I’m confused, is this happening little by little, or gigantic bursts.
Trump just started his term, but it doesn’t seem to be the incremental approach allegedly used by the Nazis.
He is, to quote his former advisor, “flooding the zone with sh*t.” A gigantic burst of terribleness, doing a thousand things at once, leaving everyone disoriented.
That’s quite different from the “every day a little worse approach.”
I suspect the next four years will be gigantic bursts of terribleness, followed by long periods of relief it wasn’t “as bad as it seeemed at first.”
Infighting is how liberalism loses. While we sit and deliberate on whether this is the slice that merits actions, they are making plans to arrest more judges.
The point of that excerpt is that there is not and likely will never be one single unifying objectionable action that provokes people into acting and we will slow walk our way into atrocity through inaction.
The argument being made is that it will continually get worse every single day. Every action will slowly become more egregious. A judge arrested politically, but for cause, today will be a judge arrested without cause tomorrow, but we will have adapted to see judges being arrested for blatantly political reasons as a new norm.
The facts and nuance will change faster than we can adapt and while we pontificate on whether this is the one that's worth it, the next bad thing will have already happened. More power will have been consolidated.
Taking in the truth requires action, so anything that lets people stay in denial or bury their heads is clung to in order to protect mental health. Eventually it will be too late, and you will wonder when you should have acted knowing you are no longer able to.
The most important part is to get the people on your side, that is how you win. If an action results in less support for your side then you shouldn't do it if you want to win, it hurts you.
So all I am saying, stop hurting yourself, that only help your enemies. It is not me hurting you, it is you hurting you. This was how the Democrats lost the election, it wasn't Trump that won it was Democrats that lost it by hurting themselves over and over.
The sum of those small slices is already great. There is no logical reason to react only to each individual event and not the sum of them or better yet the sum or what has been openly planned.
In the face of obvious fascism those who would be "turned against" their fellows by dint of honest and justified alarm are already "against" them now. They can only be opposed not convinced. They are either honest villains or live virtually entirely in their fantasy wholly disconnected from reality.
Just wait until you get to the part of the They Thought They Were Free where it mentions over-reacting. That strategy doesn't work.
There is no moment of egregious violation. It never comes. Even when the state is clearly totalitarian there were Germans holding out hope that Germany would lose the war. As if that was their final straw.
The salami is purposefully sliced thin enough that one slice on it's own will never provoke enough outrage. How do you hope to oppose that?
Be clear what over reactions are you talking about in the context of rise of the nazis and what overreactions do you see here?
Building a personal army and pissing in the woods whilst you drill and prepare for civil war 2.0 electric boogaloo would be an overreaction, this is a strongly worded letter against arresting judges. This is the absolute minimum anyone could possibly be expected to do.
The point was that conceding to the over-reactive label isn't a viable strategy The people of 1955 - just 10 years after WW2 - realized that taking a stand, even against a salami was the better strategy than avoiding the over-reactive label.
Why re-use a strategy that, when we tried it, led to Nazi Germany? Do we expect it to succeed this time?
This law and the banning of the other political parties was the egregious step that people should have rebelled and taken up arms against, you can't say this was just a tiny "salami slice":
You want to have all the political capital left when that law happens, instead of wasting it defending rotten scraps. Wasting so much energy and political capacity on scraps means there is no energy left when the big things hits, that is exactly where your current strategy is taking you.
> Why re-use a strategy that, when we tried it, led to Nazi Germany? Do we expect it to succeed this time?
People killed Nazis before they came to power, they weren't using legal or nice strategies as defense back then either. That was the wrong way, it only increased support for the Nazis.
Let me summarize what I'm hearing and you tell me where I get it wrong.
We should hold back, let the authoritarians do their thing, until there is critical support against an authoritarian power grab and then act when we have overwhelming strength?
When fighting back helps your enemy, then yes then you shouldn't do it. That is pretty obvious.
Don't fight back when the terrain favors your enemy even if it is your land, you fight where you can win. War isn't won by who holds the most land, but by who defeats the enemy troops. You need to build support from the people, not do things that lose support.
There's a metarule to the rule that you're discussing.
"Don't struggle -- only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."
If fighting back helps your enemy, don't just pause and not fight back. Change the state of the system so that the most effective thing -- fighting back -- is viable.
Get inside their OODA loop. Change the rhythm of things so that it suits your needs and not theirs.
Can you sketch out the type of person who see fighting back over these things as an over-reaction? Who are they? I've never met one, so it's hard to imagine they're real.
Yes, as long as they hate fascism more than they hate you they will help you defeat fascism when the time comes. But if you have built up enough resentment over the years then they will pick fascism over you.
Got it. So they're playing "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting," card and they've convinced us that by holding back we'll have a chance to meet them when the time comes, but by then it's too late. They'll have made the possibility of resistance meaningless.
If you haven't previously, I recommend spending time consuming right leaning media.
I find that both right and left media tend to say the same things about the other side. It's a bit wild when you first realize it, when you hear your exact arguments about the others being said by the others about you.
Finding common ground is always the best path. Determine where the actual differences are beyond the meme propaganda, and you may be able to better connect with other world views.
I find that both right and left media tend to say the same things about the other side
The left tends to be more likely to be correct, however (speaking as someone who identifies with neither.) This isn't a matter of opinion; polls have repeatedly found that Fox News viewers, for example, are less well-informed than people who consume no news at all.
"BSAB" thinking doesn't work. No good reasons remain for pretending that it does. One side is objectively and consistently bad for America... but they are better at herding dull-witted people to the polls, so they are winning.
It used to feel smart:
"Both sides are bad."
It signaled discernment, wisdom, immunity to empty tribalism.
We thought neutrality made us wiser.
But detachment isn’t a moral stance; it’s a luxury belief from a world where the system mostly worked.
Today, one side has abandoned the rules entirely. Neutrality isn't wisdom anymore. Neutrality is abdication.
"Both sides are bad" was an optimization for an environment that doesn't exist anymore: shared facts, rational actors, institutional guardrails.
We live in the failure modes now: information war, procedural collapse, manufactured resentment.
We aren't floating above it.
We’re being crushed by it.
And the longer we cling to detached cleverness, the more we surrender to people who act without waiting for certainty.
Yes, action without clarity is dangerous.
Yes, there are wrong moves that make collapse worse.
But paralysis, waiting, hoping, optimizing forever for a world that already ended kills just the same.
It only feels cleaner on the way down.
They already moved.
We're still here, swirling the last drops of neutrality in our glasses, mistaking abdication for wisdom, even as the last undergirders of the state give way beneath us.
The left seems to be more correct on things, but at the same time they run wild campaigns like the butchering of private property: george floyd riots, telsa defacement.
I also see lunacy in terms of economic policies, especially those pushed by progressives like AOC. The party seems a bit too socialist for me, though I appreciate the push for individual liberties when they embrace more classically liberal positions.
at the same time they run wild campaigns like the butchering of private property
January 6, and Trump's subsequent pardon of the rioters, cost you every last drop of the moral authority you need in order to say things like that.
Yes, there is lunacy on the left that does not sleep... but at least their breed of idiot means well. Historically, when you pit the misguided motivations of an AOC against the active malevolence of a Trump, the latter usually beat the former handily. And as usual, when elephants fight, the mice get trampled.
> January 6, and Trump's subsequent pardon of the rioters, cost you every last drop of the moral authority you need in order to say things like that.
I don't think Jan 6 was good in the slightest. Idiots idioting. But at least those idiots were idioting against federal property and not the property of private citizens - again, both are very bad and inexcusable in my book; I'm just clarifying why I didn't include Jan 6.
Really big conditional. A huge amount love fascism, in terms of sharing the same values and desires. How can they resist the allure: "we'll give you everything you want, and you won't even have to work for it by convincing others you're right, because we'll crush those who oppose us".
As long as they believe they'll always be the ones in power (see the crushing dissent part), they see that as a dream come true. Just look at how conservatives have openly opposed due process and judicial checks and balances over the executive branch lately*.
* – Which country am I discussing here? Could be a few lately!
By the time that happens, everyone who understands what is happening will have already left because people like you want to wait until power is consolidated to such an extent that it can't be reasonably fought.
That law was enacted after they thought they had the power to do it, not before as with every salami slicing action. If they think there will be a response, they back off while they continue to slice.
You talk about political capital like it's in a bank account just waiting to be spent, while political capital is being lost through inaction itself, especially in people seeing that it's more rational to run than fight.
Schumer's strategy to wait for 40% unpopularity didn't save any political capital, just the opposite, it demoralized everyone on his side, destroyed resolve, and shattered solidarity.
Intent is already declared, time passes which allows power to consolidate. When would it be easier to act, after several months of power consolidation?
It's not a difference in goal, it's a difference in level of power consolidation. They would already have enacted that law if they thought they had the power to do it, the fact that they haven't means that they think it would cause a response they couldn't win against. As soon as they think they can win, they will do it.
So by not acting now, you ensure that that law is a possibility later.
Imagine I have a neighboring country who's land I want. They have 10,000 citizens, but I only have 5,000 bullets. I have a bullet factory that produces 1,000 bullets a month. Do I invade them right now or do I wait at least 5 months?
If I am the country with 10,000 citizens and I see my neighbor is producing bullets at maximum capacity, should I wait until I definitely know they will invade to mobilize my own manufacturing base/prepare my citizens for a potential invasion? What if they had already spent 2,000 bullets taking a 2,000 person state?
> So by not acting now, you ensure that that law is a possibility later.
What do you mean "act now"? Do you want more people to go out and key tesla cars? You think that is going to make fascism less likely? No, stuff like that only strengthens fascism.
People fought Hitler at every turn in his rise to power often using less than legal means and violence, that only made him stronger.
> Imagine I have a neighboring country who's land I want. They have 10,000 citizens, but I only have 5,000 bullets. I have a bullet factory that produces 1,000 bullets a month. Do I invade them right now or do I wait at least 5 months?
Except that country is selling you the bullets, and they say they need to produce more bullets to win even though you just buy them.
My advice: Stop selling bullets to your enemy.
Your response: But they have so many bullets, we need to make more to defend ourselves, and of course we can't stop selling bullets since that will crash our market!
Like, each of those positions are fine in themselves, but the combination is devastating.
That isn't bad faith, I believe you want to do good, I am just explaining the consequences of your actions. Trump currently has higher support than at almost any time before, that is thanks to people like you who over react and fight even the reasonable things the Trump administration does with fervor.
If I didn't believe in you then I wouldn't explain these things, I do it since I think things can change for the better.
It is still higher than at almost any point in his first term, that was after years of these things and all it resulted in is higher approval than before.
So we can conclude that all that disparagement of Trump increases his support, or why else would it increase so much? The main thing that decreases support for Trump is when Trump does things like the tariffs, or all the insane stuff he has done so far.
Approval dropping a bit due to Trump doing insane things isn't thanks to Democrats, that is his own fault. You want them to shoot them in the foot like that, like press hard on the insane tariffs etc, don't press on these issues where it is easy to defend him.
> It is still higher than at almost any point in his first term,
Depending on which poll series you look at, it's at or a little below his support an equal time into his first term and either following a similar trajectory or dropping faster. It's true that it is still above most of the rest of his first term because his support dropped throughout the term, and it is a quarter of a year into a four year term.
> So we can conclude that all that disparagement of Trump increases his support, or why else would it increase so much?
It increased, insofar as it did, only when he was out of office. What seems to increase his support is him not having his hands on the levers of power.
