Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

by Arthur C. Brooks

In other words, Mill believed that to develop excellent ideas, we need competing ideas. That is why it is so dangerous when powerful actors work not to win the competition of ideas, but instead to shut it down—by narrowing acceptable discourse, squashing protest, silencing opposing viewpoints, and saying people of opposing opinions are stupid or evil. That is what is happening in our politics today, when one 2016 presidential candidate accuses the other of promoting the policy preferences of “a paranoid fringe” and the other’s rejoinder is to call the first candidate a criminal and “the worst (and biggest) loser of all time.”21 In neither case is there any engagement with the actual substance of the policies in question. Rather, these are both attempts to shut the competition of ideas down by delegitimizing an ideological opponent—and his or her supporters—as out of touch, deviant, or incompetent.