On the very idea of liberal tolerance: Civility in politics is an ethics, not a politics

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to Times staff opinion writer David Brooks, “The Siege Mentality Problem,” November 13, 2018, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/opinion/roy-moore-conservative-evangelicals.html?comments

Who cannot endorse Brooks's call for more liberal tolerance? Yet, it wrongly assumes that the basic problem is one of attitudes or ways of thinking. 

There is indeed a politics of style as well as substantive claims. What Brooks calls the siege mentality is political paranoia, whether left, liberal, or right. Its truths consist in the goodness or necessity of what "we" want and the badness of what "they" do. Such thinking can always supply itself with good reasons. Maybe indeed what we want is good and what they do is bad.

This way of thinking is a simplifying response to a crisis. Its inadequacy is that of prevailing models of war and policing (and their assimilation together) as approaches to social problems. The model implicitly legitimates the police state (at war at least potentially with many of its citizens) at the level of style or form even when it opposes it.

Telling people to just remember to exercise liberal tolerance is a personal solution to a social problem. Rooted in aspects of Christianity as old as the John gospel, it is too easy. There clearly is today a crisis to which more liberal tolerance will not do much to help resolve. Maybe for us left-liberals it is worth reminding ourselves that we have not irreconcilable desires and commitments, but better solutions to what at some level are shared problems. 

To remind ourselves as individuals to be tolerant and open-minded is a fine idea, but in fact it is only an ethics and not a politics. We need both.