The title and theme of this post come from a famous essay by Yonatan Zunger written in the early days of the Trump presidency: Tolerance is not a moral precept. I think the original title of the essay was “Tolerance is not a moral precept. It is a peace treaty,” or possibly the same words with variant punctuation; and I like that a little better, because it underscores the same kind of divide that I’m trying to underscore here.
The essay was written in a time where reasonable people could suspect that they would be (as they should have, because they were) asked, or ordered, to tolerate intolerance, which is of course the subject matter of the “paradox of tolerance.” Zunger gives the paradox of tolerance the Gordian knot treatment by clarifying that it isn’t a good in and of itself, it’s a means to an end; if tolerance isn’t achieving its intended end, it’s not appropriate for the situation, and should be discarded or at least make way for tools that are. Reasonable people are tolerant of a wide array of differences because that tolerance allows us to live in peace. It follows pretty straightforwardly that tolerance of differences that threaten peace — for example, tolerating the oppression and hurting of certain kinds of people — doesn’t achieve the intended end of tolerance and should be avoided in favor of making sure people who are different in those ways can’t realize their goals. I don’t want to represent that this makes everything clear (the stated goal of “peace” doesn’t, e.g., invalidate John Lewis’ idea of “good trouble”; there are more and less Omelas-type calculations about what constitutes “peace” that might not admit bright lines; &c) but it is clarifying.
We’ve spent most of four years with Democrats largely in control of the federal government, headed by an older gentleman who generally tacks what passes, in the US, for center-left. (His personal culpability in abetting the war crimes of a far-right government in early 2024 is not ignorable, but I think it doesn’t bear that strongly on the subject at hand.) Early in his administration, instead of essays clarifying that bigotry should not be tolerated, we got some hope for structural solutions to some of the problems of US government: Mitigating the Senate gerrymander via statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, restructuring the Supreme Court to limit the influence of individual presidents on its composition, ensuring that all Americans have the right to vote, and ending the filibuster to pass far-reaching legislation when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.
We got none of it, and an activist far-right Supreme Court denied millions of Americans access to abortion during a unified Democratic administration. We’re facing the credible threat of a unified Republican government at the top of 2025, with publicly documented plans in place for mass deportations, gutting the federal civil service, and passing a nationwide abortion ban. That threat would be a lot less credible with a balanced court; with four new Senators from DC and PR; with electoral votes from same.
I don’t think of Biden as a do-nothing president. I’ve already mentioned one of the terrible things he’s done; on the side of the good are, among other things, his two major spending bills (both negotiated through vanishingly small majorities) and the vigorous renewal of antitrust in his FTC and DOJ. I think of Biden as a president who’s tried to do, and often succeeded at doing, big things through traditional means: Legislation and appointments.
But the things he’s done have not been big enough to prevent bigger things from happening that could undo, or dwarf, them all.
The paradox of incrementalism is: Huge threats can’t be diverted by small actions. The paradox of incrementalism is: Sometimes you have to change your democracy if you want to keep it. The paradox of incrementalism is: Going high when they go low is the best way to get shivved. The paradox of incrementalism is, I say with profound regret: Do, or do not. There is no try.
I could have said “moderation is not a moral precept” for better parallelism with Yonatan Zunger’s essay, but it’s not 2017 any more; the threats aren’t vague or ill-defined, the enemy is out of the barracks, the battles have well and truly begun and, in some cases, ended. There are few things I dislike more than gratuitous military metaphors, and if we’re all lucky I’ll look back on this and say “shit, that was gratuitous”; but states have already come for our trans siblings, our siblings who are or can be pregnant, our siblings risking their lives on border crossings full of razor wire and buzz-saws, our siblings speaking out about Palestine. I can’t get worried about anything as abstract as mistaking means for ends. What I’m worried about is surrender by another name.
I wish I’d thought of this way to say it years ago.