"Republican," begins the headline of an Atlantic op-ed to appear in the storied magazine's December issue, "Is Not a Synonym for Racist." That emphasis is theirs. The essay, by contributing editor and liberal commentator Peter Beinart, is mostly predicated on the idea that, in order to engage with conservatives, we must "make Sean Hannity’s work harder by resisting the temptation to deploy the label bigoted, or one of its synonyms, when describing an idea they consider stupid or immoral."

In his essay, Beinart criticizes liberals as too eager to accuse conservatives of being bigots, characterizing it as resorting to a rhetorical "nuclear epithet" as a first response, completely skipping over more reasonable discourse that might accomplish something. Calling someone a bigot, Beinart says, will not get anything done.

The desire for a kinder, more empathetic discourse is a noble one that seems borne out through observation. I personally have seen and heard conservatives in real life visibly brace themselves and then relax when they realize a line of argument was not going to lead to "you're a racist." You too, will likely encounter people in life who hold abhorrent views, who are willing to be talked down from them if they know that you're not going to call them abhorrent for holding that view. On an individual basis, in one-on-one conversation, calling someone a name is, generally, not productive—one of the definitive pieces on how to handle conversations like this came almost ten years ago from Jay Smooth, a culture critic and vlogger who YouTubed before it was cool. Have the conversation about what the person did, he argued, not what that person is.

However, there is a problem with calling for this mentality when dealing with conservatives as a whole. Namely, it treats them as passive victims of the bigotry that is endemic to their system of political beliefs and positions, asking the rest of us to accommodate their ignorance. It strips them of their agency. Meanwhile, there's an expectation among a certain breed of centrist that the conservative must be coddled, gently coaxed out of their stubborn ways while modern conservatives actively ruin the lives of immigrants, queer Americans, or anyone brown or poor. It absolves the GOP of any and all responsibility, and admonishes liberals and moderates to do more: Namely, don't call them mean names.

The irony here is that today's Republican party has completely given its platform to a universally hostile ad hominem rhetoric. It's the sort personified by the Sean Hannitys and Tomi Lahrens of the Fox News set, as they call their ideological opponents every possible name they can get away with. And yet, writes Beinart, it falls on liberals to meet destructive behavior with civility, to calmly debate the people who argue in bad faith.

Beinart argues that "conservatives need liberals to stop abusing their cultural power" in Hollywood, in the mainstream media, and the wider field of pop culture—all arenas where liberal values have a foothold: