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Generally speaking however, I think you're slightly off the mark in your observations. The style of discouse you describe, in which a party is described as irredeemably evil due to an excessively right-wing position, is usually directed at third parties. You and your politically agreeable interlocutor paint someone who is not actually a participant in the discussion as an acceptable target and not part of polite society. It's not directed at a participant in the discussion, because you, a respectable progressive, would never have a discussion with a nazi in the first place! The whole exercise serves to strengthen in-group alignment on common friend/enemy distinctions. It's a rallying cry for allies, a measure to ensure uniformity, not an attempt to convince someone who might disagree with you - because outright disagreement is evil, beyond the pale, and marks such a one as unfit for discourse. The evil must be deplatformed, not given opportunity to voice their intolerable views.
Funny, I was just listening The Young Turks, as left-wing as it gets, fire a former contributor for doing this to their CEO.. Cenk Uygur is in no way an outsider.
Yes, a lot of the uncharitable and unprofessional things she said were about Cenk and told to allied leftists. But it doesn't change that she basically lost an ally by talking crazy about them with other leftists because he only wanted trans athletes to compete up to the high school level or thought Democrats should go on Charlie Kirk.
It only strengthens in-group bonds if a) your asks are reasonable enough that most in-group members see no need to defect and b) you're perceived as a winner.
In reality, TYT is one of the older and larger progressive media channels. Losing them (this isn't the first time an employee has declared them rightists and detached) doesn't strengthen the tribe at all. I think some people's faces are just stuck like this now. They're used to talking like this about their enemies and they simply can't help but slip into it when they see traitors pulling away as their influence recedes after a loss.
With maybe bad incentives due to social media. A smaller figure thinks they gain from punching up at an insufficiently doctrinaire one, and never consider the downsides.
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I agree to an extent. I've had many discussions specifically around Ukraine where even non-opinionated mentions of basic facts - like how the country has always had an extreme cultural and political rift between it's Western and Eastern regions - will garner accusations of relativising Putin or "playing into his hands".
I think you're right in the sense that the subtext is always "you don't want to be on that side, outside of polite society, do you now?" Unfortunately for them, this kind of threat of social exclusion only really works if you want to be socially included to begin with, and if the power relations are sufficiently one-sided. But why would I want to be included in a social paradigm that treats me as lesser and deserving of retribution for my gender and skin colour, all while failing to deliver on the basic quality-of-life promises of it's post-war social contract? At least pre-Trump and wokeness, there was one clear side of the sociopolitical spectrum that was cooler, younger, made better art, etc. none of which is really the case anymore.
I'm very curious to see how this continues - already, the AFD is inching towards overtaking the CDU in the polls and becoming the largest party in Germany, at which point virtually every single major player in the EU (not counting Spain since it's irrelevant) will have far-right electorates. The fever must break at some point, right? Or is the doubling-down going to turn into a tripling-down?
I'd predict that it will turn into a change of strategy. So far the way of it was to contain the AfD through social engineering to dissuade the electorate from backing them, and political firewalling to prevent them from affecting the running of the country. The social part isn't effective enough, and the political part will cease to work if they should grow any further.
So I expect that the fever will heat up more yet. We may see increasing sabotage, honeypots, agent provocateurs, political violence and other more proactive measures to prevent the AfD from functioning as an organization and to discredit it as not just evil but incompetent. Key actors within the party might be bought off, imprisoned on flimsy evidence, or personally assaulted on a broader scale and with more decisive violence. Perhaps a party meeting will be bombed. Maybe trustworthy intelligence agencies will discover incontrovertible proof that the entire party leadership is a bunch of pedophiles, or something similarly odious that not even right-wingers would tolerate.
This might be further facilitated by funnelling more money into "pro-democracy" NGOs that serve to coordinate activists and provide them with financial and legal support.
"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" - Robert Habeck, 2025
Jokes aside, I think you're right that there will be more escalation and use of dirty tricks and institutional malpractice - Romania seems to be the EU's current testing ground for how openly they can get away with an outright, unambiguous coup d'état. It feels very Weimarian in the sense that not even the liberal order really believes in liberalism (separation of powers, due process, free and fair elections) anymore, just maintaining power by increasingly draconian means.
Whether violence will ramp up to the level you predict remains to be seen, I think the liberal establishment can influence these things semi-indirectly by just bombarding the population with alarmism and moral hysteria until some of the more deranged and disaffected listeners decide they need to get on the right side of History by stabbing an AfD politician (this is essentially already happening since a while and seems like the only logical conclusion of the "Nie wieder!" sloganeering anyway) - is the endpoint of all this civil war?
The comparison to Weimar is apt, IMO. Back then democracy showed a failure mode in being young and not having the people's trust so that power players could just run roughshod over it; now it shows another by being old and all the players knowing how to exploit its loopholes while the people have become so accustomed the status quo that the liberal order is taken for granted.
I think the endpoint will probably be constitutional reform that further enshrines progressivism, to such a point that any significantly right-wing platform becomes legally untenable. We can see the first attempts at this in the recent inclusion of "Climate Neutrality By 2045" in the constitution - if that works, then similarly ideologically-charged items can follow, until it becomes impossible to campaign for materially right-wing goals without first campaigning for simply undoing those changes, which wouldn't be attractive to voters.
Whether the road there is cleared by weimarian violence or just another long march probably depends on how rapidly, if at all, the right grows from here on out.
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