The moral imperative of being intolerant toward Donald Trump
An essential philosophical actuality comes to us compliments of Karl Popper, who tells us that if we are tolerant of everything, including intolerance itself, we are doomed to destruction. As a philosophy, therefore, a strict adherence to tolerance is unsustainable.
Contradicting that notion is a pastime commonly playing out on the internet these days – it’s the sort of game I could easily imagine Kellyanne Conway playing – a game that tacitly assigns demerits to opponents for perceived hatefulness. It goes in principal like this: the debate belongs not to who has the best point, but who is the least hateful in how they say it. Thus comparisons are riddled, Kellyanne-like, with false equivalencies. They’re intended to communicate that the real crimes in all activities between Trumpers and anti-Trumpers are committed by the participants who are, in language particularly, the most hateful. In other words, hateful speech is the actual crime, and actual “hate-crime” is merely in the eye of the beholder. And if you are just as hateful in your speech as your opponent, then the debate is a tie and nobody wins.
Well I call rubbish, or its more potent vulgar equivalent. We do not have time to temper our language or the volume of our invective when dealing with proponents of Donald Trump, and we particularly don’t have to do it in order to be right or virtuous. I do not tolerate the notion that referring to Trump supporters as “morons” or “evil” or even “evil morons” qualifies me for an automatic blot on my forensic escutcheon. I call Trump supporters evil morons because that is precisely what they are, and if you don’t like it, you can jolly well lump it.
There is simply too much at stake in the world right now, so much so that we can no longer afford the luxury of polite tolerance. We don’t know just how bad climate change is, or how quickly it will spell our ruin, which is precisely why we cannot afford to waste time with a man like Donald Trump. We do not know how close to midnight the Doomsday Clock is in actuality, we just know that we cannot afford to continue to permit a hamfisted evil idiot like Donald Trump to remain in charge of the nuclear codes.
We very well may survive Donald Trump as a species, even if we continue to tolerate him and his followers. But we shouldn’t hesitate to fill every American, every Briton and every citizen of the world with appropriate and urgent dread – and an equivalent intolerance to match it.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.