Arguing from compassion (2021)
&gt; Yes, Nazis and white supremacists represent a particularly deranged set of ideas, but with compassion it is possible to tease the humanity out of even them. If Daryl Davis can convert Klansmen, surely you can find common ground with someone on the other end of the political spectrum.
&gt; ...The key (...) is the recognition that (...) most of us are not as opposed to one another as we think. Our discourse is rife with belligerence and bile, and our platforms are designed to stoke polarization.<p>Spoken like someone who hasn&#x27;t dealt with Nazis and other authoritarian and&#x2F;or moralistic political radicals before, as well as a false equivalency.<p>The problem with Nazis, white supremacist and tankies is not that they are personally evil, or that we find their ideas morally abhorrent.<p>The problem is that their ideologies <i>require</i> an enemy, an underclass etc., and that the way they want to achieve good things by eradicating a scapegoat with violence.
This means that while you can agree, agree to disagree or compromise on whether we should spend amount X,Y or inbetween on $socialprogram, but you can&#x27;t really do this with the classes of beliefs which are expansionary and authoritarian.
You can&#x27;t do violence to a specific scapegoat group of people &quot;only a little bit&quot; and have them be okay with it.<p>And the reason why people come up with these beliefs are not the same reasoning process that other beliefs are adopted. You cannot logic someone out of a position they didn&#x27;t logic themselves into.<p>--<p>Now, all of this is not to demean the <i>idea</i> behind this post. It is true that the only way to deradicalize people is to find the irrational core behind their ideas and try to address that. I&#x27;ve had hour long discussions with &quot;patriots&quot; making BS arguments about the inherent sociocultural predisposition of black people towards  crime, consistently trying to dig at why they <i>really</i> believed what they did - in the end, they had a traumatic experience getting mugged. After arriving at this, it was able to empathize, connect with them, and start shaking the beliefs.<p>But importantly, this was <i>after</i> I had interrupted them spreading &quot;race realist&quot; propaganda to a younger colleague of ours. The order of operations when dealing with  people holding harmful beliefs (which are almost universally authoritarian, moralistic or of the &quot;fuck you, I got mine&quot; banal egoism) is to<p>1. stop them from doing harm&#x2F;do harm reduction<p>2. try to connect with them as humans and try to deal with the trauma that almost always underlies their beliefs<p>Trying to compromise with people who are unwilling to compromise is how you get the slide into fundamentalist christianity (to quote the republican senator Kinzinger &quot;the christian taliban&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;jun&#x2F;30&#x2F;kinzinger-boebert-church-state-christian-taliban" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;jun&#x2F;30&#x2F;kinzinger-bo...</a> ) that the US has been experiencing throughout the last decades. 
If you try to rationally and civilly deal with people not interested in being rational and civil but only about pushing <i>their</i> view of the world onto you, it won&#x27;t work. In order to get that treatment, the beliefs need to be of a kind which is itself tolerant to others. Secular societies leaving the choice of abortion to women fulfills this condition: no-one is stopping hardcore christians from not aborting. But a society which forces women to come to term but does <i>not</i> also force everyone to donate blood and organs to those in need and does not provide a UBI cannot use the &quot;life must be preserved&quot; argument - it is simply imposing one extremely specific behavioural rule onto one specific subgroup of the population.<p>I know it is a radical take, but there are actual <i>differences</i> between beliefs. Acting as if there isn&#x27;t does not bridge gaps, it simply pulls us towards extremes.