Ideational Tolerance for Everyone in Politics

Political Ideational Tolerance: Defending the Person While Debating the Idea

We are living through a cold civil war of the mind.

On social media, in family group chats, and sometimes even from elected officials, political disagreement no longer ends with “I think you’re wrong.” It ends with character assassination: accusations of racism, treason, stupidity, hatred, or moral monstrosity.

The person who disagrees with us is no longer merely mistaken; they are declared defective as a human being. This habit of attacking the person instead of the argument is one of the most destructive forces in democratic life today.Political ideational tolerance—the refusal to impugn someone’s character or motives simply because their political conclusions differ from ours—is not political correctness or weakness.

It is a disciplined ethical choice rooted in Russell McAlmond’s secular Ethical Individualism: every human being possesses equal moral worth by virtue of being a conscious, reasoning individual. A person’s political opinion, no matter how strongly we reject it, is the product of that unique mind wrestling with evidence, values, and life experience.

To respond by smearing their character is to abandon reason and to violate the very principle of human equality we claim to defend.

Why Character Assassination Is Always Wrong—even When the Idea Is Dangerous

Ideas and character are not the same thing. A policy proposal can be reckless, immoral, or factually baseless without the person proposing it being reckless, immoral, or dishonest. Conflating the two is intellectual laziness. Dismantling a bad argument with evidence and logic is hard work; calling someone a fascist or a sociopath is easy. The cheap shot is never a substitute for the hard shot.

Motive-mongering poisons discourse

When we declare that our opponents don’t simply hold wrong views but hold them because they are driven by hatred, greed, cowardice, or a desire to destroy the country, we relieve ourselves of the duty to engage their actual reasoning. We also commit the mirror image of the intolerance we claim to oppose: we deny the possibility that a decent person could, in good faith, reach a different conclusion.

Character attacks make agreement impossible and learning improbable
If I tell you that you only believe X because you are a bigot, I have just guaranteed that you will never admit you might be wrong about X—because doing so would require you to accept that you are, in fact, a bigot. The moment we turn disagreement into a referendum on someone’s soul, we lock both sides into permanent enmity.

The slippery slope from demonization to violence is real and well-trodden
Every authoritarian movement in modern history first convinced its followers that their political opponents were not merely wrong but evil incarnate. Once that threshold is crossed, censorship, legal harassment, and eventually physical violence cease to feel like excesses; they feel like justice.

The Discipline of Arguing Without Assassinating

Real tolerance does not require us to pretend all positions are equally valid. It requires only that we restrict our criticism to what the person actually said or did, not to imagined defects in their heart or defects inferred from their group identity. We can—and must—say:

“That policy would cause immense harm, and here’s the evidence…” 

“Your premise rests on a factual error…” 

“That proposal violates a principle I hold to be non-negotiable…”

We must never say, or imply, that the person is therefore a bad human being unworthy of respect or civic standing. This discipline is especially important when emotions run high. The more passionately we believe someone is wrong, the more careful we must be to keep the disagreement surgical: aimed at the argument, never at the person’s dignity. Anger is permissible; contempt is not.

Toward a Healthier Political Culture

Democracy does not require agreement. It requires only that we continue to recognize one another as legitimate participants in the same political community, even when we believe the other side’s ideas would ruin it. The moment we exile fellow citizens from moral consideration because of their votes or opinions, we have stopped arguing about how to govern a shared society and started treating politics as a war of purification.

Russell McAlmond’s Ethical Individualism offers the antidote: judge the idea ruthlessly, but judge the person as "evil" for holding it never. They may be mistaken, but not evil. 

Grant every individual the same presumption you demand for yourself—that you are reasoning in good faith according to the light you have. Debate as fiercely as the stakes require, but debate as though the person on the other side remains your moral equal even if you never reach agreement, today or ever.

Only when we stop trying to win by character assassination can we begin to win—or at least coexist—by persuasion, evidence, and the slow, frustrating, but uniquely human process of reasoning together. That is the only victory worth having in a democracy, and it begins with a simple refusal: attack the argument, never the person.