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I know this sort of thing is very satisfying to type out, but it's bollocks. Nazis in Weimar Germany encountered massive physical resistance on the streets from the left, it did precisely nothing to slow their rise to power and may even have accelerated it. https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/1347104944357134337
That's not to say I believe in the "marketplace of ideas" either, by the way. You can't talk people out of fascism or any other form of extremism, it has to be crushed. But that generally means at the ballot box or, if that fails, with tanks and bombers.
I must say I find something very distasteful about someone as cossetted as this coming on like the big bad streetfighter. This isn't a game.
The thing about the word "fascist" is that its meaning is famously unstable, particularly on the far left. Don't assume it'll never be applied to you under any circumstances. https://twitter.com/MysteriosoX/status/1347112440136409089
Well, quite. But people like Laurie find elections and so on a boring way of settling things when you could be doing Cable Street cosplay instead. https://twitter.com/twlldun/status/1347112632243916802
So: don't debate them, don't platform them, but don't beat them up either, except in self-defense. Do ceaselessly organise, get out the vote and crush them electorally as heavily as possible. Often boring and hard work, but that's what works.
It's complicated. The Nazis definitely were the prime culprits, but they also needed the communists to be the boogeyman to frighten middle class voters with, and they played up to that role with great enthusiasm. https://twitter.com/Rhys_Needham/status/1347115534018465792
This, of course, is the other thing. https://twitter.com/MatzoBalling/status/1347124029421998082
Going back to Weimar: THE major reason Nazism wasn't stopped at the ballot box is that the German left was deeply and irrevocably split. Blame for that lies more or less equally with both sides, but it's an important lesson. You need a united left, as Biden understood.
I think Clinton and Blair offered broadly the right solutions to the problems of their time, but their time could only last so long and I agree that brand of centrism is a poor fit for the post-crash world. https://twitter.com/TheGravityDrive/status/1347146589115179008
