Reddit reviews Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, Expanded Edition

> Would you have signed the Civil Rights Act?

I would have signed the provisions restricting government mandated discrimination like segregation in public schools, etc. I think that there are more effective ways to deal with private discrimination (see Jonathan Rauch's "Kindly Inquisitors" for a long treatment of the subject) than with government regulation.

Since a law is presented as a package and there was not a line-item veto, I probably would have signed it at the time and in the historical context.

If you adopt the definition of fundamentalist in Kindly Inquisitors (highly recommended), these are people incapable of admitting they might be wrong.

Kindly Inquisitors

Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch described markets as a type of liberal game (decentralized competitive systems for resolving conflict and legitimizing the outcome).

He draws an analogy between liberal games and the theory of evolution. I don't have the book to hand, and I can't remember the exact quote.

But the idea is that a liberal game creates a niche that selects for some things and against others.

So markets select for things that the market values, and against things that the market doesn't value.

Most of the book is focused on liberal science, which he defines as the pursuit of truth (not just things that use the scientific method). So the niche in liberal science is supposed to select for truth and against falsehood.

> “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”

The authors here agree with that sentiment, both with "Count us in, Mr. Beasley" and the title, "If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees."

To me, this kind of thinking is the problem. It's definitely not the solution. The problem is mindless ingroup/outgroup tribalist psychology.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to vote against Trump or a bunch of Republican nominees. I can't imagine voting for Trump or just about any Republican. But, this is a one-sided analysis. It doesn't look at Democrats and whether they've gone off the deep edge either. And doing that is what makes Republicans mindlessly vote for Republicans, for those who mindless vote.

If you actually listen to Republican supporters, many of them say the exact same things as this article, but against the Democrats. For example, the point out that Clinton tried to claim repeatedly that being a woman was an important merit ("played the woman card") rather than the liberal position that it is wrong to discriminate based on gender. or Sally Boyton Brown running for DNC Chair saying, "My job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt." (If you listen to the whole thing, she's judging everybody based on race and wants people's speech to be controlled based on what skin colour they have. That's incredibly racist and a human rights violation, if carried out, and people are cheering her. If you actually read the Democratic Party policy for the 2016 election, it literally contains absurd Marxist views, such as claiming that differences in statistical outcomes by different identity groups are due to systemic racism (with no evidence to demonstrate that claim) and describes ending racism in the U.S. by being selectively discriminatory based on race, which is a contradiction and quite racist by liberal principles, and actually increases racial hatred according to ingroup/outgroup psychology, understanding of the psychological prcoess, empirical history, moral philosophy, and legislated human rights, including the Civil Rights Act and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, if the Democrats want to reduce racism, they are doing the exactly wrong thing.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with all of that, but they make a fair point. Left-wing extremism has seeped far up the chain of the Democratic Party and they are at least paying lip service opportunistically to some very bad policies that have caused mass suffering and hatred in the past. These policies certainly have the potential to be dangerously harmful and divisive to the very people they are supposed to help. I'm not convinced that most Democrats would support the absurd parts of these policies, of course.

Nor do I necessarily believe the Democrats are worse than Republicans. But, if you are going to do one-sided analysis against the absurdity of "them", you need to listen to the same analysis that Republicans do to Democrats, and why voters should blindly vote against Democrats.

The problem itself is mindless tribalism. We actually need to sit down and debate each policy and each candidate one at a time on their own merits. Not along party lines. Not along ideological lines, but what is the evidence for the policy or that the candidate is qualified for the job, or that they are not holding extreme views or promoting extreme policies.

Both parties have this problem. I am surprised to see Jonathan Rauch as an author on this article because he is an incredibly strong free speech advocate and Kindly Inquisitors is a great book that goes into great detail about why the open debate and analysis of ideas is incredibly important rather than blind faith in ideological leanings, which goes against what he writes in this article as well as the Democratic Party policies above. It might be a blind spot for him.

I think simply playing into blind tribalism will make matters worse and intensify the polar partisanship even more. It's already at the point of physical violence. Expect more of that.

I think a much better approach is for members of both parties to challenge their party ideologies and policies and bring them toward center in policy, but also in demonizing the other party. Centrism and deep debate of ideas is the solution, not blind tribalism. Rauch should know this.