"The Deck Is Tilting"

Tolerance, Ignorance, and the Drift from Democracy

On quiet mornings like this, I like to sit with a cup of coffee and listen to the river. The Cowpasture doesn’t rush; it carries things patiently — fallen branches, fishing lines, forgotten thoughts. From this deck, the world seems civil, even gentle.

But I’ve come to see that civility, like a slow current, can mask a hidden danger. Not everything carried downstream belongs in our waters.

There’s a line — a philosophical one — first traced by Karl Popper in 1945: the Paradox of Tolerance. It asks us to consider a hard truth — that a tolerant society must not tolerate the intolerant. If we do, we risk losing the very foundation of tolerance itself. The things we value — open dialogue, mutual respect, democratic participation — cannot survive in a space where one side is permitted to dismantle it all.

MAGA, once a slogan, has become an engine of that dismantling.

It didn’t rise in a vacuum. It was cultivated — with grievance, with nostalgia, with fear. And it has taken root in part because we assumed our democratic institutions would hold on their own. That the marketplace of ideas would naturally favor reason. That bad ideas would collapse under their own weight.

They haven’t.

What we’ve seen instead is a slow corrosion — book bans passed in the name of “freedom,” press freedoms attacked under the guise of “fake news,” election outcomes questioned not by evidence but by volume. And behind much of it is a dangerous kind of confidence — not the earned confidence of experience or study, but the loud certainty of the misinformed.

Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect — the cognitive bias in which those with the least knowledge are often the most convinced they’re right. It’s a kind of confident blindness. And it thrives in echo chambers, where facts are optional, complexity is shunned, and anger is packaged as patriotism.

A man can now declare himself a savior of democracy while working to unravel its very mechanics. He can say the quiet parts out loud — that he will be a dictator on day one — and his supporters cheer, not because it’s true, but because it feels true to them. It confirms what they already believe.

This is the paradox we face. In our effort to be fair, to be open, to hear all voices — we have, at times, allowed ourselves to play host to forces that seek to end that very openness. And our instinct toward civility, our reflex to “hear both sides,” becomes a vulnerability.

But as Popper warned, unlimited tolerance leads to the end of tolerance. If we continue to grant the same platform to lies and truth — to incitement and dialogue — we are not being fair. We are being complicit.

And yet — I don’t believe this deck has to tip all the way over.

We can still speak up. We can still draw the line. We can say: “No, not here.” Not in our library. Not in our town hall. Not in our schools, our newsrooms, or our churches. Not on this porch, not by this river, not in this county.

A river doesn’t just carry truth. It carries flotsam too. And if we don’t build the banks strong — if we don’t name and remove what doesn’t belong — it’s the debris that clogs the channel.

The Cowpasture still runs clear. And that’s why I keep returning to this deck. Not because it removes me from the world, but because it reminds me what’s worth defending in it.