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Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” offers a more plausible rationale for recent pro-censorship arguments than Popper’s better known Paradox of Tolerance. Popper thinks the open society is an end in itself; Marcuse sees tolerance as a means to other ends—which it no longer achieves.
Popper argues for withdrawing tolerance from those who would undermine it and thus destroy liberal society; Marcuse argues for withdrawing tolerance from those who use it to sustain a de facto “totalitarian” liberal society in which systematic propaganda forestalls free thought.
What’s misleading about the Popper meme is that those who share it believe in a pluralistic society where just some extremists must be excluded; rather, like Marcuse, they believe pluralism is a means by which dominant forces covertly maintain power over oppressed minorities.
A question often raised by critics is what it means to deplatform a sitting President or senator. This is more or less exactly what Marcuse demands: intolerance of the powerful. He presented this goal as a paradox, but in a sense, we have actually witnessed versions of it lately.
The problem is that if the entities doing the deplatforming are able to do so, they have presumably themselves become as or more powerful than what they censor. Today’s Marcusians, peculiarly, find themselves allied with the very culture and tech industries that he deplored...
Hence, we can also see the emergence of a “right Marcusianism” that, like Marcuse, advocates for those marginalized by the dominant ideology to reject the liberal value of “pure tolerance” altogether, and instead seek to assert themselves at the expense of their enemies.
