Charles Taylor is one of the sane-ist people living on this planet... here is a very recent article, which addresses, implicitly, a lot of the polarization going on, on multiple fronts these days, from Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter & LGBTQ, Take a Knee, Vilifying Jordan Peterson, Niqabs in Quebec, Rachel Harder's ostracization, to Muslims taking over the World.
Democratic Exclusions: Political Identity and the Problem of Secularism
(a couple excerpts)
Modern democracy as we know it - unlike ancient democracy - is universalist. We believe that citizen rights should apply to the whole population, without exclusion on grounds of gender, property, origin and race.
But, in a paradoxical way, democracy can also generate exclusion, and regularly does. This means that our really existing democracies have to be continually vigilant, and ready to combat this thrust towards exclusion whenever it arises.
How does this tendency towards exclusion come about? It comes from another feature of democracies, both ancient and modern.
...
Here we have a classic case of democracy turning against itself. We might say, its "immune system," which should be detecting betrayals of its ethic, is turned against potentially "friendly" cells. So that democracy generates exclusion when its "immune system" turns against itself. This is what we are witnessing today...
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