According to a new Axios poll, 71 percent of Democratic college students won’t date a Republican. Forty-one percent said they wouldn’t shop at or support a Republican-owned business, and 37 percent—more than a third—wouldn’t befriend a Republican. Among Republican college students, the proportions unwilling to associate with Democrats were much lower—37 percent, 7 percent, and 5 percent, respectively.

Obviously, it would be better if people were willing to befriend their political opponents. I’m friends with plenty. It’s bad for the country that progressive young people consider half of the population untouchable.

There’s a wrong way to respond to these data, though. A certain type of conservative is inclined to see numbers like these and denounce the “intolerant left” for its “close-mindedness.” This response fails for two reasons.

First, the accusation of “intolerance” betrays an incomplete and immature moral vision. Is a person supposed to “tolerate” anyone, no matter how vile their beliefs? Is he required, as Chesterton put it, to be so “open-minded” that his brain falls out? There are limits to toleration; prisons exist.

If you ask a young Democrat why they won’t befriend a Republican, they’ll tell you it’s because they can’t befriend someone “who thinks my rights are up for debate.” This is a ridiculous and question-begging response, but set that aside and put yourself in their shoes: If you believed your interlocutor earnestly wanted to round you up and put you in a camp, how could you be friends with them?

The second issue with the conservative response is that it misunderstands what the left means by “tolerance.” Progressives have no interest in “tolerating” you and your antediluvian beliefs. In fact, you must be repressed so others can be “tolerated.” From Herbert Marcuse’s often-cited and misunderstood essay Repressive Tolerance:

But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude…. Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

If you think there is a “human right” to kill an unborn child, mutilate your body, or impel religious people to violate their consciences, then of course you’ll seek to ostracize those who hold such beliefs from the public square. It’s a rational response to irrational premises, and it’s what the Church used to do (with some success) to unrepentant heretics. What these numbers suggest isn’t that progressives should be more “tolerant,” but rather that they are taking mistaken premises about “human rights” to their logical conclusion.