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This might be a little meta, bit here's a theory about what's happening with Trump et al, and why I'm dubious about reasoned debate even being particularly clarifying.
I remember, back when Tumblr grew popular, being struck by the rise of a specific rhetorical tone. It was a kind of outraged, indignant, wounded "How DARE you defend yourself while I was attacking you!" It was the cry bully tone. I found it deeply infuriating, and it leaked out into all sorts of social media spaces and even into more mainstream media. And in the background, all the various intersectional theories were key to justifying it, because those theories were the basis for the attackers feeling, really and truly, that they were just fighting back and calling out injustice - hence the wounded tone on encountering resistance. There was a strong, assumed element of moral grievance backing it all up. But if you weren't actually onboard with all the foundational intersectional theories, it was enormously off-putting.
And then, despite all that, it was incredibly effective for about 12 years, and cancel culture rose, and 2020 happened, and DEI happened, and Woke Hollywood and Wokeness in games happened, and insanity at universities happened (and is still deeply entrenched), and after a while it became clear that, at least in the short term, people doing the cry bullying stuff actually knew what they were doing, at least in some tacit sense... or at least the people who developed their foundational theories did. Because it turns out that most normal people want to engage with reason and discussion when faced with conflict, and most normal people are very conflict averse and very cowed by public claims of public morality and public offense. And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective. It's an accurate read about a weakness in how normal people react to drama. Actually, even more so, in this particular case, it's also an especially accurate read of the dynamics between radical "marginalized" activists and normal well-credentialed liberals who want, more than anything in the world, to publicly show that they're not low status conservatives, at any cost.
The dynamics here remind me of why people buy guard dogs. At least as far as I understand, and this is obviously not from experience, it is (relatively) easy to threaten people with weapons like guns. You point the weapon at someone, you use loud and menacing tones with specific instructions to push people around and force them to do things so they can avoid being hurt. Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners. And I think that's the logic that unreasonable activists have latched on to. They understand the power of being willing to gun the engine, tear the steering wheel out of the car, and lean in hard to being totally unreasonable. And in the short term, that works great - until the circle firing squads start forming once you've run off everyone who wants to be reasonable, and until enough opponents recognize the trick and then coordinate to massively punish this illiberal defection.
Power in the business world works like this all the time, too, of course - higher management slashes jobs or unceremoniously kills even promising projects for all sorts of reasons, little people get randomly punished through no fault of their own, and being willing to be seen as dicks is actually a major part of the job, because, well, that's just sort of what business is, right? Such people might need to project a certain amount of public reasonableness, but internally, in the hierarchy, saying "no" doesn't need justification, mostly. That's what power is. You get to be the immovable fact of the world, and someone else has to compromise and reason their way around that fact and make the best of things.
Republicans and conservatives have had it hammered in to their heads, the last decade and a half, that preemptively being reasonable, when your opponents have been supine to deeply unreasonable, monstrous people who hate you and are taking active steps to harm you, is a losing game theoretic move. Being willing to be unreasonable and confrontational, to be seen as a dick, to be the immovable fact of the world that other people have to compromise and reason their way around, is a super power and the only sensible move, at least in certain contexts. And in large measure, this is because being that unreasonable forces other people, through their actions, to reveal the actual distance between their rhetoric, on the one hand, and their actual capabilities, values, and priorities, on the other. It makes other people make hard choices. And lurking in the background is something even deeper; it's the willingness to say, "When you were doing something ill-advised, and then I stepped in and said no, I'm taking responsibility for saying no, but I'm not taking responsibility for you getting things to this situation in the first place. The damage that is about to happen is on you." That dynamic has played out especially in relation to the immigration crisis.
Anyway, that's my meta read on the current Trumpian moves, and that kind of flipping over the tea table always generates collateral damage.
There is an additional factor here- if your threatening dog menaces someone, and you didn't sick it on anyone, the dog may be confiscated and euthanized, but you will not go to prison. On the other hand even holding a gun or knife in your hand while issuing demands is legally fraught(even in self-defense friendly jurisdictions, the rule of thumb is generally that if you weren't threatened enough to kill you weren't threatened enough to pull a gun). "Get off my property!" while holding a gun is de jure a serious felony; a loud and threatening dog is a matter for animal control at worst. If your dog actually attacks somebody it will probably be euthanized, but again, you are unlikely to be in legal trouble- unless somebody can testify that you yelled out 'sick!'- and even then, the legal trouble will be far less than that of even holding a gun in your hand.
Dr. Strangelove, DVM: Yes, but the... whole point of the dog... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you put up the sign eh?
Boy DeSadeski: It was to be announced at dinner on Monday. As you know, our father loves surprises.
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To deepen the metaphor even further, while buying into the market of poorly-bred attack dogs does earn you social disapproval, that doesn't seem to amount to much in the end--people keep breeding and buying them, and dogs continue to end up unfit to live in normal human society (and thus, sometimes being put down).
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