(spoiler alert: Another post by me turned into an essay. Read it anyway, because I can't find places to cut it without losing real content. Attention spans are good for you. Builds character. By which I mean the depth of your thinking. Feel free to respond only to little chunks of it though, and I'll split it into two parts for better readability. Responding is the actually time-consuming part.)
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Part 1: A contradiction within liberal democracy
Liberal democracy contains within itself a contradiction that can occasionally lead to its own destruction.
Namely, free speech and association are sacrosanct. That's fine when applied to all people who agree with the core tenets of liberal democracy, but have other disagreements. But what about people who don't?
If fascists, neo-Stalinists or Maoists, white supremacists, radical Islamists, other religious fundamentalists, neo-monarchists who practice Moldbuggery, and so on and so forth make up a small fraction of the population with no chance of their ideas really catching on, then it's totally fine to let them do their thing without interfering.
But what if one or more of those ideas really catches on? if you have a society that is at least somewhat democratic, then there is a possibility for the people to replace the liberal democrats in charge with authoritarians of some stripe or another. Once that happens, the liberal democracy dies.
Often this happens in insidious ways, where someone with authoritarian tendencies takes power through democratic elections and then slowly chips away at the foundations of liberal democracy (however sturdy they used to be). After the 2016 election, I took quite a while to read about Putin, Chavez, Erdogan, and Orban to see how this happens in the modern world. What I found is that all of these people had clear plans to undermine the liberal democratic nature of their states and were good at political maneuvering, which made me breathe a huge sigh of relief: there was no chance of Trump pulling anything like this off. He's
way too incompetent to effect an authoritarian transition, and his party isn't really behind him.
Further, he shows no sign of learning the game. Even if he tries some sort of Shock Doctrine stuff - trying to take advantage of a war, terrorist attack, or economic catastrophe to push through unpopular legislation - it would still probably backfire, in a way it never did when W. Bush had his approval ratings hit the stratosphere after 9/11 and he could do whatever he wanted for about 2 years, including invading an irrelevant country because the PNAC neocons had wanted it invaded since they were founded, years before 9/11.
But we were at a vulnerable moment, and had Trump known what he is doing, he could easily have pushed us into frank electoral authoritarianism. He was the wrong man for the job, and while most liberals seem to act like the country has been shot in the gut, what I heard was a bullet whizzing by.
So anyway, how do you suppress anti-liberal democratic movements within a liberal democracy? Probably just ad hoc and in no particularly principled way, which could include getting counter-demonstrators to shut down speeches. But when we start doing illiberal things ad hoc in order to defend liberal democracy, then you have to consider the unintended consequences of this: when you shut down a speech by threatening violence, do you boost or weaken the appeal of white nationalism?
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Part 2: On white identity politics and why it appeals to people nowadays
There's also the uncomfortable fact that white nationalists are appropriating identity politics and using it for white people. Putting aside the fact that "white people" basically didn't come into existence in their current form as "all those with [mostly] ethnic European ancestors* " until sometime after WW2, the fact of the matter is that humans like to form tribes. And many people are inadvertently working to strengthen white nationalism, even though they think they oppose it.
What's happening is that certain (mostly well-intentioned) leftists, along with cynical centrist Democrats who see this as a way to use divide-and-conquer techniques to their advantage, have been loudly boosting minority racial identity politics, while talking about "white privilege" in ways that reach non-privileged white people (via Fox News, Breitbart, et al.), while also pointing out that white people as currently construed are declining demographically and will eventually be a minority as well, and doing all this after the collapse of the labor movement and the rise of high levels of inequality - abetted in large part by the centrist Democrats. So there are a bunch of not-very-privileged white people with no identity to speak of besides whiteness, and the non-college-educated fraction are literally killing themselves in despair, either outright or through drug and alcohol overdoses. The obvious effect? Boosting the appeal of identifying as white, especially for those underprivileged enough not to have college educations.
Which is why I'm a fan of boosting the intersectional approach among leftists - namely, that privilege is a function of many variables, of which race, gender, and sexuality coexist with social class, income, education level, innate ways your brain happens to work**, disability, and so on in determining who is privileged and who is not, and that we should work to lessen the differences in privilege. We need to push aside the divide-and-conquer tactics that are being incompetently used with predictable side effects, such as a heretofore unprecedented collapse in support for the Democratic Party among its former core in the working class, bringing Obama's blue wall crashing down as the last places where working-class white people voted majority Democratic swung dramatically towards a demagogue with a weird hairdo. Laugh at them for obviously voting against their economic interests all you want, the fact is that people care about more than just economics. Keep laughing, and the Dems will find they have still further to fall.
Sounds complicated, but I've seen a couple of encouraging signs. The less important one is that the word "intersectionality" really is gaining rapidly in leftist circles. I was recently at a camp - originally started as a Quaker thing but now consisting almost entirely of secular liberals - and the young adults all knew what that term meant or caught on immediately once it started being discussed. Even more encouragingly, the term isn't really necessary. Many of the Baby Boomers there glommed onto me and my explanations of what was happening. I started out by pointing out that Minnesota is Ground Zero for this phenomenon, with the whole state outside the Twin Cities metro swinging dramatically in Trump's favor. Then I showed them the maps of Wisconsin and Iowa, where the same thing happened enough to flip those states. Then I started moving east from there. They got the picture real fast. As The Boss eloquently put it:
From the Monongahela valley, to the Mesabi Iron Range –
To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story's always the same
(edit: included asterisk statements in spoiler, split into two parts)