You got to get past "Richard Spencer got punched" to the level of ideas.
Or maybe you just never learned about the history of these sort of thinking. I'm kind of impressed with how freely people wave soviet flags, not realizing that to many people from those areas what they are waving is equivalent to a nazi flag. That's not about left/right. It's just about the ignorance of the history of dehumanization.
Dehumanization is a real problem, so is too much humanization for objectively awful ideas held by people. Which ironically can lead to even worse dehumanization long-term. So there's that. I mean, look at Strafgesetzbuch section 86a and why it exists.
Insomuch as this is a cultural moment about a perceived Nazi getting his comeuppance without serious injury for being a Nazi, I am not sure how that can be argued to be a slippery slope to the sort of end game you infer. One where a more widespread acceptance of the sort of behavior and thinking you attribute to ANTIFA to take root, a group I admittedly do not know a ton about. Or that this speaks to a movement toward it.
It is quite the shift to go from this cultural moment of mostly people laughing about a Nazi getting punched for being a Nazi intertwined with Indiana Jones clips, to a sort of "violence is acceptable to the out-group in general" mentality that would be cause for serious alarm. I am not even sure it serves as an example of the rising partisanship. Though I could be persuaded here.
Because in my mind, if I slapped this guy and his context down into any point in history over the last several decades, I do not know how it wouldn't garner the same sentiment...Setting aside the lack of viral capabilities in the 1980's for a moment. The only reason this is a thing to begin with is because our society has gotten to a point where this sort of modern fascist ideology Spencer spouts has gained some semblance of acceptance and prolonged platform/exposure.
Going to try to use bolding rather than do a line by line thing, so the idea doesn't get too lost.
It's not humanizing their awful ideas. It's retaining the idea that they're humans and to prevent dehumanization. The idea protected is that it's better to roll your eyes at these people, to shout back at them and destroy their ideas with words rather than go down the road of using violence, fear and intimidation. The point is to humanize ourselves. The collective disgust of society towards Nazism has been a strong enough intimidation on its own to push these types to the edges. We don't become the monster to fight the monster.
Germany is a particular case where there are laws because of the nation's history. The American approach doesn't outlaw nazism, but it does safeguard against the actual evils within Nazism that we reject. I think it's very naive to think that if there is another rise of power that is truly violent, fascist and inhuman, that it will be a familiar name like Nazism or the KKK. It will be something we haven't seen before but which involves many of the same evils.
That's why you focus with the actual bad thinking rather than the outward symbols of those bad thoughts.
Second response is that for a lot of the people concerned about this, as in not sympathetic about Spencer being punched, but the justification and response to it is understanding the larger patterns. The Spencer incident isn't where this starts for us. I noticed this pattern awhile ago. That's why in some other discussion I made the point that if you want to be a neonazi to a group of people then you just have to call them neonazis. This is what the Soviets did with the Kulaks. They called them greedy, trying to draw comparisons to the landowners and their exploitation during serfdom. Eventually, the State removes their designation as an actual class, removing whats left of their recognized personhood, and thus humanity. Stalin eventually chose to "liquidate" them. Before they were completely gathered up, sent off to die in prison, to die of starvation or summarily executed, the Soviet people had already been through a whole dialogue on how awful this class of people were and then once they accepted this dehumanization via the argument that they were evil, the process could move towards removing the class, which basically meant purge them from the earth.
These bad things we do as a people, it's never obvious at first. It's never as obvious as a white supremacist group jumping up and say KILL THE JEWS! and everyone nodding. It's a slow degradation of the collective humanity by grouping people, assigning moral worth to people, dehumanizing the bad people, and then eventually erasing the bad people, and then looking for the next set of bad people.
So, ANTIFA, since I brought them up, uses rhetoric that is violent and dehumanizes their opponents and this frighten me. Identity politics speaks to this and worries people. The way the term nazi is whipped around so freely and the true nature of the groups its applied to is never given any attention worries me.
Perhaps you think, within this select thread in a select forum, that we can reasonably and wisely recognize the real nazis, and because of this we can dehumanize them with nothing to worry about. I am telling you that this is how about every genocidal killing machine of human society thought as well. You can go as to far as to call people bad, you may even group people a bit, but once you start assigning worth to groups and legitimize dehumanizing people then you are on the slippery slope of the past.
This isn't a slippery slope fallacy. This slope has been real too many times.
Do you really think Spencer was an important, powerful growing figure? He was an unimportant speck on the internet.None of us knew who he was because he was so unknown and unimportant. What made him well known? A state official bringing up a group of people, speaking about the worth and character of those people, filling in the mental blanks for a nation who had mostly never heard of these people, and choosing the worst examples to exemplify these people. The press then backed this up. And now we have a neonazi celeb when he would have just been a jackass on the net that people fucked with otherwise.
