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11 tweets,
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1. Look, I'm passionate about the need to keep treating each other with decency & respect regardless of politics. Politics is a deadly serious business. Even the best leaders get innocent people killed & make mistakes that ruin lives. It's the nature of government.
2. The norms that allow us to keep breaking bread with people we disagree with on gravely important & dangerous issues are essential to the survival of democracy. Those norms are in terrible peril right now, & too many people aren't thinking through how badly we'll miss them.
3. "You don't deserve to avoid the consequences of the policies you support" assumes you, alone, do not support any policies that many others see as immoral, dangerous or deadly. I have bad news about that, & where it leads.
4. Direct action - the incitement of targeted, in-person or professional harassment of others over political disagreements - is the most obviously dangerous example of this, and, frankly, the one from which people active in Politics Twitter have the most immediately to lose.
5. One reason I've been coming back so much to Lincoln lately is because he understood how vital this value was to the entire American project, & honoring it helped him face down the worst efforts to reject it.
6. If you're burning bridges with people in your life or business over politics, you're part of the problem. American history is full of political disputes where one side - or both! - was pushing divisive or dangerous things.
7. We always had to tolerate disagreement over the Big Things, because if we don't, we lose the ability to tolerate any sort of dissent or learn anything from each other. That's not the path to any kind of progress.
8. Reality check: political coalitions in America have always changed, & always will. There are people today in agreement for or against Trump who were in bitter disagreement for or against W. If you permanently write people off, you lose the allies you might need later.
9. Ceaseless war against bad ideas? Fighting those ideas in the political trenches, which are not beanbag? Yes & yes.
But I will keep standing for what's left of the norm against replacing reasoned discourse with personal anathema as our means of resolving political arguments.
But I will keep standing for what's left of the norm against replacing reasoned discourse with personal anathema as our means of resolving political arguments.
It was Sherman's job to end armed resistance & restore the peaceful settlement of political disagreements. He chose the means best suited to those objectives.
The Thirty Years' War is exactly where the "you can't break bread with people with terrible, dangerous ideas" sentiment ends. That war was in its second year when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
