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I think you are misunderstanding me. I think anarchists are bad, and I think Marxist communists are bad. And I do not support either of their visions of the future, because I think either will be significantly worse than current. However, it is still really important to understand the differences, in local terms. Violence on the streets is generally bad, but it is not as bad as either a communist state or a complete state of anarchy.
Even granting your entire premise about the Blue Tribe using antifa, it has a number of different outcomes, depending on exactly what happens.
2)Actual Marxist-communists have or gain control over antifa and use it as part of a campaign to institute real communism - this is exceptionally unlikely but would be catastrophic.
I am saying pragmatically, that what happens next and how bad it is, can depend very much on who has, or gains control. You think it won't be 2) or 3) and I agree it is unlikely. But the world is full of more extreme people winning internal struggles and seizing power over an organization (See IRA to Provisional IRA to the "Real' IRA and so on). If one had the ability to know which splinter faction was going to take leadership, you could do something about it.
If I tell you, a hardline communist will take control of antifa (which would obviously have to include some amount of re-organization and purging) from say distributed Blue Tribe Bob's, do you think they will be less violent or more? If you had a choice of preventing it is your argument that it wouldn't really make a difference? As you yourself point out, the Blues want to run the system roughly as it is now. And if antifa is more anarchist than communist, then who you need to be keeping an eye out for and what kind of changes might be indicative of an increase in threat is very different.
I've lived with a simmering ideological conflict between factions, which includes street violence and much more and it isn't a picnic by any stretch of the imagination...but kids can still go to school and play in the park and listen to music and you can still watch the football and bbq (assuming Northern Irish weather allowed for it!). It's not an existential threat to the system. And the destruction of the system in a nation of 330 million people will be catastrophic.
I believe you, for what it's worth.
You appear to be claiming that KKK-style oppression aimed at Reds is bad for Reds, but that we survived the KKK so we'll survive this. The problem is that Reds have guns and no small measure of political support of their own, and that unlike the KKK, Antifa has at least the tacit support of Blue Tribe on a national level, in the sense that when an Antifa goon is shot, the average Blue arrives at the conclusion that he was an innocent protester murdered by an evil Red. The obvious first-order result is a steady stream of killings that operate like Shiri's Scissor to accelerate cultural polarization; this is already happening. The likely second-order effect is that Reds are encouraged to cease confining themselves to defense, and try some offense of their own, an eventuality that our society almost certainly cannot survive. It is not obvious to me why burning down an abortion clinic or a university facility is worse than burning down a police station or a church. You talk about burning police stations as a thing that, you know, sort of happens, and of course there are no shortage of examples of church fires also happening. If consequence-free arson becomes a equitably-distributed crime, do you think social stability holds steady?
When people kill or otherwise inflict great harm on each other, it's important that we as a society generally get on the same page about who was in the wrong. If we can't do that any more for some types of crimes, it becomes very, very important to prevent and to minimize those types of killings, because fundamental, systematic disagreements over justice lead to spiraling escalations. Society cannot survive a major faction gaining common knowledge that their political opponents have in fact stripped them of their legal and social rights, and intend to commit lawless violence against them without consequence. Once that common knowledge is established, cooperation is over, the opponents' political action becomes an existential threat, and people start supporting lawless violence of their own. That is what is massively destructive to the entire order.
Antifa normalizes and escalates political violence. There is only so much political violence a society can handle without falling apart. We are currently below that threshold because Red Tribe declines to commit their share. If that changes, I and people like me will not be in favor of enforcing consequences on the Reds, because we have seen that there were no consequences for Blues. The longer this goes, the more people like me there will be.
I don't think it would make any statistically significant difference at all. Their level of violence does not appear to be determined by ideology, but by enforcement or lack of enforcement by Blue authorities. If they confine themselves to mob-stomping innocent victims, property destruction and arson, the cops look the other way. If they commit blatant gun murders, the cops show up and shut things down, and occasionally even jail or kill them if the optics are bad enough. If a "hardline communist" takes over, they'll buck this system and the cops will promptly come down on them like a ton of bricks, and then they won't be a problem any more.
If you're being menaced by a vicious dog on a leash, is the problem whether or not the dog has rabies, or is it that a human has intentionally brought a vicious dog into your personal space? Whether the dog has rabies or not, he's not going to break the leash, and you can get a shot in any event. But the guy on the other end of the leash created this situation, and he has significant control over how bad it gets. He's the real problem, not the dog.
There are other examples where it's gone worse, and it seems to me that there's a number of reasons to suspect that, in America, it will in fact be worse.
If the dog breaks the leash, savages the leash holder and then you (or you and then the leash holder for that matter) that is worse than just being menaced (in my opinion of course). I think that it is possible for the leash to break in this analogy. And whether the dog is crazed and rabid, hungry, or been beaten has some significant impact on whether the leash can or will be broken and what the dog will do after. Dogs are not my strong suit but hopefully you take my point.
The temperament of the dog is actually useful information. If it hates the owner as much (or more!) as it does you, then cutting the leash yourself is a dangerous but possibly useful option. If it is trained only to hate you and loves its owner then cutting the leash is not a good idea at all. Is it very well trained and thus will only bite on command, or will it bite of its own accord? If the former then preventing the owner from issuing commands could help.
To put it in the Northern Irish context, some of the Loyalist paramilitaries were closer to the Unionist parties than others and some to the government (unoffically) and whether the UDR was out to get you or the UVF, or the UDA etc. determines where you could go, and who might help you (and likewise with Sinn Fein and the various IRA's and the like). If you got in trouble with the Provos you could go to your local Sinn Fein rep and ask them to intercede. But if it was the "Real" IRA (who believed Sinn Fein were traitors to the cause), then even though both would be against the British, then you would definitely not want to go to Sinn Fein to intervene. The same overall goals, but different levels of control, ideology and internal enmities. And indeed you can exploit those internal enmities when one faction will share information about another faction to their shared enemies. Which has happened more than once. Lenny Murphy (Shankill Butchers) was sold out to the IRA by his own side for example.
If you get targeted by antifa, if they are mainly a group of disorganized anarchists, then that leads to different set of options than if they are a centrally organized Marxist communist group, and changes again if they have direct access to Blue Tribe resources, or are reliant on whatever scraps they get thrown. And changes once again if there are different factions with a balance of power between them. Or to go back to the dog analogy, knowing if you are running from a dog that will stop every 2 minutes to chase a capitalist squirrel vs a dog that has been trained from birth to sniff out Red Tribers for an organized purge, is pretty useful information to have.
Put simply, even if you are correct about who is deploying weapons (or holding the leash etc.) against you, correctly understanding the specifications of the weapons (or training of the dog) themselves is also tactically and practically helpful information.
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