Poor Chris Pratt, Not Really, P.S.

Did you know “One has to go” was a popular Twitter meme?  It was new to me.  And it struck me as a bit strange.

Stories about the illiberal nature of Twitter, Facebook, etc., are a dime a dozen.  Scratch that, stories about the illiberal nature of liberal progressives in America are a dime a dozen.  And of course, there are plenty of conservative voices who nevertheless manage to have a large following (I heard recently that Ben Shapiro trends a lot on social media? Bo).

And there are of course good reasons to sometimes be illiberal; illiberality is the appropriate response, for instance, to someone who attacks one’s family.  One can imagine, therefore, certain political, cultural, or social positions which merit an illiberal response; although of course one’s priors will determine which positions those are.

But the point of an illiberal response is, or should be, to correct the situation.  When someone attacks your family, you respond for the purpose of sustaining and restoring your family’s integrity.  You don’t respond in order to punish—or, at any rate, such actions were deemed, after the advent of Christianity, to be vengeful and wrong in their own right.

That is why the particular illiberality of “One has to go,” by whomever and on whomever it is used, is problematic.  Not because it might be hypocritical, not because its victims are necessarily all innocents, but because it’s designed to punish rather than to cure.  Ostracism does not, ultimately, heal the body politic.  Only conversions will do that.  And “One has to go” is not about earning converts.