Bigots in the tent

theargumentmag.com · 2,449 words · saved by 1 readers

This is a relatively common sentiment on the left, one that I heard echoed in a group chat several weeks ago. My fellow chat-ter was incensed by the notion that bipartisan abundance efforts included people with unsavory views. This is an appealing notion. Bigotry is bad! I don’t like bigots. I share the widespread sense on the left that the political success of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has inspired a coarsening of our culture that tolerates and even celebrates expressions of bigotry that deserve to be stigmatized. The sense that bigotry is not only bad but requires a kind of purifying distancing is not a new one. As a teenager, I knew They Might Be Giants’ “Your Racist Friend” well. The song’s narrator attends a fun party, but feels forced to leave not, per se, because he finds the racist friend so unpleasant, but because he finds the host’s willingness to tolerate the racist friend to be intolerable. The ethic advanced in the chorus was politically advanced for

You get it. Adam Bartosik/Getty Images “Some people don’t want a tent so big that it includes bigots.” This is a relatively common sentiment on the left, one that I heard echoed in a group chat several weeks ago. My fellow chat-ter was incensed by the notion that bipartisan abundance efforts included people with unsavory views. This is an appealing notion. Bigotry is bad! I don’t like bigots. I share the widespread sense on the left that the political success of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has inspired a coarsening of our culture that tolerates and even celebrates…

Bigots in the tent

related reading