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The point I am making is precisely that American anti-racists have been willing to both kill and die for their beliefs, going back to the Civil War. So, historically, have American racists. The Civil War was violent. Reconstruction was violent. Redemption was violent. The Civil Rights movement was less violent, but the death toll made it into three figures. Even today, the political opponents of organised American anti-racism like to fly Gadsden flags, take AR-15s to political rallies, and talk about 2nd amendment remedies.
I don't think that the people protesting Kyle Duncan were okay with the idea of suffering physically painful consequences for their protest, but I don't think MLK was okay with being shot either. I do think that American anti-racist protestors are prepared for a physically painful response to their protests and think of it as an unfortunately necessary part of normal American politics. "Don't unleash goons on racists because they wouldn't do it to you" is not plausible to American anti-racists given the history of the last 200 years.
I am not American so I don't have a dog in this fight, but my impression is that the infamous Yonatan Zunger essay on tolerance is accurate as a description of the history of American race relations. The US status quo on black-white race issues is a peace treaty, but the "cold civil war" looks real. The fact that so few people on the centre-left were willing to condemn the George Floyd riots, and that most of the people on the centre-right who did condemn the January 6th riot are no longer competitive in a Republican primary, suggests that "there are no improvements to American race relations that would make large-scale political violence worth it" no longer commands the supermajority support it did ten years ago.
The American anti-racist left do not operate under a delusion that they can set a fire which only burns Red Tribers. (I agree that the specific group of elite law students who protested Kyle Duncan might, but if this kind of behaviour was restricted to law schools then it would be less of a problem). Yonatan Zunger is making a conscious, cold-blooded decision that America is close to the place where setting the normal kind of fire that burns everything it touches is worth it because the current iteration of the peace treaty isn't giving him what he wants and he thinks his side would win the next round of the war.
Anti-racists are conflict theorists who are playing to win. So are Federalist Society lawyers. I am a mistake theorist who (to the extent I can tell from overseas) sees two sides playing 1.5 tits-for-a-tat so every piece of noise gets escalated until it looks like a defect-defect equilibrium. The correct strategy against an opponent playing 1.5 tits-for-a-tat is to play 0.6 tits-for-a-tat until you get back into a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium, but the internal politics of large movements makes it impossible for them to play that strategy.
MLK wasn't shooting people, or advocating for people getting shot, though.
If my country goes to war, I'm probably not going to feel very guilty about shooting people, but likewise I'm not going to be morally outraged at them returning fire. On the other hand the entire progressive memeplex seems to be built around "it's ok when we do it", that's what I was getting at.
Can you give an example of even a small group using this strategy, and successfully avoided being taken over by conflict theorists?
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