re: #109 Decatur Deb

About soft supporters and punching Nazis:

There is never a time to punch a Nazi. Right now is the time to handle them with the ‘soft’ tools of civilization. Someday those tools might prove to be too soft. Then it will be time to kill Nazis. If we soft supporters fail, and that time comes, all the ‘hard’ supporters will find they don’t have enough 12 guage.

I noticed Josh of TPM said something similar a couple of days ago.

I believe that if you look both historically and in practice, when you have widespread street brawling between “good” groups and “bad” groups it almost always ends up being a victory for the fascist groups. This is for a number of reasons. First is that these groups have historically used the presence of civil violence to justify “law and order” crackdowns which usually empower and propagate authoritarian politics. You can already see this, tendentiously, in those hideous NRA video hate screeds. Again, history tells us this and I think it’s close to intuitive: breakdowns of civil peace lead to authoritarian crackdowns, which almost always have a right-wing and often racist valence.

[…]

Pushing civil society from talk and voting to violence and paramilitaries is what the fascists are trying to accomplish - moving from the rule of law to the rule of force. By every historical standard and also by almost every philosophical one, this is a victory for, if not fascism, then certainly authoritarianism. The answer to Nazis and white supremacists isn’t flowery talk or left-wing paramilitaries. It’s a stronger rule of law and an empowered state behind it. We have our work cut out for us.