Tolerance is the source of American greatness
let's lean into it on Nov 5th
The 2024 presidential election begins in less than 48 hours from when I will send this message. This election has an ugliness that we, as a country, have been lurching toward for close to ten years. I’ll be glad when it is over. Not that I think it will fix the ugliness, but at least the uncertainty will be behind us.
I’ve written about this before, but given the timing, I think it is worth writing about again: I think the thing that has made America great is tolerance (see my post Federalism and Diversity). I think it is important that we lean into this value on Tuesday, whatever the results are.
Tolerance does not mean embracing difference. It does not mean agreeing with or liking difference. It simply means allowing people to be who they want to be and live the lives they want to live, so long as they do not violate your rights to do the same. It is a cold virtue, but I think it is a fundamental American value, and it is represented by the federalism that is built into the US Constitution.
The default human condition is for the majority to oppress minorities, usually through physical violence. The protections of federalism that our system of government are built on are meant to protect minorities from the majority. This includes institutions like the Electoral College which overweight geography relative to population precisely to protect minorities.
The authors of the Constitution came up with a remarkable document that was meant to provide a minimal structure to bind together a group of diverse and cantankerous communities that had little in common and wanted to maintain their unique identities. With one deadly exception, the Constitution has provided a structure that has allowed these communities to coexist without state-level violence (i.e., interstate violence, not that there is no violence between individuals).
Tolerance at the Federal level means having the government do less, and impose itself less on the lives of citizens. The heat from this election, and much of the last 10 years, is the result of a loss of tolerance. We’ve been trending in the direction of a more intrusive Federal government since the 1930’s. The Federal government’s purview was supposed to be limited to dealing with other countries (foreign policy) and regulating trade between the states, and not much else. The Federal government has become progressively more involved in things it was not designed to do, and I believe this is in part the source of a loss of tolerance. The more centralized power becomes, the more urgent it becomes for a community to control it so as to protect itself from other communities. The decentralization of power in the constitution was meant to prevent this. The Tenth Amendment says:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
What we know from the study of economic development is that the control of violence is a minimum necessary condition. In other words, we need tolerance. We need to be able trade with our neighbors. We need to be able to respect their rights and not hurt them or steal from them. We don’t need to agree with who or how they worship, we don’t need to like the food they eat, we don’t have to approve of who they love, and we don’t have to like their beliefs about what makes a worthy life. We just need to leave them alone. And all things considered, the US has been pretty good at that. It is what has made this country successful, despite the breadth of its diversity. Really, in the scope of human history, no other country has been as successful in creating and sustaining a widely wealthy populous with so much potential to live the lives they wish to live.
Whatever the results are on Tuesday, I hope we can lean into tolerance. I hope we can do it as individuals, accepting that our neighbors may not agree with us in all things, and I hope we can do it as a country, asking the Federal government to do less, so that there is less to fight about.