09-05-2021, 03:01 PM
(09-01-2021, 04:54 PM)Dill Wrote: Thanks for the non-confrontational approach.
If I understand your first paragraph, the claim is that conducting public discussion of politics which undermine democracy has "real world ramifications" which are exactly the opposite than those intended. You speak of "polar opposite results" for example.
But I don't see that you have clearly established this claimed cause/effect relation. I haven't seen much evidence of Right Wing outrage over the scholarship I have mentioned. Do you have such? It is not clear at all that books, such as those I mentioned, have no intended effect, such as increasing the knowledge/understanding of authoritarian politics in those who read them. Remember, we are discussing something quite different from tweets and memes. We can track the CRT hysteria directly back to its origin in Fox News segments and measure its progress in proposed legislation and video of angry parents confronting school boards. Anything like that for scholarship on authoritarian regimes?
The premise of your second paragraph seems to be that people writing about authoritarian regimes have "zero real world experience of how their proposed ideas will actually impact society," and so their proposals inevitably fail. I am not sure how you know the kind or degree of experience they have, or what counts as "real world." You analogize them to criminal justice advocates, and write about them as if they had proposed legislation which, like a tariff, has produced measurable opposite effects. And they are contrasted to people like yourself, who know "people."
Yet I don't see any evidence of your claimed effect.
Further, when I see "division" and "polarization" in US society, that rarely seems to follow from Nazi/Taliban comparisons, even at the tweet level. Rather, they depends much more upon who is speaking and the movement to transform proposals into politics--e.g., a wall to keep out "rapists" or a SCOTUS decision legitimizing gay marriage. Taliban tweets did not drive the movement to ban Sharia law in various states. I'd wager that, if Taliban/Nazi tweets ended today, the effect on "division" would be nil.
Understanding something of "theory," by the way, is a prerequisite of democratic government. In order for that to work, the voting populace must know how democracy works and value democratic over anti-democratic politics. They must be able to tell the difference. I think I can better connect current divisions in the US to an inability to tell that difference, than to outrage because "Moore called us 'Taliban.'"
To the first bolded, it looks like we disagree on what "the average person" can or should be expected to understand. If you are right, then we are in trouble, because liberal democracy is predicated upon enough "average" people understanding enough about anti-democratic politics to keep their government democratic in form. That's always been the gamble, the experiment. And it requires some "book learnin'" to maintain that expected understanding, e.g., of principles of democratic government, how precarious such government is, and what guises anti-democratic tendencies may take. It also requires public discussion of politics which moves beyound sound bites and political caricature.
Where I am proposing that informed public discussion/debate can educate, you are proposing such informed debate does more (as yet unsubstantiated) damage. If I understand you correctly.
I'd say part of our "division" at present arises from a deficit of knowledge about how democracies fail. If we cannot remedy that through public discussion we are already lost. Such discussion should be complemented by re-affirming civility and evidence-based reasoning, to move people past deliberate obstructors. Part of our "division" is a division over whether and how such complements should be valued--e.g., by not electing politicians who disrespect them.
Division also follows from books and news reports that are not at all well intentioned. Mark Levin's American Marxism will have a far wider readership than Stanley's How Fascism Works, though the former is disinformation and the latter is not. I don't think the remedy to that is for the scholars to shut up because they might offend the un- or disinformed. Surely we cannot let disinformation flow unopposed because responsible scholarship would upset people.
Your girlfriend doesn't understand how you can tell all your handguns apart. I say she should could learn quickly enough how to do that, if it were important to her. Books like Stanely's are calibrated to 12th grade/college freshmen level readers. Most adults can manage it too. Enough can manage comparisons between group "A" and group "B" to make a difference.
Thanks again for working through your reasons like this. Now you can show whether I have misunderstood them and/or provide some of the evidence I've found lacking.
I had a longer response typed up for this, then my cat jumped on my keyboard and page backed, so my whole response was erased. I started typing it again when I realized there was little reason to do so. I've made my point, clearly and logically. I've provided real world examples. If you still see no problems with these types of comparisons then there's really nothing more to be said. I find them divisive and inflammatory, you see the "scholarly" benefit of such examples as outweighing that obvious consequence. We don't agree and it's obvious that further discussion will not change either of our minds. So we can leave it at that.
