Some of you may have noticed that I trash your comments on a post about Harris when your point is that Trump is worse, or a post about Trump when your point is Harris is worse. I appreciate that it’s popular to do so, and most people who agree with you also agree with your comparison. I do not. Nor, apparently, does David French.

If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.

It’s an easy gimmick, so easy that there is a name for it. It’s the logical fallacy called “tu quoque,” responding to criticism with criticism rather than addressing the issue at hand. If I say Trump is ugly, what difference does it make that Harris is ugly too, or which one is uglier than the other? It is deflection. Trump being ugly doesn’t make Harris less ugly, or not ugly, or beautiful, but you’ve avoided facing the issue of Harris’ ugliness or beauty.

On the one hand, this has become so commonplace and accepted in our rhetoric that few give it a second thought. It’s easy, if not facile, and most people find it effective. After all, what’s there to say in reply, other than to hurl examples whether true or false to make the other come off worse?

On the other hand, it completely avoids confronting the unpleasant reality that your tribe might be ugly, regardless of whether it’s uglier than the other. No one wraps themselves in glory for being just slightly less ugly than their opposition. No one takes comfort in their virtue for being an iota less of a venal or vacuous mutt than their adversary.

But there’s a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.

In David’s op-ed, this is presented as the lead-in to a New York Times Magazine story by Nicholas Confessore on the extremely expensive, yet massive failure, of the University of Michigan DEI apparatus.

There are two troubling components to his story. The first is found in the bottom-line results of the university’s D.E.I. program. In spite of spending staggering sums of money, hiring scores of diversity administrators and promulgating countless new policies, the efforts failed. Michigan still hasn’t come close to becoming as diverse as it wants to be. Black students, for example, are stuck at around 4 to 5 percent of the undergraduate population in a state where 14 percent of the residents are Black.

The second is that those ineffective policies were promulgated and enforced in part through a campus culture that was remarkably intolerant. Confessore’s report is replete with examples of professors who faced frivolous complaints of race or gender bias, and after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 — when the university’s commitments to pluralism were put to their toughest test — Michigan couldn’t meet even its most basic legal obligations.

This is not offered to incite a commentary about Michigan’s or DEI’s failings, no matter how alluring such a topic may be. Rather, this is presented as an example of how the ideologically bound tribes can delude themselves and deny the flagrant failure of their belief system by avoiding any circumspection and substituting tu quoque in its place. They can easily do this because they are all of the same mind and have no one to trash their comments and call bullshit in their indulgence in logical fallacies by believing that no matter how badly their scheme is turning out, it’s better than what the other side does.

In my experience, the more ideologically or theologically “pure” an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task. Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority that’s silenced, harassed or canceled whenever its members raise their voices in dissent. It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.

Indeed. While my liberal tolerance for views that I do not share may be paradoxical, not to mention unusual in a space where heresy is a capital offense, that does not mean that the facile lapsing into specious comparisons that avoid, ignore and deny issues that are worthy of consideration will be tolerated. For some of you, that’s hard, as tu quoque is not only the best you can do, but the way your head works. For others, why bother thinking too hard when an easy “but Trump” or “but Harris” will do the trick.

Not here and not under my watch. And that, kids, is why your otherwise brilliant comment got trashed and all similar comments will get trashed as well. It’s not that I don’t like you, although there are some of you who contribute nothing useful while being perpetually offensive, but that you have crossed a line that undermines what might be accomplished by all sides and no sides if we just give it a little harder thought than specious comparisons.