ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the idea of tolerance in the advanced industrial society of America. It deals with tolerance toward radical extremes, minorities, and subversives, and also with tolerance toward majorities, toward official and public opinion, toward the established protectors of freedom. The factual barriers which totalitarian democracy erects against the efficacy of qualitative dissent are weak and pleasant enough compared with the practices of a dictatorship which claims to educate the people in the truth. With all its limitations and distortions, democratic tolerance is under all circumstances more humane than an institutionalized intolerance which sacrifices the rights and liberties of the living generations for the sake of future generations. The chapter concludes that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for in-tolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.
