For years, the left has vilified the right as populated by neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Although often exaggerated, there is some truth to the vilification.

Right-wing influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, praises Adolf Hitler, doubts the Holocaust, urges a “holy war” against Jews and compares the 6 million exterminated by the Nazis to cookies being baked in an oven. He envisions a U.S. government under authoritarian, “Catholic Taliban rule,” and his signature refrain is, “All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory.” Fuentes assailed Vice President-elect JD Vance by asking, “Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

Kanye West, aka Ye, volunteered on Alex Jones’ Infowars that people should “stop dissing the Nazis” and saluted Hitler.

Trump added fuel to the fire by deploring immigrants from “shithole countries” like those in Africa and pleaded, “We should have more people from Norway.”

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, featured marchers from the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen and far-right militias. Some chanted racist and antisemitic slogans and carried weapons, Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols, the Valknut, Confederate battle flags, “Deus Vult” crosses, flags and other symbols of past and present antisemitic groups.

While X under Elon Musk has admirably protected free speech, that freedom commonly finds expression in the glorification of Adolf Hitler, applause for Nazism, exaltation of white supremacy, and unabashed racism. Musk’s recent choice to start using an avatar modeled on “Pepe the Frog,” an online cartoon figure first denounced as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016, suggests the trend continues.

Yet we tolerate hate speech only because the alternative of suppression is a cure worse than the disease — a thought police. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explained, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Conservatives idle at their peril if they ignore rather than denounce racists. Republicans should drive them from the party, as they did former U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) after he voiced incredulity that some might find white supremacy offensive.

But the left wing has its own apologists for communist monsters like Chairman Mao Zedong, “Uncle” Joe Stalin, Fidel Castro (once embraced as an agrarian reformer), Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the like. They are responsible for the extermination of tens of millions of opponents and the crushing of internationally recognized human rights that are the baseline of civilization.

Such Democratic Party indulgence of left-wing dictators finds expression today in hesitation to support Taiwan if attacked by China, a regime guilty of genocide of Uyghur Muslims and the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong after killing it in the mainland.

Healthy, sustainable politics strives for an Aristotelian mean, in which compromise and respect for difference is a virtue, not a vice. It begins with the recognition, “I could be wrong,” and conversing without stooping to ad hominem demonization. The needed attitude was captured perfectly in President Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address: “[E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans: we are all Federalists.”

Some conservative House Republicans have not gotten the message. They attempted to hold the budget needed to keep the government open hostage to their extremist ambitions last month and a last-minute compromise failed to address the debt ceiling so the new Congress may soon find itself similarly at loggerheads over federal spending or risk default.

Let’s hope this is not an omen of more of the same after President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated. If it is, the Republican Party may implode leaving the nation at sea. As for the Democratic Party, if they are to pick up the pieces from the last presidential election, they will need to craft a more compelling message than, “Look, the Republican Party is in disarray.”