Depends. Have I gone out to nazi, antifa or BLM marches and tried discourse there? No, lots of people have though and most have had little luck in getting anything intelligible from them.
Have I talked to people who seem to generally support their movement in more controlled settings? Yes. I have, in fact. This forum is a solid example of a place where at least a few on one side or another congregate.
All sides are wrong, all sides have their empathetic stories of why they feel that way. But in each case they fall back on emotional reasons rather than logic.
So many people have been telling you there is blame on both sides, sluissa?
Do both sides have some very fine people, too?
(Just to be clear, sluissa, I'm not saying you're like Trump. I'm saying that you've reached by presumably careful consideration the same position that a deranged Cheeto reached through sheer inanity.)
The "blame on both sides" thing is a fairly common opinion among the conservative sector. The "very fine people" view is a little more rare. But I think it's fair to say it's possible people on both sides got swept up in it without realizing the full picture of it all. I don't care to try to guess what Trump meant by those words specifically though nor will I try to compare what two different people mean by the same words.
I'm getting tired of people repeating the same arguments on this topic, but never responding to mine.
I assert, once again, that the resurgence in white nationalism isn't because they've been successful in portraying themselves as martyrs. The idea that a person with no bigoted inclinations would watch a nazi be victimized and think "His ideology must be right, because he's being persecuted for it. I am inspired now to hate colored skin and different sexualities." is incomprehensibly absurd.
The resurgence is because the taboo surrounding those ideas has faded and loosened over time, to the point that it's been superceded by free speech dogmatism. Bigotry is deeply rooted in American culture, and never went away. It was only forced, through much blood, sweat, and tears, into hiding. After WW2 and then the civil rights movement, severe bigotry became universally understood to be unacceptable in public, and potentially ruinous to reveal even in private company.
This is 101 shit. Social movements cannot build up if the people aligned with them don't know who their allies are and can't find them. This is one of the effects of a strict cultural taboo. Declaring free speech more important than this taboo means white nationalists are going to find themselves capable of movement building again. Period. That is what is happening.
The centrists in this conversation are just as guilty of obsession with ideological purity as the people they accuse of this. You care more about ideological purity in regards to the ideal of free speech than you do about keeping people who literally just want to kill anybody who isn't like them from having the capability to build a movement capable of enacting their will. You are treating an ideal absolute, while saying that everything wrong with politics is other people treating their ideals as absolutes.
Unless you can explain to me the socio/psychological mechanism behind how someone with no inclination towards bigotry can watch someone get punched for openly declaring black people to be inferior subhumans and think "Hmm... I think he's right. But only because he got punched for saying it."
It's not strictly the "martyrdom" that draws followers. There's a source of the anger. Let's take a more clear cut example in BLM first.
BLM was founded more or less on the message of fighting police brutality and injustice in general against black people. There's a solid, real problem there that's basically proven to exist in some form and is worth putting effort to change one way or another.
The problem is there and deserves attention. Instead of looking for sources and ways to change it, they attack directly what they see as the problem. They protest the police directly. They incite hate against the police force as a whole instead of attacking the specific issues that lead to it. All this does is bring paranoia and hate back around at them from the police. Pressure builds on both sides and then it explodes violently with further issues. Attacks on police, more examples of brutality and all along the examples of injustice remain or grow larger.
Neo-nazis don't just turn that way overnight. With exceptions being made possibly for inheritance of values from neo-nazi parents, or other influential family members, one has to have a reason to feel that way and have that much anger and while it's more misguided, it stems from a very similar sort origin as BLM. Many white conservatives see multiculturalism as a thing that's killing off their own culture. "White Culture" if there is anything that can be clearly defined as such and for lack of a better term, is so ubiquitous in some places as to have become the default cultural background noise. But being the default background noise of culture means it's very easy for new noises to come in and be very noticeable above the din of the background. New noises come in, it can make things uncomfortable until you get used to them, and if you actually LIKED the background noise rather than simply lived with it as such, then you might take the new noises as an attack on something you care about.
These opinions still don't make a nazi though for most people. Enough of it, over a long enough time, maybe some manner of racism. It takes more hostility and pressure though to make it turn into something described at "hate". You have people that put their opinons out there "I don't like this new noise all that much, it was better without it." The makers of the new noise rightly take that as hostility toward their culture. Pressure builds and builds and builds. Finally, along come a group of charismatic speakers, people who openly speak out against the "noise makers". This makes people feel validated, they "say what everyone is thinking" and most importantly they do their best to actively be abrasive toward the "noise makers". Afterall, someone needs to make those troublesome people fall in line and be quiet. This abrasiveness reaches a flash point and suddenly you have people getting punched. Where before you had "Oh, hey, I kind of agree with these nazi guys, things are getting a bit noisy." to people reasoning "I agree with these guys and they got punched for what they said. An attack on them is an attack on myself. There is simply no dealing with these noisy people, they must go away."
Now, poorly drawn conclusion or not, they feel their culture is under attack. When it comes to the point where one feels the only option to protect something as vital and core to one's identity as culture is to make sure it's the only one that still has any power. That's when you begin to get actual "nazis."
Again, just to make it clear, this is not logical, this is not correct, but it does make a modest amount of sense when viewed through their lens. Aggression and hate formed their viewpoint, moreso will only reinforce it.
Note: I wrote most of this last night and fell asleep half way through, some of this has been addressed already by others, and there was more I wanted to respond to but I just wanted to finish my thought as best I could before the conversation had progressed another two pages. Some of what I wanted to say did disappear in the night, however. Sleep is frustrating sometimes.
Edit: MSH hit the nail on the head. The best way to dissolve hate is to emphasize the similarities, show compassion and show that you can make a better world for all without losing something yourself.
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