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Notes -
It's this. More to the point, it is a human tendency to think that if someone's wrong and insists on being wrong, it's OK to solve this problem by violence. Individuals are just as prone as collective institutions to think that 'error has no rights'. The normal way to handle heresy used to be violence, the normal way to handle differences between ruling class (ie. factions fighting for kingship etc.) was violence, it was normal for the masses to use violence when they wanted to overthrow the elites and for the elites to repress the masses with violence to keep their power. In practice, premodern societies had to allow a certain leeway simply because they lacked state capacity to handle everything; modern societies have that state capacity.
It actually takes a lot of societal and governmental indoctrination to get societies to the point where people are able to live with their political and religious differences, United States certainly having the capacity to enact such indoctrination. Even then I suspect a lot of it is simple apathy, a tendency to believe that politics has been solved and society stabilized to the degree that there's no real reason to care about anything and we can allow all sorts of weird freaks to have their say. This seems to explain the congruence of the late-90s end-of-history thinking with the post-political-correctness relative cultural tolerance.
Communists, fascists, religious extremists etc., then, are more willing to continue to shut their opponents down, either through state or through individual violence, because they're the ones who actually believe that their cause is just, important, and worth it to restore the use of violence as a general principle of handling differences.
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