The rise of the intolerant tolerants

When pop superstar Chappell Roan recently refused to endorse Kamala Harris for president, she faced a firestorm of online venom. Roan merely said she would vote for Harris but forgo an endorsement due to her displeasure with the Democratic Party’s treatment of marginalized communities around the world. 

The left-leaning internet responded by calling her an “embarrassment to lesbians” and “ten million times worse than Taylor Swift hugging a Trump supporter.”

The Roan kerfuffle is the latest reminder that we live in an age of “intolerant tolerants” — people who claim to be open-minded but don’t act that way.

Polls show that Americans think of themselves as tolerant. In August, Pew found that 93 percent of Republicans and 97 percent of Democrats describe themselves as at least somewhat open-minded. Another survey found that young people in particular say they’re committed to tolerance, with nearly 40 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 saying that “treating all people with respect, dignity and tolerance” is among their most important core values.

But Americans’ commitment to tolerance may not be as deep-seated as we think. In 2019, a Wall Street Journal-National Opinion Research Center poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed tolerance for others to be an important value. Just four years later, only 58 percent said the same.

Our actions paint an even worse picture, with data showing left-leaning Americans looking especially bad in this regard. Lots of us have very few or no friends with different politics from our own.

In 2016, one in 10 Democrats said they had no friends with very different political opinions from their own. By 2020, that number had risen to nearly 1 in 4. For Republicans, the figure rose much more modestly, from 10 percent to 12 percent. Just last month, a Yahoo News-YouGov poll found that nearly one in three Americans say it’s either very or somewhat stressful to spend time with friends and family who don’t share their political views. 

Democrats and Kamala Harris voters are more likely to report feeling stressed than Republicans and Donald Trump voters. It is not surprising, then, to find that discussions of cutting off loved ones for their political views have become a dime a dozen.

Why have the “tolerant” — especially the more progressive among us — become so intolerant? Yes, we undoubtedly live in a highly polarized age, but tolerance and diversity are held up as liberal values worth striving for. Why are we in reality becoming less open-minded?

One reason is that although we still give lip service to tolerance and diversity, we’ve also recently become much more focused on self-preservation and self-care, and specifically on protecting our own mental health. That may be healthy overall, but if a relationship does not serve our needs, the thinking sometimes goes, perhaps it isn’t worth the trauma associated with maintaining it.

This applies to family and friends. It even applies to how we view celebrities. They may be strangers, but many Americans increasingly rely on them to meet emotional needs in an era when so many people stay inside their homes while inundating themselves with streaming or social media.

Add to this the fact that more and more people view other people’s differing political views as a moral failing rather than a difference of opinion, and you have a perfect recipe for cutting off those we disagree with — whether we know them or not. 

Maybe the best way for all of us to live up to the tolerance we say we espouse is to have more regular contact with folks who disagree with us. Think of tolerance as a muscle we must work to maintain.

Roan asserted in a recent TikTok video responding to her endorsement controversy that “actions speak louder than words.” If she’s indeed right about that, then so-called “tolerant” folks who have turned their back on her have no business applying that word to their own behavior.

Jennifer Tiedemann is the executive editor of Discourse magazine at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.