New Year's Resolution for the Left: Practice Some Tolerance

AP Photo/Matt Slocum

You’ll rarely see me use the term “liberal” in my writing to describe folks on the political left. Instead, I use leftist, statist, socialist, or if necessary, progressive. Democrats today are too frequently illiberal to merit being deemed true liberals — and that’s factual. 

Axios recently determined that nearly 40% of Democrats would not befriend someone from the opposite party, whereas only 5% of Republicans said the same.

Three in 10 Democrats wouldn’t work for someone who voted differently from them, and 71% of lefties wouldn’t even date someone with opposing views. The numbers on those two were nearly zero for tolerant GOP members.

Gender can also be a component.

Axios reported just 68% of women, as opposed to 84% of men, would shop at a business of someone in the other party.

Last year, Michael Barone published a column in the Wall Street Journal about how being immersed in wealthy cultural bubbles causes lefties not to realize their ignorance.

He cited studies showing that conservatives are better at understanding opposing views than left-wingers are.

“Whereas liberal views permeate the news media and popular culture, liberals can easily avoid exposure to conservative views,” Barone wrote in part. “That distorts their view of the world and produces oversensitivity to leftist social-media mobs along with overconfidence in demographic trends.”

Related: Young Democrats Have Been Taught To Hate

As someone who lived among Democrats his entire life until just a decade ago, it’s long been clear that progressivism is the lazy, default ideology, since everything in today’s culture leans left.

Perhaps this is why the ignorant bubble of intolerance permeates and persists.

In a recent study, the Cato Institute found that while more than 75% of Republicans feel they cannot openly express their views, “strong liberals” are the only political group comfortable sharing their views, at nearly 60%.

The left claimed for years that our democracy is under attack — and the vacuous vice president now bizarrely claims that democracy itself is a threat — and therefore it must be strengthened.

I agree overall.

Maybe try speaking to and humanizing people with whom you disagree in 2022. The process clearly must start on the political left.

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