Synonym For Racist

"Republican," begins the headline of an Atlantic op-ed to appear in the storied magazine's December issue, "Is Not a Synonym for Racist." That emphasis is theirs. The essay, by contributing editor and liberal commentator Peter Beinart, is mostly predicated on the idea that, in order to engage with conservatives, we must "make Sean Hannity’s work harder by resisting the temptation to deploy the label bigoted, or one of its synonyms, when describing an idea they consider stupid or immoral."

In his essay, Beinart criticizes liberals as too eager to accuse conservatives of being bigots, characterizing it as resorting to a rhetorical "nuclear epithet" as a first response, completely skipping over more reasonable discourse that might accomplish something. Calling someone a bigot, Beinart says, will not get anything done.

I personally have seen and heard conservatives in real life visibly brace themselves and then relax when they realize a line of argument was not going to lead to "you're a racist." You too, will likely encounter people in life who hold abhorrent views, who are willing to be talked down from them if they know that you're not going to call them abhorrent for holding that view. On an individual basis, in one-on-one conversation, calling someone a name is, generally, not productive—one of the definitive pieces on how to handle conversations like this came almost ten years ago from Jay Smooth, a culture critic and vlogger who YouTubed before it was cool. Have the conversation about what the person did, he argued, not what that person