But Holmes understood as we should by now as well that a tolerant society is necessary for the purposes of seeking the truth, that this is produced through an act of collective commitment to live according to its values and that this requires constant vigilance and persistent reassertion of those values, yet we often lapse.
Unsurprisingly then, history provides countless illustrations of these ideas colliding with people in government who felt threatened by the current of their time and chose to be hostile to the imagination and enamored of their own power and belief.
At the end of the first world war, western civilization had lost its way and the political and economic divisions were unraveling the status quo. Fears of Russia and the spread of communism and socialism along with growing unrest among labor give rise to fear and panic among those who wished to preserve the world as it was.
All these forces of instability, in turn, escalated into repression, censorship and the scapegoating of marginal populations, of radicals, dissenters, nonconformance, foreigner and immigrants. The leader of the American socialist party Eugene Debs was imprisoned for delivering a speech.
Today, a century later, a new threat to our core values has emerged, around the world and in this country. The rise of authoritarianism often in the guys of democratically elected despots has become the defining feature of modern life. The tactics, unfortunately, are age-old and time tests.
There must be an in-group, conceived around religious ethnic, racial or nationalistic lines and an outgroup. Typically, foreigners, immigrants, elites, or an opposing party.
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