The difficulty is that in the past the camps felt pretty clear: There were wingnuts ranting about lizard people or cosplaying in Klan robes and there was everyone else. You could pretty well tell the difference. Yeah, there were always a few suit&tie nazis, but they never really gained traction until recently.
Recently, it seems nazis are everywhere. They’re in the White House, they’re on the streets, they’re on talk shows, they’re on every internet forum. Thing is, the way they got there was by pretending not to be nazis. Turns out the most important and influential nazis are the ones who won’t cop to their own values, but instead use sneaky rhetoric and dogwhistles to advance their line.
Obviously these people and their politics need to be stopped. They don’t need to be engaged in debate, or have an open forum for their ideas, because they don’t have any real ideas (other than power). They are pretending.
This has been a major revelation for a lot of people, which is good. But it has also created a sort of political paranoia in the Left. Now that we know nazis are among us, using deceptive rhetoric to advance fascism under the guise of real debate, everyone is suspect. Any given critique of the left is most likely just crypto-fascist driving trollies, and so we understandably approach critiques of us with that assumption.
The real accomplishment of the 9/11 terrorists was not the destruction of the WTC, it was the hypertrophying of the American security state at home and abroad. Bin Laden wanted that reaction, because even though it polarized many forces against him, it created a battlefield on his terms.
In the same way, nazis want us to become suspicious of debate and critique, because even when we’re successful and manage to get society to reject their critique as disingenuous, a social environment where critique is stigmatized is far more hospitable to their politics. This is not theoretical, it’s a documented prong in the american fascist strategy, and it’s part of what’s making their power grow. So I do think it’s relevant to discuss in this context.
Just as the movement against the War on Terror was equally a resistance against the American police state, the movement against fascism should also be a resistance against simplifying our discourse for the sake of stopping fascism.
