And your solution is what then? Just hug it out? Light candles and sing Kum Ba Ya and wait for them to be blinded by your nonviolent righteousness? Play guitar at them until their consciousness rises enough to turn them Liberal?
I'm genuinely asking, because I haven't seen a realistic alternative offered.
Good question. To be totally upfront, I don't have a complete answer I'm willing to call a definitive plan; I only know some of the bounds on the solution space, which in turn create necessary but individually insufficient elements. Nazis are but the symptom of a much larger set of problems.
For one thing, stop punching them and start ignoring them. Quit counter-protesting, quit giving them anyone to mock or shout at. We need more events where a bunch of beered-up rebels with excessive numbers of firearms stand in an otherwise empty cemetery guarding it from nothing and feeling vaguely foolish, and it's no trouble to get them to believe that Antifa is going to strike everywhere next. They believe fake news. Like most terrorists, their ideals are more terrible than the idiot kids comprising most of their membership. Let them throw their tantrums and tuck them in when they finally tire themselves out. If they actually get violent, by all means defend yourself, but if they just want to shout dangerous nonsense, laugh and move on. They don't recruit people with their rhetoric; they recruit people with the response to their rhetoric calling for them all to be violently stamped out.
For another, we need to quit mocking flyover country. Every idiot with a tiki torch and a swastika armband came out of an American school, and we failed them just as we failed to give their parents something to do when we replaced them with robots and now none of them have any idea what to do with their time. That's an entirely different and much more fundamental problem, but it's one we can deal with at least for the remainder of their natural lives if we just get Democratic leadership to quit laughing at socialism and start figuring out how to sell it to people who want "fairness" but hate "handouts." Hell, call it reparations for liberal elitism and they'll blow the doors off trying to get their fair share. Anything we can do to make them feel less like the doomed punchline of a national joke makes Nazism seem like a more extreme recourse.
Then there's the matter of removing the entrenched Republicanism at the local level that keeps getting these people fired up and selling them a bill of goods. This part is easy: if you're a liberal, and you're pissed, run for the stupidest podunk local office you can find and displace whatever sixty-term incumbent has been alderman's assistant cupbearer for the past century or whatever. Let no one run unopposed and make everyone defend themselves. Democrats have done an excellent job convincing themselves that small offices aren't worth their time, and now Republicans run local and state government and have an excellent bench to throw at national offices. It's also a very old bench because they've irrevocably hitched themselves to the Boomers' generational politics, and that creates an opening where progressives can have candidates with credentials ready by the time they're no longer numerous enough to be the dominant voting bloc. In the meantime, bringing local politics to peoples' attention cannot help but find places where it's too expensive to keep buying local politicians and that's where we can start making actual change that will help with the choking cynicism currently fueling our national discourse. There's no more useful force than a bunch of entitled brats looking at the next town over and demanding "why can't we have that?"
That's not enough. That's not nearly enough. But it's a start.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4469728 times)