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The left have shown that is how it works. Their punishment regime has made absurdities intro absolute dogma in every professional environment, simply by inflicting enough fear and pain on anyone who dared to speak out. Nobody in the year 2000 could have even imagined the insanity that would be enforced by the next 20 years of HR witch-hunting, mobbing, lawfare, and violence. Inflicting pain is how that was accomplished.
The post-modernists had important lessons about social discipline and punishment, and the left learned them first.
It's probably too late for the right to learn the same lesson, now that the left dominates the social control infrastructure, but they can at least try.
The very existence of your argument refutes it. If putting the screws to people got them to relent and peacefully live according to one's preferred ideology, then you wouldn't be mad because you would have relented. But in actuality, you're upset (rightfully so) and you want to hit them back as hard as you can the instant you get a chance to. Why on earth do you imagine the result would be any different when it's your (side's) hands welding the knife?
He doesn't think peace is realistic. He just wants a détente, and that requires a show of strength.
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It almost has worked. There are vanishingly few people actually willing to fight back, and it took incredibly good luck to keep them (literally bullet-dodging levels of luck!).
And even they are only willing to go against the most radical 10% of the left's agenda: the other 90% has already been adopted in the Republican party platform.
So the leftist strategy worked, even if people manage to claw back 5% of what they won with it.
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