Ben Shapiro

This is, of course, why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them.

It's why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed.

That in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with.

But in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions.

And that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom.

Because without trust, there really can't be freedom at all.

If the institutions which provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, if those die, so too does the social fabric.

And then when the social fabric dies, we stop attributing to each other decent motivation.

Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called emotivism, this belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious.

And so instead of having a political conversation,

What you do is you just attribute a motive to the person's policy.

So just to give a quick example, last week, a couple weeks ago, I was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, and there was a student who got up, and that student started asking about Obamacare.

and started off the question talking about the differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats on health care.

Now, that's a very complicated topic, because obviously, the United States has a very heavily regulated and subsidized system.

Even if you wanted to unwind it, it's very difficult to do so.

There are a lot of moving parts.

It's not an easy question.

But what made the question, I think, sort of telling is that he finished the question by saying, why do people who want to change the health care system want tens of thousands of people to die?

That's emotivism.

That is the idea that the person who disagrees with you on policy does so not because they have an honest differential assessment of the evidence or different premises from which they are working.