Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says progressive politicians need to tone down their rhetoric following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. As Sean Amato reports, Smith’s comments are also under the microscope. #ableg #cdnpoli
It’s considered a paradox because by tolerating intolerance you allow intolerance to occur. And by being intolerant of intolerance you are allowing intolerance to occur.
If your principles of tolerance are, “everyone should be allowed to express their identity, religion and opinions peacefully and calmly, as long as their views do not call for violence” then that allows people to express their view that a certain race is inferior. But it does not result in the end of tolerance (as this popular but wrong summary express).
It’s only a paradox if you can only think of tolerance as being absolute, where any level of restriction on what people are allowed to do or express is “intolerant”.
Individual freedoms do sometimes need to be limited, for example “freedom” to oppress or “freedom” to deny hiring certain races.
But these “freedoms” are not freedoms any liberal or advocate of tolerance means by “freedoms.”
I’d go further than saying this is “the nuance”; this is the whole thing. Mentioning the paradox doesn’t give any guidance in what to do; just directly saying “we shouldn’t allow people to display swastikas” or " we should allow people to call for the assassination of presidential candidates" will result in a useful discussion.
But you need evidence, or a strong argument, to determine cause and effect here. Sure, there’s a scenario you can imagine in which intolerant views are shared, proliferated, spread among the population, gain support, gain votes, gain power. But there are many liberal democracies in the world, and most are still holding onto their liberal democratic principles. The USA is heading for fascism, which is certainly terrifying, but what about the UK? What about France? All the other countries? Even the far right in these countries is forced to be circumspect in their intolerance due to public opinion, and their probes in the direction of fascist rhetoric and policy are weak at worst.
And if you want to couch this as a “paradox” then you end up with the “paradox of democracy” (it’s possible for people to vote for the removal of democracy). What you’re saying is not that we need to resist fascism because fascists are violent and a risk to people’s lives, but that we should resist fascism because they might be too convincing and get people to vote for them - and hence arguing that we should be less democratic in order to prevent their gaining power. So maybe you do think that’s a paradox. But in practice the way democracies solve this is by banning parties which are a threat to democracy and by having a high bar to do so because otherwise that will be wielded against all sorts. It would certainly be wielded against people who “oppose capitalism” (this we know from history).
Once again, we find that there’s a route through the “paradox” which neither capitulates entirely to fascists, nor capitulates entirely to the anti-democratic, illiberal tendencies of their most extreme opponents.
There are laws that try to prevent this, but those laws are weak and the legislature is captured.
And so we get to what I said originally: the “solution” to the so-called paradox is to have strong laws, for example a hard-to-modify constitution, which guarantee people’s rights. The formulation doesn’t have to be explicitly legal in nature to have a legal solution.
Thanks yourself, I have a similar view of your position :)
I am undecided on collectivism versus individualism, and have been conflicted since a young age. As I get older I suspect both can produce good societies and bad societies and that, while I actually tend towards collectivism being the ultimate ideal, I don’t see inconsistent approaches as being particularly viable, which is where current western collectivist politics tends to sit - there’s no point, for example, in introducing rent controls. Either collectivise housing completely or work within the system to improve housing provision. Ultimately I think there are small advantages of (well-regulated) privatised housing (better choice), and small advantages in (well-managed) nationalised housing that are more significant, and that since the differences are fairly small, it’s not worth trying to push through a poorly managed middle-zone in the hope of achieving the ideal when that looks unlikely.
This was a digression but it was easy to explain and is similar to my thinking on other things…
If your principles of tolerance are, “everyone should be allowed to express their identity, religion and opinions peacefully and calmly, as long as their views do not call for violence” then that allows people to express their view that a certain race is inferior. But it does not result in the end of tolerance (as this popular but wrong summary express).
It’s only a paradox if you can only think of tolerance as being absolute, where any level of restriction on what people are allowed to do or express is “intolerant”.
But these “freedoms” are not freedoms any liberal or advocate of tolerance means by “freedoms.”
I’d go further than saying this is “the nuance”; this is the whole thing. Mentioning the paradox doesn’t give any guidance in what to do; just directly saying “we shouldn’t allow people to display swastikas” or " we should allow people to call for the assassination of presidential candidates" will result in a useful discussion.
deleted by creator
But you need evidence, or a strong argument, to determine cause and effect here. Sure, there’s a scenario you can imagine in which intolerant views are shared, proliferated, spread among the population, gain support, gain votes, gain power. But there are many liberal democracies in the world, and most are still holding onto their liberal democratic principles. The USA is heading for fascism, which is certainly terrifying, but what about the UK? What about France? All the other countries? Even the far right in these countries is forced to be circumspect in their intolerance due to public opinion, and their probes in the direction of fascist rhetoric and policy are weak at worst.
And if you want to couch this as a “paradox” then you end up with the “paradox of democracy” (it’s possible for people to vote for the removal of democracy). What you’re saying is not that we need to resist fascism because fascists are violent and a risk to people’s lives, but that we should resist fascism because they might be too convincing and get people to vote for them - and hence arguing that we should be less democratic in order to prevent their gaining power. So maybe you do think that’s a paradox. But in practice the way democracies solve this is by banning parties which are a threat to democracy and by having a high bar to do so because otherwise that will be wielded against all sorts. It would certainly be wielded against people who “oppose capitalism” (this we know from history).
Once again, we find that there’s a route through the “paradox” which neither capitulates entirely to fascists, nor capitulates entirely to the anti-democratic, illiberal tendencies of their most extreme opponents.
And so we get to what I said originally: the “solution” to the so-called paradox is to have strong laws, for example a hard-to-modify constitution, which guarantee people’s rights. The formulation doesn’t have to be explicitly legal in nature to have a legal solution.
deleted by creator
Thanks yourself, I have a similar view of your position :)
I am undecided on collectivism versus individualism, and have been conflicted since a young age. As I get older I suspect both can produce good societies and bad societies and that, while I actually tend towards collectivism being the ultimate ideal, I don’t see inconsistent approaches as being particularly viable, which is where current western collectivist politics tends to sit - there’s no point, for example, in introducing rent controls. Either collectivise housing completely or work within the system to improve housing provision. Ultimately I think there are small advantages of (well-regulated) privatised housing (better choice), and small advantages in (well-managed) nationalised housing that are more significant, and that since the differences are fairly small, it’s not worth trying to push through a poorly managed middle-zone in the hope of achieving the ideal when that looks unlikely.
This was a digression but it was easy to explain and is similar to my thinking on other things…