I Don’t Want to Live in a Monoculture, and Neither Do You
Few things can change your perspective for the better more than being attacked from both sides of America’s culture war.
If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.
But there’s a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.
I’m inherently suspicious of the notion that simple ideas can solve complex problems, but what if a simple idea can help us embrace complexity? Intellectual diversity matters. Opening your mind to a wider range of perspectives is transformative. It doesn’t just protect the minority from the majority, it also helps protect the majority from itself, and the institutions that learn that lesson will be far more tolerant and successful than those that close their doors to opposing points of view.
No American faction — or party — has a monopoly on virtue or insight. For those of us who see diversity, equity and inclusion as good values, the answer is less for the right to beat the left or for the left to beat the right, but rather for the right to be open to the left, and the left to be open to the right.
David French remains one of the best political writers in the national media.