You can't play nice with fascism

If you try then you die, literally. This post was motivated by a recent Facebook discussion, as well as by the many well-meaning but naive proponents of a so-called 'more developed worldview' where we can all get along and overcome all of this nasty polarization. 

I maintain that there is no use trying to reason or mediate with fascists. And that's what the Repugnacon Party has become. They must be defeated, not negotiated with, whatever that takes.  How do we do that? My preferred way is via rhetorical framing to motivate voting and activist behavior in the working class. And working in the trenches typically does not lend itself to Robert's Rules. I previously survived on the streets and it has its own ways. My later intellectual pursuits notwithstanding are for a different audience, typically one that cannot understand down and dirty.

Robert's Rules are what the US Congress (and others) use to keep order and civility in debate. In effective street framing/fighting they are inapplicable. But by participating in the dirt doesn't that defeat our higher purpose of a better worldview? Only if that worldview is so idealistic that it thinks we can eliminate all the dirt.

I'll use fighting as a metaphor. I trained in martial arts, which has such high ideals as aforementioned. And yet it is a fighting art. Which means it recognizes that not everyone in this world has such high ideals. And to suppose that we'll create a world where everyone does is naive at best. So it behooves us to know when to fight and how much depending on the context. When we're facing fascism, which doesn't fight by any civilized rules, you fight back with whatever works and save the civilized rules for the civilized. 

At this point the fighting is rhetorical in the hopes of averting the physical. Make no mistake though that if Repugnacon fascism is not curtailed now in a rhetorical war that gets them out of political power then eventually they will revert to the same heinous acts that they have throughout history. Today book-banning and taking away the right to vote. Tomorrow putting journalists in jail? The next day death camps? This is where that road leads and for Repugs it's full speed ahead.

I'm getting old and my physical fighting skills have deteriorated. My words are all I have left, which some say are mightier than the sword anyway. So I do what I can with what I got in the hopes that in some small way we can save democracy from this fascist onslaught. If the intellectuals find my tactics degrading then that's on their naive, cozy and enabling idealism that deprived them of knowing when and how to fight evil. Or even to recognize it.