Opinion: Bringing people over to your side through conversation and debate is the essence of democratic life. But the trend of simply dismissing the other side is obvious on Canada's political right — and left.
It’s all about mobilizing your own people while condemning your opponents as unfit even to be part of the conversation.
A lot of this is very American. You have to be awfully interested in the internal battles of the U.S. left to follow Giridharadas’s accounts of lessons learned by progressive politicians and activists, even celebrities like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And the fact isThere’s still a big persuadable middle ground of voters in this country, and thank goodness for that.
On the left, which is Giridharadas’s big concern, the same trends are obvious in this country. The tendency to write off opponents is just as strong. The fashion in some circles is to paint them not just as wrong, but as evil and unworthy. And yes, at this point one has to say there are limits. Some people really are irredeemable; some are even evil. But not nearly so many as you might think. And surely it’s best to start from a position of genuinely trying to understand why people believe what they do, rather than winning kudos on social media by dismissing them out of hand.
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