America’s One Remaining Bigotry: “We Don’t Want to Be Around Anyone Who Disagrees With Us.”

“America has come so far,” Bill Clinton said during an interview on The Daily Show last week. “We’re less racist, sexist, homophobic and anti specific religions than we used to be.”

I’m not a Daily Show viewer, but I caught his remarks online after the fact, and I thought he expressed a refreshing sentiment in this era when so many seem intent on explaining our problems and disagreements on those things.

But what Clinton said next was even more insightful: “We have one remaining bigotry: We don’t want to be around anyone who disagrees with us.”

“The crowd’s laughing, but they didn’t laugh loud because they know I’m telling the truth,” he continued.

If you can cut through the relentless politics and furious promotion of Clinton self interest Bill is capable of saying some truly profound things.

Not only is he right about our not wanting to be around anyone who disagrees with us, this “remaining bigotry” explains why we still have so many claims of sexism and racism, etc., etc.

They are side effects of ideological tribalism.

Tribalism which is itself a side effect of the internet. We’re all living in a fish bowl now, so we fish organize ourselves into schools, and then denounce the fish in the other schools.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. But it might help if we started seeing ourselves as individuals, and the government not as a means to impose our views on others but rather as a mechanism through which we allow one another to live as we would to the greatest degree possible.

Here’s the full interview: