Yascha Mounk sits down with sociologist Frank Furedi (In Defense of Populism) on The Good Fight to debate whether modern populism represents a legitimate democratic correction against technocratic elites or an existential threat to liberal democratic norms.

It’s a compelling discussion on populism and its place within the liberal democratic order. Towards the end, Furedi makes a notable point on how the classical concept of tolerance has shifted:

What I really worry about at the moment, and I go back to tolerance all the time because I think tolerance is the key issue of our time, is that people in government have invented expressions that are fundamentally hostile to the ideal of tolerance. Take, for example, the expression that people in the British government use: “zero tolerance.” They think the idea of zero tolerance is a really positive goal to achieve. They do not realize that if you get rid of tolerance, because that is what they are really getting at, even though they have a more interesting way of expressing it, you give tolerance itself a negative connotation. So many people I talk to, instead of upholding Pierre Bayle’s and John Locke’s liberal ideas of tolerance as a wonderful achievement in a world where people used to kill each other if they had different views, regard it as something that can be swept aside by the people who are meant to be liberal.