Inner Democracy and Political Intolerance
This chapter explores the shaky basis of political tolerance. There exists a contradiction between the broadly shared preference for democracy as a form of national politics and the evident unwillingness to grant democratic rights to disliked groups. This lack of political tolerance suggests that democracy is nothing more than a thin layer of varnish that can be easily scraped away. This observation leads to the question: What, in fact, is inner democracy? The answer lies in three characteristics of inner democracy: (1) space for opposition inside ourselves, (2) cooperation and learning from the diversity of positions we can assume, and (3) participation of a broad repertoire of inner positions, whose distinctive voices can be heard in the interactions with ourselves and with others.