OPINION:
Tuesday, Jan. 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we recite the names of the dead.
We watch the grainy footage of the camp liberations. We repeat the phrase “Never again.” Yet for too long, we have treated the Holocaust as a historical anomaly — a rogue wave of evil that crashed onto the shore of history and then receded.
It wasn’t.
The Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers. It began with words. It began with the slow, steady erosion of moral taboos. It began when polite society decided that antisemitism was a crude but acceptable eccentricity rather than a disqualifying moral failure.
For decades after World War II, we seemed to understand this. Western society built a sturdy guardrail around the public square. Overt bigotry — specifically against Jews but eventually against others as well — became an immediate social death sentence. To be an open racist was to be cast out. It was a taboo so strong that it regulated behavior without the need for government censorship.
Today, those guardrails have eroded. We are watching the normalization of rhetoric once considered radical. We see it in the streets, where calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state are chanted with impunity. We see it in a new “hierarchy of hate,” where bigotry against groups deemed “oppressors” — Jews, Whites, Asians, men — is shrugged off while bigotry against others remains strictly policed.
To fix this, we need to look at how we have beaten hate before. We need to look at the fall of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan was defeated with numerous tactics, but one of the most powerful was that civil society made membership socially and economically suicidal, effectively enforcing the taboo. If you were exposed as a Klansman, then you faced ruin. You lost your job. You lost your friends. It became expensive to be a bigot.
This is the mechanism we have lost. It is the mechanism we must restore.
As a free speech absolutist, I don’t believe the government should police hate speech. The First Amendment protects the vile and the ignorant, but a healthy civil society must have standards. We have a right and a duty to enforce social consequences for speech that violates our core values.
This isn’t cancel culture, or a mob punishing people for minor slights or political differences. This is consequence culture: enforcing universal taboos against the most egregious hatred, such as overt bigotry, dehumanization and the endorsement of violence.
To make this work, we have to revive a concept that makes modern individualists uncomfortable: moral guilt by association.
In an age of hyperindividualism, we think we are responsible for only our own actions. If you have a friend who openly calls for the deaths of Jews or Black people or any other group and you stay friends with them, then you aren’t a neutral bystander. You are a validator.
By not condemning those who violate these existential taboos, we signal to the world that their views are within the bounds of acceptable difference.
Restoring the taboo requires the “transitive property” of stigma. If “Bill” advocates for violence, then “Joe” can’t remain his friend without paying a social tax himself. Joe’s friends have to be willing to say, “Joe, as long as you legitimize Bill, we can’t associate with you.” It’s harsh. It’s awkward. Yet the alternative is the slow creep of extremism into the mainstream because nobody wants to ruin the dinner party.
We must reject the notion that bigotry is OK as long as the target is perceived as “powerful,” creating a hierarchy of acceptable hate. Fighting extremism requires us to apply a single, clear standard. The taboos have to be universal, applying equally to the neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the radical activist cheering for Hamas. Both have forfeited their seats at the table in polite society and our mainstream politics.
We can’t wait for the government or the media to solve this. The power to restore these taboos lies with us in our hiring decisions, our social invitations and our willingness to draw hard lines on whom we associate with or choose to lead us.
The lesson of the Holocaust is that hate doesn’t stop itself. The lesson of the KKK is that it can be stopped, not just by laws but also by a society that refuses to subsidize it with attention or friendship or any other support.
“Lawful but awful” speech may be protected from the government, but it shouldn’t be protected from the judgment of peers. If we want “Never again” to be real, then we must be willing to make hatred costly again.
• Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large.
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