory idea known as the ‘paradox of tolerance.’ This concept holds that a tolerant society should not have unlimited tolerance. The reason for this contradiction is that unlimited tolerance implies the toleration of those who are intolerant. 

He argues that without tolerance limits, those who are intolerant will work with impunity to subvert those whom they consider to be the ‘other.’  If these intolerant ideas are allowed to exist and eventually spread, they will bring about the dissolution of the tolerant society from within. 

It is a paradox because a tolerant society must fortify against intolerance by being tolerant. Popper states “We should claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. Furthermore, he says intolerant ideas should be “placed outside of the law,” in other words, certain ideas should be made illegal.

Currently, there exists a debate along this line of thinking. Should democratic societies allow for intolerant and anti-democratic ideas to persist, despite their implied protection under the democratic principle of tolerance?

It has long been understood that there is a political spectrum and that at either side of that spectrum lies extreme political ideologies. Both of these ends of the spectrum include intolerant ideas. The extreme right generally is intolerant of modernist ideas like egalitarianism and multiculturalism. The extreme left is generally intolerant of traditionalism, nationalism and hierarchical structures. 

Antifa serves as an example of the manifestation of Popper's thought. It is a far-left organized political movement that looks to prevent the spread of intolerant racist and neo-fascist ideologies. These ideas are detested by Antifa based on their intolerance and potential for violence. Passively denouncing or exposing these ideas as falsifiable, bigoted and unsophisticated is not enough–as that allows the ideology to persist and continue its intolerant bigotry. Instead, Antifa kinetically persecutes those who hold intolerant beliefs. Put simply, Antifa does not tolerate ideas that are perceived as intolerant and seeks to eradicate them by force. 

Political extremes are defined by their distance from the center. While extreme ideas are not favored by the majority of citizens due to their deviation from the norm, they exist because of the right to hold any opinion and the principle of universal tolerance. To counter intolerant extremism and protect a tolerant society, Popper suggests overriding the democratic principle of universal tolerance.

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Free speech, democracy, and “repressive tolerance” the use of herbert marcuse to justify left suppression of free speech.

       Herbert Marcuse’s Opposition to “Tolerance”

       Marcuse’s Reasons for Rejecting Toleranc e

       Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Analysis

       The Benefits of Free Speech and Tolerance for the Left

       What About Fascism?

       What Are We For?

There has been, recently, controversy on the Left over “free speech.” Should radical leftists and anti-fascists disrupt speeches by right-wingers? Should leftists break up such meetings, charge the stage, and smash windows? Or should the leftists limit themselves to counter-demonstrations, boycotts, protest leaflets, and, perhaps, heckling? The controversy is not so much over public events by fascists—U.S. Nazis or Klan members, for example—but over right wingers who claim to not be fascists but “conservatives” who value free speech.

In working out an approach to this issue, a number of leftist thinkers—anarchists and Marxists—have revived interest in the ideas of Herbert Marcuse (1969). In 1965 (updated 1968), Marcuse wrote an influential essay, “Repressive Tolerance” (which appeared with essays by two others in the little book, Critique of Pure Tolerance ). Marcuse (1898—1979) was one of the most influential Left theorists of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. A member of the Frankfort School, he was a scholar of Marx, Hegel, and Freud. Marcuse had an enormous impact and following. Given the general ignorance and muddle of much of today’s radical thinking, it is not surprising that there has been an attempt to revive Marcuse’s ideas about free speech and the limits of “pure tolerance.”

Herbert Marcuse’s Opposition to “Tolerance”

Marcuse argued that “tolerance” of differing political views was a fine goal for a good society. But it was wrong for the Left to “tolerate” right-wingers here and now, in the current social system. He was not speaking just of intolerance toward out-and-out fascists, but towards a very wide range of views. He was not just against tolerating bad actions (such as racist physical assaults on People of Color, women, and leftists).

He called for: “Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion and word, and finally, intolerance…toward the self-styled conservatives, the political Right….” (110; his emphasis) “Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled.” (120) This means restricting tolerance for a lot of people.

By “withdrawal of tolerance” he did not mean only opposing conservatives and those who were against “peace, justice, and freedom for all.” He did not mean only organizing against them, fighting them through literature and speeches, demonstrations and strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience—as well as physical defense against violence from the Right. He proposed to physically suppress these views which were contrary to his—to not allow them to be published or to be spoken, to be in party platforms in elections, or to be organized for in any way.

If Marcuse had his way, “…Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted….” (88) “This is censorship, even precensorship….” (111) He advocated “…apparently undemocratic means…the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements….new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions….” (100) There will have to be “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly.” 109)

Who would determine what opinions were to be tolerated and which were not? “Who is qualified to make all these distinctions, identifications for the society as a whole [?]…Everyone who has learned to think rationally and autonomously…the democratic educational dictatorship of free men.” (106) Although coming from the Marxist tradition, Marcuse rejected the idea of the rule of the working class (whether conceived of as democratic or a dictatorship). Instead, he raised the idea of “the dictatorship of an ‘elite’ over the people….a dictatorship of intellectuals….the political leadership of the intelligentsia….” (120-1) However, he pulled back; this may have been too bluntly authoritarian. Although it is the logical conclusion of his orientation, he finally rejected “a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent” in favor of “the struggle for a real democracy.” (122) Which was still seen as consistent with opposition to “tolerance.”

Marcuse’s Reasons for Rejecting Toleranc e

How did Marcuse justify this repressive strategy, which seems to contradict his goal of a free and democratic society? He argued that the Right’s opinions are bad and “destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all.” (During the reign of Franco’s fascism, the Spanish Catholic Church similarly declared that “Error has no rights,” to justify suppressing Protestantism.) Marcuse claimed that it was not so hard to know what was best: “the institutional and cultural changes which may help to attain the goal [of freedom] are comprehensible…they can be identified…on the basis of experience, by human reason….True and false solutions become distinguishable….” (87)

Experience contradicts this optimism. Even if we limit ourselves to the Left—to those who are for “peace, justice, and freedom for all”—opinions vary enormously about how to “attain the goal.” Disagreements are many among Leftists. At times, they have led to bloody suppression, not only of the Right, but of other Leftists as well.

The libertarian-democratic tradition accepts that people are limited and fallible. The truth can never be known with absolute certainty but only approximated, to the best of human ability, at any one time. Therefore there must be free speech and opinion, letting differing views be expressed, clash with each other, and influence each other. As expressed opinions interact with actual human experience, a truer and more useful set of ideas will emerge over time.

Marcuse regards this libertarian-democratic model as an abstraction which does not fit existing capitalist society. While not the same as fascist totalitarianism, even the freeist bourgeois democracy is still dominated by a minority, the capitalist class (more-or-less the “one percent” and its minions). Even the best-paid working class still works to support the capitalists out of an unpaid-for surplus, that is, is exploited. But today the working class and others put up with this exploitation and oppression without rebellion. This is partly due to massive propaganda and mis-education poured out by a “monopolistic media…the mere instruments of economic and political power….” (95) This combines with a relatively high standard of living for most of the population due to modern technology. There is a flood of consumer goods which drowns more natural desires for fulfillment. The result is “a democracy with totalitarian organization.” (97)

This is not counting the actual suppression of the Left. In Marcuse’s period, this included McCarthyite witchhunting, FBI persecution, and Klan terror in the South. More recently, there has been the non-judicial jailings of Muslims, and the destruction of Occupy encampments throughout the country by coordinated police attacks.

In Marcuse’s opinion, the workers and the rest of the population are mentally numbed by this system. They are not capable of thinking rationally and autonomously, even if they knew the facts. They are overwhelmed by life, used to taking orders in their daily jobs and satisfied with the minor pleasures of the consumer society. Politically they are used to the narrow range of opinion available in the newspapers, on radio, and in TV news, and offered by the two parties (a range from slightly-liberal to not-quite-fascist reactionary). Everyone can say what they want, but one side has the loudspeakers, which determines what everyone hears.

“The democratic argument requires a necessary condition, namely that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they put have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.” (95) None of these conditions apply, he believes. Seeing the population this way, leads to Marcuse’s abandoning the working class—most of the people—and attraction to a dictatorship by an intellectual elite.

Freedom of speech and association (tolerance) are necessary aspects of capitalist representative democracy. This is itself simply one way for the capitalist minority to rule, exploit, and oppress the people. This limited democracy has its uses for the ruling class. It permits factions of the ruling class to raise their disagreements with each other and to work them out (without bloodshed). Also, it serves to bamboozle the people into thinking that they really run the state.

In this context, democratic tolerance becomes “repressive” for Marcuse. It is “repressive” because it supports and justifies the overall undemocratic system. The Left is tolerated, so that liberals get to make their complaints, and even tiny revolutionary socialist grouplets get to put out their rarely-read newspapers. The Left gets to blow off stem and the system looks democratic. But the ruling class is not impacted and the complacent majority is not affected. Similarly the Right is tolerated, from overt fascists, to far-right-authoritarians who deny that they are fascists, to moderate-conservatives. The Right is permitted to mis-educate the people with lies and bigotry, under the protection of “free speech” and tolerance.

“In endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This [is] pure tolerance of sense and nonsense….” (94) This certainly sounds like current U.S. political discourse.

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Analysis

Marcuse’s analysis of capitalist society was true then and is true now—but it is not the whole truth. It is one-sided and ignores the inner contradictions and conflicts within the apparently totalitarian-democratic-affluent society. Marcuse insisted that industrial capitalism was in the process of ending inner contradictions which might once have moved society forward; it was developing “one-dimensional man”—the title of one of his books. (Ignoring inner contradictions is surprising for an authority on Hegel and dialectics.)

In fact, the sixties and seventies of Marcuse were a time of upheavals and conflicts. It included the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movement. This was the time of the struggle against the Vietnamese war. These two movements shook up U.S. politics and culture. They led to other struggles—for women’s liberation, LGBT rights, ecological sustainability, and so on. By the early seventies, there were large workers’ rebellions, including union organizing, national wildcat strikes, and Black caucuses in unions. Internationally, 1968 was the year of a workers’ almost-revolution in France, an anti-Stalinist national rebellion in Czechoslovakia, and the Tet offensive in Vietnam (a turning point in the war).

Most importantly, Marcuse did not see that the late sixties and early seventies were the end of the post-World War II boom. (Marcuse’s blindness to the weaknesses of the capitalist prosperity was pointed out at the time by the libertarian Marxist, Paul Mattick [1972].) The effects which had overcome the Great Depression (such as massive arms spending and looting the environment) had worn out by then (see Price 2012). The world economy began to go downhill overall (with ups and downs). There developed new threats of global environmental catastrophe. The ruling class turned to “neo-liberal” policies, attacking the working class’ living standards, weakening the unions, cutting government social benefits, de-regulating businesses, and slashing taxes on the wealthy. None of which restored overall prosperity.

Rather than everyone happily agreeing about politics and culture, in a stable, affluent, monolithic society, as Marcuse had seen things, there is now turmoil, vicious conflict, and an inability of the ruling class to keep things moving together smoothly. There is working class distress and dissatisfaction, among African-Americans and white workers. There is massive hostility toward the government. This is not (yet) a time of revolutionary upheaval, but neither is it one of one-dimensional totalitarian unity and solidity as described by Marcuse.

The Benefits of Free Speech and Tolerance for the Left

The capitalists certainly benefit from their limited democracy, freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, and general tolerance. But so do the exploited and oppressed and their defenders on the Left. It is not a one-sided arrangement. The oppressed can form mass organizations to pressure the capitalists for benefits. African-Americans waged a large-scale struggle in the fifties and sixties which succeeded in ending legal racial segregation. Workers organized unions (workers have better pay and better working conditions when they have unions). Similar gains (real, if limited) have been won over time by women, LGBT people, and others due to their (tolerated) freedom to organize and mobilize.

The radical Left has also benefited from tolerance. If we add together all the anarchists, socialists, communists, radical feminists, radical pacifists, and everyone else who regards themselves as radical, this is still a small minority of the population. The big majority dislikes the views of the far Left. That millions of people believe in free speech and tolerance of minority extremist opinions is a major defense for the radical Left—not a complete defense but an important one. To a major extent, it protects the Left from government suppression and mob violence.

Freedom of speech and assembly, tolerance of minority opinions, has permitted the Left to continue even in times of reaction and repression. It has remained possible to for a minority to “blow on the coals” of revolutionary tradition, even in the worst of times. It has made it possible for a minority of advanced workers and youth to make contact with revolutionary socialists and join their cause. Doing this would be infinitely more difficult under conditions of fascist or Stalinist totalitarianism.

The extreme Left has been able to have an impact on the broader society. In times of turmoil, small groups and tendencies may suddenly have a major effect on the world. During the thirties, the Communist Party, and others on the Left, played a major role in organizing unions, the unemployed, and African-Americans. They won improvements for the workers and oppressed. In the upheavals of the sixties, the antiwar movement was organized and led by Trotskyists, Communists, radical pacifists, anarchists, independent socialists, and others—a minority which had a great effect on the politics and culture of the time. Radicals had a smaller, but real, impact on the African-American struggle. The ruling class became worried that too many young people were being influenced by revolutionary programs.

In brief, while tolerance and democratic freedoms have benefits for the ruling class, they also have real benefits for the people and for the Left as such. The capitalist class, because it is the ruling class, gets the lion’s share of the benefits—so long as society is stable and prosperous. But in times of turmoil and upheaval, the Left gets to use its freedom and tolerance to its maximum advantage, to challenge the system. At which point, the rulers would be most likely to attack these freedoms. The Left would be foolish indeed to oppose the very free speech protection that it depends on.

What About Fascism?

What about the U.S. Nazis, the Klan, and similar groupings? Should they be granted freedom of speech or should their organizing be stopped for force, whenever possible?

When the Italian Fascist Party was working its way to power, and when the National Socialists were building themselves in Germany, the big problem was not their speeches. It was their actions. They assaulted the sellers of Left newspapers, broke up Left meetings, burned down union halls, and murdered opponents. In response, the police did little and the reactionary judges gave them slaps on the wrist. The failure of the liberal state was in not stopping such behavior. The failure of the Left was in not forming common fronts and fighting back against this aggression.

The Left groupings should have formed defense guards to defend their meetings, their halls, and their newspaper sellers. They should have taken the battle to the fascists. They should have retaliated by breaking up fascist meetings and driving the fascists from the streets. Such tactics were attempted by the Italian anarcho-syndicalists, but the Italian Socialists and Communists would not agree. Similar tactics were proposed by Trotsky to fight the rise of Nazism. Again, the German Communists and Socialists would not agree. In both cases, the Communists were too sectarian to work with other Leftists, and the Socialists had faith in bourgeois legality to protect them.

However, it would be a mistake to call on the government to ban the fascists or outlaw their speech. This is the state—the capitalist state. The Left should not trust it. Given the power to outlaw political opinions, it will put most of its efforts into silencing the Left, not the Right. Far better to demand that the state keep hands off political opinions.

But the Left does not have to respect the fascists! The Nazis are not a Conservative Discussion Club. They deliberately identify with a movement which overthrew political democracy (however limited), murdered millions of Jews, Romany, Slavs, and others, waged aggressive war, and subordinated other nations. Similarly, the Klan identifies with night-riding masked murder done to enforce white supremacy. When either group tries to march through a Jewish or African-American neighborhood, it is not to win local adherents but to frighten people with the threat of violence.

The big majority of U.S. workers are hostile to fascists in a way that they are not toward conservatives. Militant counter-demonstrations against overt fascists (who are understood by most people as fascists) are understandable. Efforts to break up their rallies and marches are justifiable and comprehensible as a form of self-defense.

What Are We For?

Marcuse objected to having a minority (the capitalists and their agents) rule over the rest of the population. He wanted to replace this with a truly democratic and free society. But his methods implied an elite “educational dictatorship.” (106) A minority of rational and autonomous people would make the decisions, while suppressing other views which, they believe, do not lead to peace and freedom. In effect, he wanted the current society to support free speech for the Left while it is out of power—but if the Left should ever get into power, it should suppress the free speech of others. This seems like a foolish thing to say out loud, but there it is.

Such views are really quite common on the Left. Much of the Left wants to turn the U.S. into something very like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba, or even Lenin and Trotsky’s early Soviet Union—one party dictatorships with state capitalist economies. Of course they do not believe in free speech for anyone but themselves—which is not free speech at all. Unlike Marcuse, they rarely say this explicitly, but it is their program.

Also, a great many anarchists openly reject democracy of any kind—not only capitalist representative democracy. (See Price 2016; 2017) They reject even the most participatory, direct, antiauthoritarian-socialist democracy, in the workplace or community (managed by consensus or by majority rule with respect for minorities). They deny, sincerely, that they want any kind of dictatorship, but provide no alternate form of collective decision-making. Without an explicit belief in radical democracy, it is not surprising that many anarchists slide into elitist practices, such as denying free speech to others, even non-fascists. (Many other anarchists believe that anarchism is the extreme form of participatory democracy. When everyone is involved in governing, then there is no government—that is, no institution separate from and over everyone, no state.)

From another perspective (one which is compatible with anarchism and libertarian socialism), on the demand for free speech, “There can be no contradiction, no gulf in principle, between what we demand of this existing state, and what we propose for the society we want to replace it, a free society….What we demand of this state now does constitute our real program….The kind of movement we build now, on a certain basis, will determine our new society, not good intentions….Our aim by its very nature requires the mobilization of conscious masses. Without such conscious masses, our goal [socialist democracy] is impossible. Therefore we need the fullest democracy….We want to push to the limit all the presuppositions and practices of the fullest democratic involvement of the greatest mass of people. To the limit, that is, all the way.” (Draper 1992; 165-6, 170, 172)

In conclusion: An antiauthoritarian Left should have no tolerance for the Right. That is, it should organize against the Right, polemicize against the Right, mobilize and demonstrate against the Right, do all that it can to expose the lies and evil program of the Right. It may demand debates, or, when objectionable speakers appear, get up and walk out. Within the broader movement of opposition (the “Resistance”, which is mostly pro-Democratic Party liberals), there should be an effort to build a revolutionary, antiauthoritarian, Left wing. This should oppose all sections of the Right. It should also criticize the liberal supporters of capitalism, who have prepared the way for the successes of the Right.

Contrary to Marcuse’s expectations, the current condition of capitalism is shaken by failures and internal conflicts. Fissures in the system have been revealed, and they open up a great deal of dissatisfaction and frustration with the society and the state. There are now possibilities for a revived mass movement of the Left.

But what kind of Left will it be? Will it present an elitist, authoritarian, statist vision of socialism? Or a vision of the fullest freedom and radical democracy? If we want freedom and cooperation, then we need a movement whose methods are consistent with its ends—which prefigure the ends. When necessary it would physically defend workers and People of Color from violent fascists. But in general, it should make clear by word and deed that it is the most consistent and thorough defenders of freedom, including free speech. Whatever his other contributions, Marcuse has nothing to teach us in this area.

Draper, Hal (1992). “Free Speech and Political Struggle.” In E. Haberkern (ed.). Socialism from Below. NJ: Humanities Press. Pp. 162—172.

Marcuse, Herbert (1969). “Repressive Tolerance.” In R. Wolff, B. Moore, Jr., & H. Marcuse. Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press. Pp. 81—123.

Mattick, Paul (1972). Critique of Marcuse; One-Dimensional Man in Class Society. NY: Herder & Herder.

Price, Wayne (2012). “ Living Through the Decline of Capitalism. ”

Price, Wayne (2016). “ Are Anarchism and Democracy Opposed? A Response to Crimethinc ”

Price, Wayne (2017). “ Democracy, Anarchy, & Freedom. ” C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium: Anarchy and Democracy.

United States Institute of Peace

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How Teaching Tolerance Can Promote Peace

Making tolerance-focused education a priority can help students prepare for an increasingly diverse world.

By: Knox Thames

Publication Type: Analysis

Instability, conflict and human rights abuses are daily occurrences worldwide, often driven by hostility based on religion, belief or ethnicity. As policymakers look for ways to get upstream of potential human rights abuses, tolerance education can play a crucial role in preparing students to live in peace in our increasingly diverse world. The Transforming Education Summit , to be convened by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on September 16-19, provides an important opportunity to elevate tolerance education into the global education movement.

The summit concept note recognizes education is “a foundation for peace, tolerance, other human rights and sustainable development.” However, the summit’s agenda does not focus on ways to harness the power of education to promote these important values. Prioritizing tolerance education can help promote peace, stability and human rights. The summit represents an opportunity to bring international attention to this missing aspect of global education strategies.

What is “Tolerance” Education?

“Teaching tolerance” is shorthand for a basket of concepts regarding the value of multi-faith understanding, the benefits of pluralism and the importance of human rights and freedom of religion or belief. Because of our increasingly diverse societies, tolerance should be a core component of any effort to support basic education — as well part of the summit agenda. However, very few international organizations or donors prioritize teaching students how to live with diversity through cross-cultural learning.

Our work at USIP engaged a variety of practitioners, educationalists and diplomats from around the world about best practices. We convened roundtables with individuals working on programs to promote religious tolerance through education from Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, United Kingdom and United States, among others, as well as the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe .

Irina Bokova, a former UNESCO director-general from 2009 to 2017, provided insightful guidance based on her U.N. experience. “Education should be about values, values of human rights, of mutual respect, of respect for the nature and of humanity, of living together,” she said. “We must move beyond literacy and numeracy, to focus on learning environments, on new forms of learning.” 

While immense challenges exist to meet needs in reading, writing and mathematics, choosing not to support tolerance education is also a decision. Inaction will ensure children are exposed to ideas of fear or hate of the “other” without the tools to see through misinformation, thus leading to continued human rights abuses and instability. Children may learn to count and read but will be ill-prepared to live in an increasingly diverse world.

Incorporating Tolerance in the Classroom

Practitioners were adamant about the need to prioritize textbook reform that promotes positive views of multi-faith tolerance, pluralism and human rights. Textbooks are the lynchpin in any education plan. Often used for years, they provide a foundation for student learning and teacher programming. 

And in many contexts, there is an urgent need to update them. The international community should empower local actors to develop culturally appropriate materials that promote multi-faith tolerance, the benefits of pluralism, human rights and religious freedom.

Teacher training should go hand in hand with textbook reform, equipping teachers to welcome pluralism and create a positive classroom environment. It is critical both textbook reform and teacher training be supported simultaneously. Otherwise, improved textbooks will lay under-utilized by ill-equipped teachers, or teachers appropriately trained will lack supporting materials to incorporate. A “twin-track” approach of simultaneously improving textbook “hardware” and teacher training “software” will bring the most durable results.

Tolerance Education is a Community Effort

Encouraging change will take a mix of public and private engagement with government officials, elected leaders, parents, community and religious leaders, and faith-based actors. A healthy ecosystem for multi-faith understanding requires engagement with all these groups, as what children are taught is sensitive in every society.

For example, USIP has  partnered  with the Alliance of Iraqi Minorities (AIM) on  curricula reform . AIM has “focused on including more examples of multiculturalism and conviviality in the curriculum, a balanced compromise between the need for integration and minority concerns of assimilation.”

Their engagement is working. Based on AIM’s recommendation, the Ministry of Education in Baghdad “will modify second-grade Islamic religious curriculum to highlight Armah, the seventh century Christian king of Abyssinia and Axum. The king was known for providing generosity and refuge to Muslim pilgrims in what is modern-day Ethiopia, serving as an example of religious coexistence.” Additions like this are small but important steps.

Religious leaders also have an essential role to play. Faith leaders can set a positive framework for education about pluralism and human rights. Initiatives such as the Document on Human Fraternity , signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, provide leadership for other clerics. And in the most egregious situations, the international community should prioritize pressing government partners whose education materials promote violence toward “the other,” especially if governments share them outside their home country. 

A Long-term Commitment

However, none of this will happen without a decades-long commitment to fund tolerance education. We need consistent, specific and — importantly — additional funding for tolerance education from the international community.

Textbook reforms and teacher training will require additional resources, not a siphoning off already inadequate funding. Specific, annual funding from the international donor community would equip educators, practitioners and communities to teach children how to live with diversity and inoculate them against narratives of hate and violence. Funding this work has the potential for positive effects in ways yet to be fully explored or tested. 

In conclusion, at a time of increasing diversity — and increasing intolerance — emphasizing tolerance through education is crucial. Irina Bokova summed up our findings and challenges when she said, “Teaching tolerance, respect for cultural diversity and human rights is an essential part of bringing peace.” She also stressed, “There is the need to put education into the forefront of public policies, a need of a global Marshall Plan for education. Unfortunately, we see shrinking of national budgets and development assistance for education generally, let alone education for peace and tolerance.” 

Teaching tolerance requires a long-term commitment. And, with lasting support, such efforts can foster greater respect for human rights and positively equip students to succeed in a diversifying world. The Transforming Education Summit provides a unique opportunity to recognize the importance of tolerance education in global strategies and assemble the needed resources. Hopefully, tolerance education will be part of the solutions emerging from the summit.

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Summary and Response to Teaching Tolerance in America

Within his essay “Teaching Tolerance in America,” Devlin (2011) begins by introducing the reader to the current state of the nation‟s schools, specifically high schools, by discussing a variety of ways that tolerance in schools is falling short and that this is a significant problem.

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Living alongside one another in a spirit of acceptance evokes the concept of tolerance that, from Erasmus da Rotterdam to Voltaire to Primo Mazzolari, calls upon us to understand that the only possible choice for mankind, from time immemorial, has been to educate towards coexistence within milieus that increasingly differ by culture, customs, ways of thinking and behaviours. Beliefs and concepts sometimes refer to values that may also be quite remote from and unlike ours and, as a result, our capacity to find points of contact with other persons becomes the condition, not only for survival, but for growth itself as a human person. To know how to interpret and yet keep one's own points of reference is a constant challenge to our intelligence guided by the will to do good. The concept of free will is based precisely on the strength of the human will, driven to dedicate itself to whatever safeguards, or to turn away from the search for salvation. Freedom cannot exist if we replace it with new absolutisms and mental blocks that hinder the realisation of that growing humanisation plan, founded on responsibility and care. This paper broaches the subject of the relevance of education to tolerance: on one hand, a plan for detecting the limits within us and, on the other, the need for creating a human community, with the purpose of defining a common interest to live for and commit ourselves. So, it is a matter of choosing whether to live through another cold war or shift towards much more promising horizons of encounter and solidarity.

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Tolerance, Empathy, and Inclusion

• Open Access
• First Online: 03 November 2021

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• Tuuli Lähdesmäki 8 ,
• Jūratė Baranova 9 ,
• Susanne C. Ylönen 10 ,
• Aino-Kaisa Koistinen 11 ,
• Katja Mäkinen 12 ,
• Vaiva Juškiene 13 &
• Irena Zaleskiene 14  

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In this chapter, the authors analyze the artifacts in which the students explore the key attitudes of cultural literacy within the CLLP: Tolerance, empathy, and inclusion. The chapter introduces each attitude with critical discussion of its meanings, connections, and relations to other key concepts of cultural literacy, such as diversity, equality, and democracy. The authors explore how the program addresses these attitudes and the cultural texts it includes. The analysis of the artifacts reveals the variety of ways in which children give meanings to tolerance, empathy, and inclusion, such as helping others. In this meaning-making process, the students draw from their own experiences and emotions.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

Core Components of Cultural Literacy

In this chapter, we explore how the artifacts created by the students in the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (CLLP) address tolerance, empathy, and inclusion—the key attitudes of cultural literacy as defined in the DIalogue and Argumentation for cultural Literacy Learning in Schools (DIALLS) project. Cultural literacy is a dialogic social practice involved in relating to others (Maine et al. 2019 , 390). It includes an assumption that we may perceive these others as different from us, and that through tolerance, empathy, and inclusion we are able to engage with each other in meaningful and constructive ways.

Dialogue, the key tenet of cultural literacy as it is understood in DIALLS, is necessary for democracy characterized by plurality and dissent. Tolerance, empathy, and inclusion as core components of cultural literacy are relevant to the public debate that is a hallmark of democracy. Particularly in deliberative democracy, dialogue is essential to equal participation in decision-making and to improving the quality of democracy (e.g., Dryzek 2000 ).

The data used in this chapter consists of 228 cultural artifacts made by students in five lessons who were given five different cultural texts to inspire their explorations of tolerance, empathy, and inclusion. These artifacts are mainly drawings, but the data includes collages using readymade materials, such as magazine clippings. Some of the artifacts were created individually while others were made collaboratively, in small groups or with the whole class. Some of the jointly created artifacts consist of several individually created parts.

Concepts not only reflect reality, but also create and shape it, for example by constituting norms and practices (Lähdesmäki et al. 2020 ). Concepts are constructed and contested in debates and used as powerful tools to both change and maintain the status quo (Wiesner et al. 2018 ). Tolerance, empathy, and inclusion are impactful and influential concepts frequently used in debates on contemporary problems, such as the polarization of societies and racism. Therefore, the following exploration of tolerance, empathy, and inclusion in the students’ artifacts starts with a brief discussion on the respective concepts.

Tolerance: Helping Strangers

Tolerance is an attitude to perceived cultural or physical differences between people or differing opinions. Tolerance can mean refraining from interfering with an opposed other (Cohen 2004 , 69), while a broader understanding of tolerance includes recognizing the other as equal instead of deviant, inferior, or marginal (Galeotti 2002 , 9–10). Nevertheless, the concept of tolerance implicitly refers to something that is perceived not only as different but also to some extent as negative or undesirable—but that should be tolerated (Klix 2019 ). As such, the concept can sustain prejudices rather than mitigate them, create pejorative conceptions of the “tolerated” others, and undermine their self-esteem. Moreover, the power relation between the tolerating agent and the tolerated subject(s) is unequal. What is regarded as different and by whom are questions which raise deeply problematic issues of inequality (Galeotti 2002 , 8). To repair the power imbalances and to avoid unnecessarily judging and labeling things as desirable/undesirable—and in need of tolerating—altogether, it would be useful to replace the concept of tolerance with other concepts, such as openness, respect, acceptance, and appreciation of diversity. These other concepts are included in the definition of tolerance used in the DIALLS framework (DIALLS 2018 ).

Understanding tolerance in terms of recognition puts equality at its heart. Sometimes some differences can be markers of oppressed or excluded collective identities; people with these identities may be refused or offered second-class membership in the polity and lack the preconditions for full participation in democratic citizenship (Galeotti 2002 , 6, 9). Tolerance is thus ultimately a question of justice, recognizing differences, and ensuring they hold an equal position in the public sphere (Galeotti 2002 , 10).

The lesson on tolerance with the youngest age group in the CLLP was based on a book called Owl Bat Bat Owl (2015) by Marie Louise Fitzpatrick. It tells a story of owls and bats who end up living on the same branch of a tree. In this lesson, before starting to make the artifacts, the children were supposed to discuss respect and why it is important to respect people who are different. In the lesson plan, based on the book, the students were invited to discuss why it is “important that the two families learned to live together and share.” The lesson goals focused on listening to others and respecting their ideas. The instructions for creating in-lesson artifacts ask the students to picture the “owls and bats living happily together”; after the lesson, the students were encouraged to make a collage of local nocturnal animals showing “how they all live together happily.” These tasks demonstrate how animal characters were used in the lesson to deal with the questions of human life. This tradition of animal fables is used in several other CLLP lessons as well. Most of the artifacts on tolerance in the youngest age group were made by children in Cyprus (34) and the UK (14), while the other nine artifacts were made in Lithuania, Portugal, and Spain.

Most of the artifacts by the youngest children follow the book Owl Bat Bat Owl carefully: The children have drawn the moon, tree, bats, and owls and used the same colors as those in the book (Fig.  4.1 ). In some artifacts, however, the story is relocated into daylight and some other elements, such as flowers, have been added to the scene. The instructions for the artifact advised the children to picture how the owls and bats live happily together. This is explicitly repeated in the captions, in which the children emphasize happiness, friendship, and the sense of togetherness. The instructions for the artifact also asked what the animals might do together. The children have given answers to this in their captions by mentioning activities such as sharing space and food, helping each other, playing together, and having a party. This lesson, thus, comes close to the DIALLS theme of living together (see Chapter 5 ).

The images from two different countries, Cyprus (left) and Britain (right), exemplify the unified character of the artifacts and their similarity with the book that was used as a cultural text to stimulate the youngest students’ exploration of tolerance in this lesson

In the second age group, a short film called La Cage ( In a Cage 2016) by Loïc Bruyère was used to catalyze students’ ideas on tolerance. The film shows a bear in a cage on display in a park. Time passes, seasons change, and visitors walk past the cage, until one day his longtime friend, a bird, with other birds of different species, frees the bear. The lesson was designed to start with a whole-class discussion on freedom. After watching, the students were given a list of emotions and invited to reflect on the emotions related to the film in a group activity, followed by whole-class discussion. In the lesson plan, the goal of this reflection was learning to recognize “others’ emotions when they are in a difficult situation,” which refers to empathy rather than tolerance. The cultural artifacts were made in the same small groups. The groups were asked to make a poster with the title “Save the animal from the cage.” The task invited students to feel empathy not only to human beings but also to animals—at least those in a zoo (see Chapters 5 and 6 ). The data comprises 18 artifacts from Cyprus, 13 from Portugal, and six from Spain.

The fact that the children were given a precise task, to make a poster on freeing animals, explains the uniform shape of the artifacts and their titles. Many of the images depict an animal in a cage and the bird. In Fig.  4.2 , there is, however, no cage, but the whale is inside a delineating, separating frame and the bird crosses the boundary and creates a connection with the whale. This echoes how, in the film that was used as a stimulus in this lesson, a bird brings a change to the long-term captivity of the bear. That the instructions also gave a list of emotions for the students to work with contributed to the seeming lack of direct references to tolerance in the artifacts. Instead, the captions mention animals feeling sad and lonely in cages and happy after being released.

This drawing, titled “Save the whale,” was made in the lesson on tolerance by a Cypriot student from the second age group

While the film shows different bird species collaborating, some of the artifacts similarly highlight collective action to free the animals using various means, from a truck to a helicopter. Some of them also express notions of civic action and public debate: One caption explains how people organized demonstrations to save the animals and another describes how “many people got together and spoke out” to find a way to rescue the animals. These images and texts reflect complex ideas of expressing opinions, influencing, and mobilizing in a public sphere. As such, they connect with another DIALLS subtheme, civic competence, included in social responsibility (see Chapter 6 ). They also reflect the idea of dialogue, which is defined as a core component of cultural literacy in the DIALLS framework. In general, the artifacts do not indicate negative tolerance as noninterference (Cohen 2004 ), but rather active collaboration against oppression.

The catalyst for addressing tolerance in the oldest age group was a short film called Super grand ( Super Big 2014) by Marjolaine Perreten. In this age group, students from Germany, Lithuania, and Spain produced a total of 11 artifacts addressing tolerance. The film depicts a giant child in a superhero cape arriving in a city. The child tries to help the inhabitants but they are afraid of the child because the child is so big. When a volcano near the city starts to erupt, the child stops the eruption, with their parent, who is even bigger. The story suggests that one should not be afraid of difference, since it may prove to be an asset in the community. In this sense, the storyline follows the logic of many superhero narratives, where difference is transformed into a superpower that helps the community (on otherness and superheroes, see Goodrum et al. 2018 ).

As a warmup exercise, the students were asked to give examples of tolerance. After watching the film, the group was encouraged to discuss how we could live out tolerance and how appearances might be deceptive. The question given for the discussion with the other class, also included in the lesson (see Chapter 1 ), was: What means might help to promote tolerance? After this, the students were asked again to give examples of tolerance and empathy and whether the lesson had changed their thinking. The students were not asked to reflect on the role of making art or creative practices in exploring abstract issues such as tolerance during the lesson, as the cultural artifacts were made only after it.

The instruction for the cultural artifact invited the students to continue the story of the film by drawing in groups or pairs. Most of these drawings described how people cheer and applaud the superhero who has saved the community (Fig.  4.3 ). The artifacts can thus be interpreted as expressing the theme of tolerance as it is framed by the book: the gigantic girl’s different size is turned into a superpower to be celebrated, emphasizing how differences should be tolerated and even celebrated. However, the book and the artifacts seem to suggest a problematic approach to tolerance and celebration: They need to be earned through doing something useful and even extraordinary for the community. This approach does not highlight tolerance as a matter of justice and equality (see Galeotti 2002 ).

In the artifacts on tolerance made by the oldest age group, such as this artifact by a student from Germany, it was common to depict celebrations of the superhero’s bravery in defending the community against danger

Some students in the oldest age group made their own short films, thereby widening the range of the multimodal creative practices to audiovisual artifacts. In a film called The Bird , the students deal with intense experiences of tolerance and intolerance. A bird called Paul is violently bullied at school because he likes reading. One day he is beaten so badly that he needs hospital treatment. His situation improves when he saves another bird, Dani, from drowning, and they become friends. The film has a long temporal horizon, which helps viewers to see that situations change in time. Paul and Dani spend all their school years together and find other likeminded friends in high school. At the end, Paul is planning to become a psychologist to be able to help children with similar difficulties. In a sense, the film follows the logic of superhero narratives by transforming Paul’s difficult experiences into a “superpower” that he can use for the benefit of others.

Two other films made by students use Playmobil figures that look tiny next to the hero of the story, a big doll in one and a drawn image in another. The films, similarly to drawings based on Super Big , present a happy end, in which the giant hero gets thankful applause and cheers for saving the community from danger. All the artifacts follow the Super Big film by playing with proportions, although relocating the story to another setting. They all depict music, joy, and parties expressing how fear and prejudice turn into relief, gratitude, and acceptance. Tolerance here means respect and appreciation of difference (see DIALLS 2018 ). The artifacts show the superhero as an individual who is alone, whereas the other members of the community are illustrated as part of a big group. Thus the unequal power relations (see Galeotti 2002 ) between the superhero and the rest of the community are made visible although not problematized.

To summarize, in the lessons focusing on tolerance, the cultural texts used for all age groups depict a situation in which the actors are strangers to each other at first but end up helping each other. Based on mutual help and sharing, they develop a sense of togetherness. Respectively, artifacts on tolerance in all the age groups focused on helping each other.

Empathy: Recognizing Emotions

The DIALLS project’s definition of empathy drew on Buber’s notion of I-Thou (1958) which describes the necessity of moving away from an objectifying world view that highlights “other” (I-It) and instead includes the relational sense of engagement (I-Thou)—underpinned by genuine dialogue (Buber, 1947 ). The project approached empathy as “what happens when we put ourselves into another’s situation and experience that person’s emotions as if they were our own” (Lipman 2003 , 269; DIALLS 2018 , 22).

It is more common to feel empathy—consideration of others’ emotions, positions, and perspectives—toward one’s own ingroups than outgroups. These empathy biases may strengthen stereotypes and prejudices against people we do not know, who seem far away, or appear very different from us (Bloom 2016 ). We need to develop notions of empathy that avoid these pitfalls.

Solhaug and Osler ( 2017 ) define intercultural empathy as fostering encounter between multiple groups with perceived cultural differences. It includes both cognitive and emotional aspects, feelings and expression of empathy, empathetic awareness, acceptance of cultural difference, and empathetic perspective-taking (Wang et al. 2003 ). Intercultural competencies influence our ability to recognize and enable solidarity across differences. Solhaug and Osler ( 2017 , 6) emphasize the capacity and willingness “to empathize and identify with others in a spirit of solidarity.” Perceiving similarities and being open to different perspectives can facilitate intergroup relations and trigger positive feelings, a sense of togetherness, and inclusiveness, for instance in schools. This is important for inclusive citizenship in the current global and European climate.

Solhaug and Osler ( 2017 , 9) highlight experience and knowledge of diversity as an important predictor of intercultural empathy. It can be learned through experience, and schools are crucial arenas for intercultural contact, for practicing and learning the inclusiveness that can stimulate intercultural empathy and inclusive citizenship (ibid., 8, 23). Teachers can harness this potential to create harmony and mutual understanding by inviting students to reflect on and discuss diversity, and to address potential controversies and concerns that could affect inclusive citizenship in practice (ibid., 13, 28). Open dialogue is a way to engage with differences and controversies in class through deliberative democratic practice (ibid., 27; see also Habermas 1994 ; Englund 2006 ; Hess 2009 ).

Conceiving of it as a process that involves both affective and cognitive components, Morrell ( 2010 , 114) claims that empathy is necessary for citizens to show toleration, mutual respect, reciprocity, and openness to others. All this is needed for deliberative democracy to function, so that everyone affected can be involved in decision-making processes. Empathy as openness and responsiveness to other perspectives is needed for developing political judgment, a core skill in democracy. For Arendt ( 1993a , 217–221), political judgment is dialogic and multi-perspective (though she denies that it is about empathy). “The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion” (Arendt 1993b , 241).

This kind of political judgment relates to the principle of audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), a cornerstone of justice and equality. According to this principle, no person should be judged without a fair hearing in which each party has the opportunity to respond to the evidence against them. The same idea is central to the parliamentary pro et contra principle for fair debate of opposing arguments in the same discussion (Palonen and Rosales 2015 ). Empathy, listening skills, and openness to other perspectives can be seen as prerequisites for these principles to work. The reverse is also true: inclusive processes of deliberation, where people are encouraged to consider others’ positions, can enhance empathy toward outgroups and eventually result in altruistic behavior (Grönlund et al. 2017 ).

Activity has been defined as a core dimension of empathy (Aaltola and Keto 2017 ), and according to Solhaug and Osler ( 2017 , 6), empathy is required for collective action. For Fraser ( 2009 , 2013 ) parity of participation means the ability of members of a society to act together as peers, willing and able to put themselves in each other’s shoes and take others’ perspectives into consideration—in sum, parity of participation is about being empathic.

In our data, empathy is explicitly dealt with only one lesson for the youngest age group. Based on a book called On the Trail (2016) by Anna Ring, students from Cyprus produced 39 artifacts exploring empathy, students from Portugal, 24, and students from Spain one artifact. The book describes how a girl and her father notice that someone is stealing food from their house. They soon find out that the thief is a stray cat and start chasing her. Once they discover that the cat is stealing food to feed her kittens, they change their mind about the “thief” and help to take care of the cat family. The instructions for the lessons proposed a discussion about finding reasons for why someone does something, ability to change your mind, and the importance of not judging someone’s action straight away . For the cultural artifact, the students were asked to picture “happy/sad/angry/excited children” with thought bubbles to indicate several reasons for their feelings. Hence, the task focuses clearly on affective rather than cognitive or active components of empathy (Morrell 2010 ; Aaltola and Keto 2017 ), even though the film offered ideas about changing one’s mind and giving help. While this lesson enables approaching empathy through the ideas of dialogue, deliberation, and openness to other perspectives (Arendt 1993a , b ; Grönlund et al. 2017 ; Solhaug and Osler 2017 ), it does not explicitly encourage the children to engage with these aspects of empathy.

Making this artifact gave the children the opportunity to recognize their own emotions (Fig.  4.4 ), which is important if empathy means understanding others’ feelings and insights. Most of the artifacts deal with happiness. For example, the children explain in their captions that they feel happy for several reasons and related to various activities, people, and locations, such as playing, friends, animals, family, parties, and nature. The reasons the children give for happiness include going on a trip to the mountains and making a snowman, playing with dad and being tickled by him, sleeping over at grandma’s in the summer, the ice cream man passing by, going to school with friends, and playing with a cousin.

A collage exploring empathy by students in the first age group from Cyprus depicts a range of emotions

Inclusion: Doing Things Together

As a central aspect of inclusion, the DIALLS project ( 2018 , 11) emphasizes the need for building deep mutual relations with other people. Inclusion is about membership of a community. Social inclusion has been described as individuals and groups participating as valued equals in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the community; it involves mutually trusting and respectful interpersonal relationships at the family, peer, and community levels (Crawford 2003 as quoted in Babacan 2005 , 11).

Inclusion is often discussed in the context of diversity and asymmetrical power relations (e.gYoung 2000 ; Ahmed 2012 ). Groups that perceive themselves as excluded may seek full membership of the society. In some cases, those already included may seek to include others in particular groups, institutions, or the society at large. A broad literature on inclusive education explores the equal opportunities of students from various backgrounds to participate in the school institution (Jagdish 2000 ; Allan 2003 ; Potts 2003 ; Armston 2006 ). Inclusion has a flip side: Exclusion can refer to rights, recognition, socioeconomic status, access, and barriers to participation (e.g., Hayes et al. 2008 ). Inclusion and exclusion are thus core issues of justice and equality.

Elements contributing to social inclusion include access to social goods and services, resource allocation, empowerment, participation in decision-making, and institutional trust (Babacan 2005 , 11). Citizenship as a legal status, access to rights and active public participation is a significant vector of inclusion (Babacan 2005 , 12–13); however, citizenship has exclusive implications. Inclusive citizenship includes values such as justice, recognition, self-determination, and solidarity (Kabeer 2005 as quoted in Lister 2007 , 50–51). When solidarity is understood as the ability to identify with others and act with them in their claims for justice and recognition (Kabeer 2005, 7 as quoted in Lister 2007 , 51) it comes close to belonging (see Chapter 7 ), which is crucial for inclusion. Creating understanding between people fosters inclusion (Babacan 2005 , 11), which connects it closely to empathy and other dimensions of cultural literacy.

Inclusion was the explicit topic of only one lesson for the youngest age group in our data. Fifteen artifacts from Cyprus, 23 from Portugal, and 21 from the UK dealt with inclusion based on a film called Big Finds a Trumpet (2017) by Dan Castro. In the film, two characters, one big and one small, interact with a trumpet. They need to find ways to take turns in playing the trumpet and play it without disturbing others. The instructions for the discussion advise the group to identify what skills the main characters in the film have and what are they good or less good at, and provide justifications for these interpretations. In their cultural artifacts, the students were asked to draw a character to be glued on a lolly stick. Finally, the group was supposed to discuss how the pictures differ to create debate on “how we are all different but we all accept each other.”

The task given for this lesson was very general, referring as much to tolerance as inclusion, and so some teachers may have adjusted the task. For example, the children were asked to write in a thought bubble and draw things which they are good at, such as drawing, playing football, swimming, playing cards, and waking up early to go to school. This task probably stems from the question for the discussion on the film, asking what the main characters are good or less good at. Perhaps making these artifacts can help the students to recognize their own strengths, which makes them feel they belong to a group and can welcome others, and thereby develops their thinking about inclusion. Students in another group also made an artifact that was not mentioned in the lesson plan, a collage depicting the games they play together. This may have encouraged students to reflect on their own group and how they spend time together, and as such rouse their team spirit. This reflection may promote inclusion, provided everyone can participate in the activities. Both tasks show that different people have different skills and preferred activities, which may feed into the idea that this diversity makes the group or community stronger.

Conclusions: Entangled Attitudes

The attitudes of tolerance, empathy, and inclusion are closely connected, also to other CLLP themes, particularly to living together. This entwinement was visible in the lesson plans and the instructions for making the artifacts. Consequently, the artifacts made by students elaborated on the three attitudes simultaneously.

When dealing with these abstract topics, students drew from their own experiences and concrete things in their lives. Influences from contemporary popular (children’s) culture were less frequent. Even though the students used their own experiences, the artifacts share a notable number of similarities, thus manifesting the dialogic chain of thinking (Maine 2015 ; see also Chapter 9 ). The unifying influence of the school context (see Chapter 1 ) is clearly present in the data. The artifacts reflect the instructions and cultural texts used in the lessons so strongly that based on these artifacts, we cannot get a complete picture of how the students themselves understood tolerance, empathy, and inclusion.

Emotions play a central role in the lessons and the artifacts made in them. Emotions are a channel through which the three attitudes are expressed. Although the link between emotions and the three attitudes is somewhat abstract in the lesson plans and the artifacts, emotions can be seen as essential in developing tolerance, empathy, and inclusion. In effect, learning about emotions is needed in schools and in the surrounding society, and creative practices can contribute to this. Previous research has discussed how various artforms can increase empathy and influence others (see, e.g., Stout 1999 ; Fialho 2019 ; Lähdesmäki and Koistinen 2021 ). They can provide a space for using the imagination, constructing relationships with “the imagined other” (Leavy 2017 , 199), and imagining their experiences.

Creative practices provide a channel to train cultural literacy and its key elements, tolerance, empathy, and inclusion. Dialogue, a core component of learning cultural literacy in the CLLP, helps people to gain new knowledge and to understand various standpoints (see Arendt 1993a , b ; Morrell 2010 ; Grönlund et al. 2017 ). It enables encounter and provides experiences of diversity. Such interaction can mitigate prejudices and encourage people to look beyond the polarizations constructed in populist discourses. It strengthens critical thinking and can help to combat misinformation and conspiracy theories. All this makes dialogue an important resource for democracy.

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Lähdesmäki, T. et al. (2022). Tolerance, Empathy, and Inclusion. In: Learning Cultural Literacy through Creative Practices in Schools . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89236-4_4

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Essay on “Tolerance” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

The world needs more Tolerance

“Tolerance is the only real test of civilization”. It was Arthur Kelps who thus extolled the virtue of tolerance. Man in the 21 st century believes he is more civilized than his ancestors. But is he also more tolerant than them? Unfortunately, the virtue of tolerance is not abundant in the world of today and the world is in dire need of it.

          Tolerance can be defined as the possession of  a fair and objective perspective and attitude towards those people who are of different races, religions, nations or have a set of opinions, beliefs and ideas the differ from our own.

          The importance of tolerance lies in its ability to make a human being broad enough in mind to be receptive to all  kinds of ideas. This, in turn , enables on e to widen one’s knowledge and exercise more freedom of choice and jugement for oneself. At the same time it creates a deeper understanding of other’s views and beliefs.

          Today, tolerance seems to be at a discount at all levels. At the most trivial sign of disagreement hot words are exchanged, almost immediately escalating into a fight and sometimes even murder. Family members find it difficult to put up with one another’s shortcomings – after all which human being is perfect? Communities, social groups, facial groups and nations- at all levels, there appears to be an acute lack of tolerance. Trivial misunderstandings, even rumors, give rise to riots with the accompanying bloodshed and permanent acres on relationship ; at the national level, there is civil war and border wars. So often a personal matter such as religion has been distorted to create hatred amongst peoples. If people learnt to tolerate one another’s views , perhaps such sad occurrences could be reduced if not totally removed from this world!  

          Why has tolerance level come down? Or, indeed, has it come down at all? Human beings all through the ages have shown intolerance of views and beliefs and customs alien to their own. Wars such as the Crusades have been fought because of religious intolerance. Racial tension has grown due to intolerance. So long as human beings give in to envy, malice, jealousy and greed, tolerance will suffer. In rent times several longstanding and accepted social institution have shown signs of crumbling. Family values, social values are all being eroded. An increasing materialistic and consumer culture has not helped to nurture essential values. The individual has assumed such importance that anything that militates against that individual’s own ideas is not collated.

          Enlightenment of individual is necessary. Universal values of liberalism, the willingness to listen to others, at most agree to disagree and not enter into fights of domination – these qualities have to be bred at every level of society. Democracy, after all, means tolerance of dissent; if this tolerance is not imbibed and nurtured, it will only give rise to another Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir.

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Teaching Tolerance

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Teaching Tolerance focuses on four core domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. These domains inform lessons and activities geared towards promoting social justice, inclusivity, and tolerance within schools and communities. "The program emphasizes anti-bias and social justice. The anti-bias approach encourages children and young people to challenge prejudice and learn how to be agents of change in their own lives"(SPLC). There are lesson plans and extension activities for each grade level as well as corresponding justification guides, which detail domains covered and grade-level reading resources. There are numerous lessons for all grade levels.

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Presence Evaluation : Full Presence

Evaluation Notes : There are many featured lessons about teaching injustice with examples of injustice in various forms (e.g., disability, race, religion, etc.) are provided.

Evaluation Notes : Lessons encourage students to take their knowledge and move into action, including “do something” sections. Examples of opportunities for students include, but are not limited to making a more inclusive calendar, designing a monument, and engaging with campaigns. Students are given the opportunity to use the internet as a means for social activism.

Evaluation Notes : Some lessons explore the various communities schools might be involved in such as neighborhoods, online, school, etc. A few lessons spoke about improving communities and engaging in a positive way with the members of the communities. Students are asked to solve problems in their local schools and communities.

Presence Evaluation : Minimal Presence

Evaluation Notes : There were few opportunities for students to engage with administrators, parents, or the physical environment in documents reviewed.

Evaluation Notes : Many of the lessons are focused on the direct instruction of definitions that relate to social justice, such as equity and fairness.

Evaluation Notes : There are lessons that ask students to participate in self-reflection and consider social justice themes impact on their experiences. For example, in one reviewed lesson, students are asked to reflect on their consumer choices around gendered products.

Presence Evaluation:  Full Presence

Evaluation Notes: There have been numerous studies documenting Teaching Tolerance's effectiveness. 

Evaluation Notes : Teaching Tolerance contains many lessons promoting inclusion, respect, and equity.

Presence Evaluation : N/A

Evaluation Notes : We are unable to evaluate this domain since it is best measured through observation.

Evaluation Notes : There are several lessons examining social identities.

Defend Liberalism? Let’s Fight for Democracy First

America never really was liberal, and that’s not the right fight anyway. the fight now is for democracy..

There are words we know, and there are words we argue about, working our way to a shared meaning. And then there is that unique category of terms that, once they appear, stubbornly refuse to succumb to any mutual understanding no matter how belabored the discussion. Such is the boggy terrain known as “American liberalism.” At best it carries meaning through its modifiers—but then, there are just way too many of those. Lockean? Rawlsian ? Jeffersonian? Social? New Deal? Libertarian? Pragmatic? Great Society? Keynesian? Feminist? Muscular? Patriotic? Neo? The mind reels.

Hardly a snapping pennant of faith, American liberalism is one hot American mess.

American liberals would like to see U.S. history bursting forth from its Jeffersonian roots, launched on a steady march from monarchy to democracy, from slavery to freedom, from rapacious Gilded Age capitalism to robust regulatory state. Instead, confusion reigns. By the time I get to the 1980s in my history classes, for instance, it takes me a 45-minute slog of a lecture just to explain the etymology of “neoliberalism.” The root of the term is a nineteenth-century Manchester-style economic “liberalism” deployed to overturn a twentieth-century New Deal and Great Society “liberalism.” That nineteenth-century version was a very selective implementation of a more abstract liberal idea—one that highlighted free trade (a total myth in the U.S. case) while often ignoring the liberties of free citizens, the rights of workers, or the process of democratic government. When I suggest to my students that the individualism of their generation’s identity-based liberalism could be said to feed the hypercapitalism of neoliberalism, their heads are spinning.

Given that the term lacks depth, coherence, and precision, let alone a fighting creed, allow me to introduce a multipart political puzzle. First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.

So, while the question today might be, “How to make America liberal again?” the problem is that it never really was. That’s not the right fight. By the time this is over, I hope to draw your attention more narrowly to one part of the liberal idea that is most important and most contested: democracy.

We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential  The Liberal Tradition in America   (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.

Yet the persistence of the Hartzian idea, even if only fumes remain, has prevented us from understanding the frequent failure of our own political systems. This holds especially true for the question of democracy, because the Founding Fathers had a tortured, suspicious relationship to the people, which we have yet to overcome. This makes liberalism more of a longing for that which never existed than it is a useful guide for democratic values.

Thankfully, this year, Steven Hahn finally wielded his hefty historian’s hammer, sinking nails in the coffin of liberalism by separating Hartz from fact in his perfectly titled book,  Illiberal America: A History . Hahn writes “not of the country’s recent departure from long-established and entrenched ‘norms,’” but instead “how our present-day reckoning with the rise of a militant and illiberal set of movements has lengthy and constantly ramifying roots.” He also shows how the mythology of liberalism has been sustained less by its proponents than by its anxious critics. The right attacks it, while the left defends some kind of imaginary norm to fight off the new assault on great (mythical) American values.

Individual freedom is often seen as the core of liberalism (root:  liber , free), that most cherished of American values. Yet the practice of freedom hardly holds up to any litmus test of American liberalism. In my recent book,  Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power  (2022), I found a near two-century history of the practice of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian freedom wielded by white elites to dominate the land, labor, and political power of other people. Freedom for white Americans meant the freedom to control, exploit, subjugate, deny, and even murder. When, for instance, the federal government intervened militarily to back the political rights of formerly enslaved people, elite Alabamians fought the feds with a twisted but enduring version of the liberal ideal. Whites saw federal intervention as a “flagrant and dangerous invasion of the ancient conservative principles of personal liberty and free government.”

Annelien de Dijn’s  Freedom: An Unruly History  (2020) has a similar finding. As democracy broke out across the North Atlantic, the liberal idea of freedom was mobilized to control the unruly democratic expressions of the people. Freedom, she shows, was not deployed as a source of liberation but as a “formidable reaction against democracy.” In his book  Bind Us Apart  (2016), Nicholas Guyatt further problematizes Enlightenment liberal values by showing how the founding generations invented, and were committed to, the logic of separate but equal. There never was a place for a multiracial, multicultural (liberal) republic. Men may have been created equal, as some claimed, but they’d have to go be equal somewhere else—for American Indians it was out West, for slaves it was “back” to Africa.

A contemporary “liberal” view looks to foundational moments of expanding access to democracy and economic prosperity—signposts of the American reform tradition. Eras like Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights era may have been partially inspired by liberalism, but their most salient victories were fostered by forceful departures from it. This is the mobilization of illiberal means for liberal ends.

Consider Reconstruction. Eric Foner aptly calls it The Second Founding, but we ought never forget that it was a product of military subjugation followed by what former Confederate states regarded as the “forced ratification” of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Given the rather unliberal, albeit overdue, military means of statecraft, the old Confederacy cried foul on the “forced ratification” necessary for them to rejoin the Union as federal bayonets ruled their land. Even the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, barely met the two-thirds majority to pass, and that was without the Southern delegations voting (suggesting it would have had a hard time in any other circumstances besides those born of military subjugation).

Not so ironically, the party that grew in opposition to the Radical Republican agenda was called, of course, the Liberal Republicans, who fetishized civil service reforms and proper procedures while whites seized power in the South. Then, in the tradition of what Richard Hofstadter called “a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity,” the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law, became a tool for supporting corporate personhood while Black people sought their rights in the streets.

When the New Deal came along during nation’s second great moment of peril and reform, Roosevelt’s Brain Trust also abandoned the core values of liberalism by creating the corporatist National Recovery Administration. Here FDR saved liberal capitalism by suspending its rules, selecting to call his project “liberal” because the individual rights inflection of the word provided useful cover for the NRA’s collective tendencies. While the NRA was found both unworkable in real life and unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, it nonetheless opened the way for the great and semi-enduring breakthroughs in controlling and managing capitalism: Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the National Labor Relations Act (upheld after FDR’s threat to pack the court and the autoworkers’ rather illiberal seizing of General Motors). I’ve called the era “The Great Exception” because it was based on the muting of the American love affair with the ideology of individualism and the bolstering of organized class power—at least for a few decades.

When it comes to the modern civil rights era, it is worth mentioning that the brave actions of the Little Rock Nine integrated Little Rock High School, but it also took the illiberal means of Eisenhower’s executive order and a show of force by the 101st Airborne Division to make sure the job got done. This is an age in which liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey, segregationist Senator Richard Russell, and master manipulator Lyndon Johnson—and perhaps even Eisenhower himself—were all liberals. How can that be?

I suspend my caustic take on liberalism when it comes to the momentous achievements of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. They may have been the most liberal pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States. For the first time in American history, the United States legally declared itself to be a democracy and did so by parliamentary (not military) means. That makes the United States a very young republic indeed. Yet those great historical breakthroughs, “the liberal hour,” now seem fleeting, tactical, and so propulsive of anti-liberal reaction that they generated what can only parallel the post-Reconstruction era of white “redemption” from the grip of federal power (known in the 1960s and beyond by the more populist term “backlash”).

This delivers us to the missing piece of the liberal story. As the historian James Kloppenberg noted in a 2001 retrospective essay on Hartz’s  The Liberal Tradition,  we need to stop debating liberalism and “turn our attention toward democracy.” In this time of political crisis, the path forward should be focusing on the single definable dimension of liberalism, democracy, and promoting a robust expansion of the franchise, through very active federal intervention, ideally a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for all citizens—full stop—and some system of equal representation of that vote (say, getting rid of the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and other tricks of the trade).

Our current political system is based on who gets to vote and which states’ votes matter, not what the policies or ideas could or should be. That is a failure. The clarion call of “Democracy Now!” is a lot more attractive than “Vague Culturally Relative and Historically Defined Liberalism at Some Point if It’s Convenient and Procedurally Correct!”

Authoritarian conservatives now own nearly every political value—liberal (as a pejorative), freedom (a scary version), patriotism (the white nationalist variety). But confront them with the one concept that remains up for grabs, democracy, and they buckle. It’s the key dividing line. The real American history is a contest over whether this will be a democracy—culturally, institutionally, and participatorily—or will be something else: authoritarian, oligarchical, white nationalist, fascist, segregationist, elitist, or some other.

The question of democracy was there at the founding. And, sure, it is part of liberalism. But it is the part that is clear and makes sense. It was there at Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. As Louis Menand paraphrases the essence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “democracy is an experiment the goal of which is to keep the experiment going. The purpose of democracy is to enable people to live democratically. That’s it.”

The confusion inherent in liberalism risks drowning its most urgently needed value: democracy. Clearly, if you’re not some kind of liberal at this moment in history, you are not helping. That’s fine, but let’s define our aims more precisely, with a vision that is more energizing, more inclusive, and yet still identifiable within some kind of American tradition. A system of a federally enforced and equally weighted right to vote for all citizens would be the best and most unifying place to begin. Despite everything, if the system is run right and aggressively so, the people can be trusted. Let’s gamble not on the chimera of liberalism but on pursuing the unfinished vision of an American democracy.

Jefferson Cowie received the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. He teaches history at Vanderbilt University.