...Our form of government and political culture demand that individuals tolerate disagreements about the highest good, that the state treats all people equally under the law, that citizens resist the temptation to settle political disputes through violence, and that members of the political community forge a common heritage through a process of unending civil discussion, argument, and debate that's undertaken in a spirit of mutual respect.
...The illiberalism can be seen in different forms on both the right and the left. Whether it proves to be a passing trend or an early indicator of something far more ominous has yet to be determined. What's clear is that all those who cherish liberal ideals of tolerance and mutual respect need to be vigilant in speaking out against and acting to thwart these tendencies.
By far the most alarming development is the willingness of Donald Trump (but not just Trump) to deploy rhetoric and propose policies that sound an awful lot like a distinctively American form of fascism. I don't use the word lightly. It's invoked far too frequently and imprecisely in our politics. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, we run the risk of being dismissed for empty name calling when we use the term. But in this case it is disturbingly apt.
...This puritanical drive toward a moral purge resembles nothing so much as the efforts of the most radical actors in the French Revolution to break entirely from the sins of the past so that history could be started over from scratch, with Year One. Make no mistake about it: If these Jacobin standards were consistently applied, our public life would need to be cleansed of every person in our history who fails to conform to the moral standards valorized by college-aged left-wing activists in the second decade of the 21st century. Which means that our public life would have to be cleansed of just about everyone (beginning, perhaps, with Thomas Jefferson).
That is not the liberal way.
The question all of us need to answer is whether we're willing to let it be the American way.