I was browsing reddit mindlessly when I saw this maybe ~10 posts down from the top of r/all, and I kind of snapped:
I am not a communist. I think violent communist revolt would result in, at the very least, a period of significant loss of life and economic destruction. Successful communist revolts usually (but not always) produce brutal, authoritarian police states.
Yet it it seems to me like violent communist uprisings are fairly overtly supported by a sizable fraction of the American populace, perhaps 1-5%. When I talk to the larger fraction of the American populace that does not actively sympathize, they appear to be much, much more comfortable with this than I am. They speak as if the FBI was somehow omnipotent, or as if the internet has removed the possibility for popular revolt inside countries with strong civil liberties.
This optimism is insane. Authoritarian factions are adversaries. They are run by real people with real political ambitions who attempt to move around what you think are the tripwires. They will mask themselves even to internal supporters as “social democracy” or “alternative right” or what-ever, and take off the mask right as they are lining you up against a wall. When they do, our turtle-paced glorified three-letter bureaucracies stand a real and substantial chance of being too slow to react.
A large part of this procedure is the revolutionary alerting everyone of their pending revolution before anything actually illegal happens. Statements like the above accomplish a task in this vein: demonstrate widespread sympathy and tolerance for murder. They serve as an important coordination mechanism, and that is the job they are performing in the above post.
In the general case I think most people intuitively understand why this should make everyone nervous. If 1-5% of the United States were upvoting posts on Reddit explaining how they “unironically” support a fascist uprising and gassing all Jewish Foreign Agents, well… finish the sentence. I would at least not have to explain why this political propagandist threatening to kill a large number of people is a bad omen and why it’s a cause for concern.
So I’m asking: what can I do now to help prevent this from happening? I don’t want to wait ten years so the problem can get 10-
As a starting point, you can open the tweet and report it to twitter. Twitter will sometimes delete the accounts of users who threaten violence if it is reported to them.
On a deeper level, the problem is that freedom/liberalism is inherently self-defeating. Any form of freedom involves giving people the right to accumulate power; but once they accumulate enough power, they can use this power to take away other’s freedoms.
In this case, the “power” is organized social networks, and the freedom in question is freedom of association. In order to stop communists from organizing a revolt, you must dissolve their social networks, e.g. get forums like Twitter to ban them when they threaten violence, but doing so violates their freedom of association.
If you’re just trying to protect the economic conditions as they exist now, then that might not be a problem, but you explicitly say that you want to protect libertarian democracy, which runs into the paradox. I’m not aware of any full solutions to the paradox; having rules like “don’t threaten violence” helps I guess, but they tend to be justified using lies such as mistake theory, that “you should spread your policies through debate, as participants are honestly trying to improve the world for everyone”, which seems like a bad foundation.
This is why the secret true LOTR ending is Sauron slow-clapping and then fishing the ring out of Mt. Doom while explaining that you can’t destroy the one ring (edit: and much obliged for fetching me my ring).
It would be really good to figure out a real solution to this. A possible speculative way in: mistake theory is afraid of violence (understandably) and so ignores that violence is continuous with existence (existing is a kind of doing violence to nature), and the notion of mistake is founded on the notion of truth which is founded on life which is founded on existence. So maybe mistake theorists can uncover how they’re already essentially wielding a kind of violence. (Not at all to say that all violence is the same. Argument good, bullet bad.) Once that’s uncovered, the violence they’re already wielding might perhaps be more reconcilable with the violence needed to prevent violence.
You can more-or-less prove that that paradox has no mechanical solution. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a citizenry with a widespread culture of moderation that makes them resistant to bad violent memes.
I agree, I think.
I sort of imagine an unstable equillibrium, where even small perturbations can put you off track, or aiming a ship in hyperbolic geometry for some exponentially small subset of the space.
However, I think for doing this, since it is so unstable, it is important to think carefully about building the foundations. Hence why I bring up concepts like mistake theory, I find that people often treat mistake theory as a counter to revolts, but it doesn’t seem to me that it even attempts to accurately describe the social dynamics involved in democratic debate, and so I feel like this may be a foundation that needs improving.
I just did report the tweet. Following their questionnaire for the report, it’s a specific group of people being harassed or threatened with violence. This is being done by wishing harm on people, though their identity isn’t targeted. Straightforward violation of Twitter’s content policies.
More to the point, the “paradox of tolerance” thing supposes some nontrivial things:
Checks and balances / bills of rights don’t exist.
Nobody / not enough people will use their power to protect others / the institutions of freedom/liberalism in general.
Nobody is a hardcore flagrant strong-preference… tolerant/libertarian/liberal person.
Preemptive coercion would work well enough / not backfire too hard.
(Not necessarily in your comment but in similar arguments): It supposes that more violent/extreme/rights-limiting ideas will inevitably get more adherents. This can be true with threatened violence, but...
The PoT also assumes no/little enforcement against violence. Which is the case in parts of the U.S., but is not universal. If violence is adequately prevented, then the paradox falls apart.
James Lindsay says the most effective thing that can be done in the US relatively short term is to get Communism/Marxism classified as a religion. That means they get all the protections religions get, but are also barred from public institutions and the government (as the US cannot become a theocracy). He makes this argument most elaborately in the last chapter of his recent book, Race Marxism. He makes the case most strongly here that Marxism is a religion.
Apart from that you can listen to this lecture. Where he mentions a bunch of things that can be done, and also talks about the importance of long term cultural change (I focused on more short term things because this seemed to be what your question was geared towards).
Why does it need doing? Does anything need doing about right wing extremism.
Sure. I focused on Communism because that was the original focus of this question (before lc changed the title). I oppose authoritarianism from both sides, and though I know less of it and think they’re not as dangerous right now, I do think the rise of people supporting authoritarianism around the Neo-Reactionary movement is worrying. btw, since I already mentioned him, James Lindsay thinks that too. He talked about it for a few days on twitter and got a lot of criticism for that. I’d share a link but twitter doesn’t lend itself to showing a person’s tweets at a specific timeframe, as far as I know.
For the first question I’m just gonna point you back to Lindsay, he makes the case far better than I’m going to in a comment.