The Gospel According to Corey Booker

This is a troubling era in presidential politics. Opinion polls suggest that most Americans not only don’t support either major party candidate, but disapprove of both. For my own part, I find the possibility of a Trump presidency appalling, but I’m also decidedly unenthusiastic about Clinton. The speech at the Democratic National Convention that I found most convincing was that of Michael Bloomberg, whose endorsement of Clinton was essentially a repudiation of Mr. Trump.

Of all the speeches at this convention, though, the one that I disliked most intensely was that of New Jersey Senator Corey Booker. This was not because I thought Booker made a hash of his oration, or that he was rhetorically ineffective. What I disliked was the content, an invocation of political values that I thought were completely contrary to the basic principles of a pluralistic liberal democracy.

“We are not called to be a nation of tolerance,” Senator Booker proclaimed, “We are called to be a nation of love … Tolerance is the wrong way. Tolerance says I’m just going to stomach your right to be different, that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’m no better or worse off.”

Now, this is an interesting re-statement of a particular twenty-first century version of American civil religion, but it is clearly inconsistent with the ideal of a nation of free citizens who can pursue their own forms of happiness as long these don’t interfere with the pursuits of others. Tolerance is exactly what a free society is all about. A polity that pretends to dictate our affections for each other is one that does not allow us to choose our own paths or our own associates.

I do believe that tolerance requires that we “stomach” the right of others to be different. And there may be some other people that you and I feel could disappear without making us any better or worse off. Now, I would see every human life as having value, even the lives of people I don’t like very much (including the lives of certain political candidates). But this is a personal conviction, not a mandate from political authority.  I also recognize that any polity is a shared enterprise and requires cooperation. But saying that we need to cooperate with each other in order to meet our shared goals is pretty far from saying that government should be telling us what our feelings and relationships should be.

I’m certainly not opposed to universal love and acceptance as a religious precept, although I would suggest that you are going to find the injunction to love your neighbor as yourself very challenging when you deal with some of your neighbors. But one of the foundations of political tolerance is the idea that the state does not establish religion or religious precepts. Or tell us who we have to love, embrace, or include.