There’s no shortage of nastiness from either the left or the right these days, but it’s always seemed to me that the flavor coming from the left has something special, which is especially good at driving people away. This is separate from whether their aims are a greater threat. What I see a kind of elitism. What I’m saying here is based on my own impressions, not systematic study. Although the attitudes I’m discussing are elitist, I’m talking about ordinary people, not ones in high positions.

A lot of people on the left can be pleasant to deal with. The points I’m making here don’t apply to them all, by any means. It just doesn’t take a lot to make a lasting bad impression. I grant that if I were Mexican, Arabic, or trans, I’d experience vastly more hostility from the right.

Elitism, like populism, is tricky to identify. We all think we’re better than other people. Elitism is more than that; it’s an attitude of inherent superiority. It divides the world into the virtuous few and the despicable outsiders, and it polices its own members.

This attitude is the opposite of the populism I discussed last time. It’s manifested in attitudes of superiority to the masses. When people act this way, they’re effectively saying no one else is worthy to talk with them. However, both take a static view of people; everyone is a certain way and can’t (or had better not) change. People on the left often boast that “everyone is welcome” among them, yet in practice they have little tolerance for deviant ideas. The left and right can both come down hard on full-blown opposition, but people on the right are less likely to denounce people for limited disagreement.

Many throw accusations of “racist,” “fascist,” and “Nazi” around as freely as Joe McCarthy issued accusations of Communism. Some use the threat to keep people in line. One person threatened that people would start calling me racist if I disagreed with a proposal of hers, and she admitted the accusation would be false. Others have skipped that step and gone straight to the accusation.

People of this type like to build accusations out of nothing. The word “Gypsy” used to be commonly applied to the ethnic group now generally called Roma. It may not have been the best choice, but most people who used the term didn’t intend it as an insult any more than “Mexican” or “Chinese” is an insult. However, the notion that it was a nasty slur caught on. I recall a singer who used to have a song in her repertoire about “gypsies.” One day she came out and apologized in the most abject terms for having ever sung it. I know enough about both her and the song to know she meant nothing derogatory about it. She must have been threatened with ferocious denunciation if she didn’t get down on her knees.

I wrote a few years ago about how SFWA smeared a prominent writer by claiming she used an unspecified “racial slur.” The word she used, it eventually came out, was “colored.” Does SFWA claim that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) engages in racial smears on all its letterheads?

Giving people the benefit of the doubt and letting others defend them against accusations are basic principles of fairness. Sometimes, though, they’re unpopular ideas. A Mastodon site still bans defending people against accusations, even if they’re just “devil’s advocate” arguments. In that respect, the site is less tolerant than the medieval Catholic Church. Access to what others are saying isn’t always popular; a popular Mastodon client “rickrolls” attempts to access servers that the developers disapprove of.

Conservatives have sometimes reached out to libertarians, while the left has more often been fiercely hostile. This helps to explain why so many self-proclaimed “libertarians” have taken Trump’s side. Supporting Trump is dumb, but was it really necessary to drive us away?

In a sane society, the MAGA movement would be denounced almost everywhere, and the politicians who have pinned their careers to it wouldn’t be comfortable showing their faces in public. But that would require people who disagree on many things to agree that the current situation is so bad we need to put our differences aside for a while. Instead, there’s often a sense on the left that their purity comes above all else and anyone who isn’t fully with them deserves denunciation. That goes a long way to account for where we are.