Not all opinions are equal, but some people seem to wish they were. Former Google engineer James Damore, who you may remember as the author of an eye-poppingly sexist company-wide memo about why men are naturally better at computers than women, is now suing the company for discrimination against conservatives. The memo claimed that it was wrong for Google, a company with 80% of its technical roles held by men, to be pursuing diversity. Damore joins a dull retinue of bad actors asking whether, if it’s wrong to judge people because of their gender or the colour of their skin, is it not also wrong to judge people because they happen to have certain “unorthodox” ideas about social Darwinism?

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The answer is no, and Damore was fired. The 26-year-old promptly became a martyr for an alt-right that believes that losing your job for being a sexist arsehole is an injustice equivalent to facing centuries of structural oppression. Damore is convinced that he lost his job because of what he thinks, rather than because of how he behaved, and that he is being punished by a culture of “political correctness”, which is what used to be called human decency.

He is not alone. Donald Trump received his strongest support at the polls among Americans who believed that men, Christians and, in particular, white people, were being unfairly discriminated against. The new right feeds off this narrative of victimhood. It’s seductive. It allows the vertebrally challenged to feel justified in their crass and reactionary opinions, and righteous when they face a backlash. It’s not you, it says – it’s them. You have been used to privilege, so equality feels like prejudice.

Fairness and justice are not achieved by calculating the mean average of everyone’s opinion, whatever they happen to be

The trouble is that, as most children learn, there is a material difference between feelings and reality. Only someone who has never faced real prejudice in their lives could possibly believe that centuries of violence and injustice are any sort of equivalent to not being allowed to scream and pull your pants down in public. It’s the upside-down logic of individuals so thoroughly swallowed by their own self-regard that they scream censorship when someone talks back to them, and prejudice when someone calls them to account for being a bully. This type of weaponised ignorance is not just dim, it’s dangerous.

Those of us who actually care about tolerance tend to get thrown off course when someone tells us we’re not living up to our ideals. Let me explain, then, why it’s all right to discriminate against conservatives.

Conservatism is a behaviour, a set of opinions, not a fixed identity. Biology is not destiny, and it is certainly not ethics. Nobody tumbles out of the womb with decent politics. No, not even in Sweden. Nobody is born believing that people who die young of preventable diseases because they are unable to afford private healthcare have only themselves to blame for not working harder. That’s a learned, developed standpoint, and one that says a great deal about who a person is, and the choices they’ve made about the world they want to live in.

The new right loves to harp on about “meritocracy”, but it seems to believe that merit can be judged entirely by the market – that human worth is a matter of what you produce, rather than how you behave towards others. In his suit, Damore compares the qualities of “liberal” and “conservative” individuals in the language of a household instruction manual – as objective qualities. Liberals, for example, value “compassion”, whereas conservatives value “authority”.

Even if we countenance this Fisher-Price political analysis, one of these things is not like the other. Worship of authority is not morally equivalent to compassion and concern for your fellow beings, not unless you live in a world where the only thing that matters is the cash value of your raw talent.

It’s perfectly reasonable to judge others by standards of basic decency. Martin Luther King, in his “I have a dream” speech, spoke of his desire to see his children grow up in a world where they would not be judged on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Some conservatives today seem to inhabit a universe where those judgments are morally equal.

There is a difference between discrimination on the basis of background and discrimination on the basis of behaviour. The former is a prejudice: literally, a pre-judgment, writing someone off before you’ve even met them. The latter is simply a judgment, and it’s not just alright to judge people on how they treat others – it’s admirable. Fairness and justice are not achieved by calculating the mean average of everyone’s opinion, whatever those opinions happen to be. If my opinion is that you ought to be eaten by a leopard, and your opinion is that you’d rather not, it does not follow that we should compromise by lopping off your least-favourite limb and feeding it to next-door’s cat.

I discriminate against people who are rightwing and conservative. I’m entirely happy to say so. I don’t view it as hypocrisy to judge people by their personal qualities, rather than their background and appearance. If people are bigots and bullies, I will judge them for that. And for those who think it’s hypocrisy to refuse to tolerate intolerance, perhaps they should read the philosopher Karl Popper, who got there decades before me when he wrote of the paradox of tolerance: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

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It is no accident that the charges the new right loves to fling about in its ballistic culture wars – of hypocrisy, over-sensitivity and intolerance of difference – are practically the watermarks of its own movement. It’s a very human impulse to always be angriest about the things you’re guiltiest of doing to other people. I’m late to everything, but if I get stood up for 10 minutes I am ready to put my fist through the wall of my own hypocrisies. I’m working on that, though, and these days I’m rarely more than 10 minutes late, whereas modern morality has been waiting for Silicon Valley to show up at the party for several decades.

It used to be conservatives who were more concerned with “character”. It is odd that the idea of decency and personal responsibility has now become the domain of progressives. But I believe in fairness, and if the right are going to co-opt the language of tolerance for their own ends, it’s only fair that we should get to pinch something of theirs in good faith. Character matters. How you treat other people matters. Actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences include other people telling you you’re being a dick. And, yes, that’s hard.

It’s OK to be sensitive to criticism. Plenty of us are a bit wet – but it takes a special sort of person to see that as a reason to sue the swimming pool.

• Laurie Penny is a journalist and feminist activist