[Itse]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Both extremes are acting like it's a war of survival. That's how polarization happens - it takes two to tango.

It takes two to tango, but only one to start a fight.

You're catastrophizing. Today's situation is hardly 'untenable'. America, for example, endured far worse social division and violence in the 60s. Hundreds killed a month in race riots that ripped through dozens of cities - Ferguson wouldn't have even made the national news in '67. A war that killed thousands of Americans a month grinding on an on in an age of conscription when half the men in uniform didn't want to be there. Families torn apart over draft-dodging and the peace movement. Parties coming apart at the seams and remaking themselves. Political assassinations and attempted assassinations. All under the spectre of nuclear annihilation.

I'm not speaking necessarily of war, but internal conflict. Which there was plenty of in the 60's. More than a hundred people died and over a thousand were injured in the 67'-68' riots.

I think if that starts to happen again, there will be a lot more shots fired, as there's just a lot more guns around.

And if today's ideological conflict comes down to violence, the left can't possibly win. This isn't the 20s or 30s, when great masses of men were employed in industry, and could be marshalled to fight in the streets. You really think a bunch of academics, social activists, and software developers are going to throw down with rednecks and, presumably, the police and military (if you're right that the fascist peril is real, then the police and military must already by compromised)?

First of all, violence takes many forms and it's much more complicated than "who can win".

Second, if we presume a civil war, it's pretty safe to assume that states, police forces and military units would pick different sides in the conflict. And in general: economies win wars.

I'll repeat my comparison with the 20th century: Liberal democracy was the middle road between the extreme left and the extreme right. It won in the West. It was a good thing that it won. It won by not losing confidence in fundamental liberal values and institutions and by not getting sucked into the allure of extremist zeal - that enticing state of mind when you can abandon thinking and give yourself up to emotion and enmity. Countries that failed that test entered a dark valley.

I think you're greatly romanticizing how liberal or democratic the West was for the most of the 20th century.

I'd like to remind you that Nazism was (and technically still is in many places) banned by law in most of Europe, which is pretty much what I'm advocating. Communists were quite commonly harassed, imprisoned, beaten by the police and generally stripped of political rights all the way up to the sixties or in other words: until the political status quo was clearly not threatened by any kind of a revolutions.

That's how the liberal democracies fought and won the war of ideologies in the 20th century. The battle of ideologies was very far removed from fair and open debate, even outside of actual warzones.