Well, as opposed to any time when it wasn't dying... because this is exactly how it dies.

Democracy actually works with small causes and stable rules. Not at all with radicalism.

How do we define radicalism in this context?

Radicalism doesn't do this:

> complex, reasonable and nuanced debate, and appeal to the reasonability

In that case, American politics has been dominated by radicalism at least since the time we let one of our own vessels blowing up due to lax maintenance drag us into the Spanish-American War, if not longer. Politics is usually more about feelings than facts. The rational voter is a myth. We don't imagine Americans were mulling the issue of slavery by reading the great thinkers of the day in an era when 1 in 10 white men couldn't read, do we?

No, it has not.

There have been radicalism popping up here or there, but it only dominates the politics some of the time. Usually, politics is about real details, not great abstract and non-negotiable things.

And yeah, interesting that you put slavery here. The way the US handled it wasn't through democratic institutions. (You have a famous saying about how those institutions fail from time to time and people must help them die.)

Previous eras of democracy often had some limitations on suffrage, and no round-the-clock media cycle that reached into every household. Under those circumstances, political debate was less sensitive to the loudness of the mob, and more sensitive to longform argument published and read among intellectuals. If you look at nascent American or European democracy, it is remarkable how much its tensions were negotiated by texts that seem emotionally balanced and complex indeed in the modern era of television, radio, and internet.

Yeah, no. There was a lot of political violence in proto-democracies, especially around the topic of suffrage. If we just look at "limitation" of women's right to vote - Suffragettes would be called domestic terrorists today.

It's not much more than nostalgia to think that in the good old times pens were mightier than sword. The nascent American democracy fought two wars to settle its tensions despite all the wise prose the elite wrote.

And in Weimar Germany, there were violent street clashes between Nazis, Communists and the Police, as well as assassinations, attempted coups, etc.

> in Weimar Germany, there were violent street clashes between Nazis, Communists and the Police, as well as assassinations, attempted coups, etc.

Thanks for amplifying my point for me.

When democracy broke down in those days you needed to pick up sticks, rocks and Molotov cocktails to silence those that disagree with you..

Today you just need to delete their DNS records.

  """ The most violent element in society is ignorance
       -- Emma Goldman """

It's not that there was a "golden age" of democracy, just that ways of disrupting the best efforts of reasonable people have changed.

Censorship laws directed against "hate speech" and "disinformation" are just new manifestations of ignorance. They are a retreat from rationality. Truth must be fought for with more words, not less, tooth and nail every day, and it's very costly.

In the aftermath of the breakdown of German democracy and after the Nuremberg trials, Germany passed very strict laws against platforming fascists. How do we square that with the notion that laws against hate speech are a retreat from rationality?

> In the aftermath of the breakdown of German democracy and after the Nuremberg trials, Germany passed very strict laws against platforming fascists.

It's conceivable that those laws were a mistake. As I understand it, in the 1950s and 60s Germany went into a very psychologically "wounded" state, in which a generation felt unable to face the past.

Since speaking about it was verboten, the children of that generation had no ground truth, nor any forum in which to seek one, and they were shut down whenever they raised questions.

As a result paranoid currents began circulating in the culture of the 70s leading to Baader-Meinhof's Red Army Faction and other outspilling of unresolved guilt, accusation and anger. Of course it's a textbook case of what Freud would have named "repression".

> How do we square that with the notion that laws against hate speech are a retreat from rationality?

If you accept the premise of necessary of openness and public legibility then it doesn't need squaring. It is the essence of rationality, albeit uncomfortable and costly. So long as apples and oranges are not confused. One responds to speech with speech and to actions with actions.

Unfortunately we live in an age best describes as "psychotic" - one strong definition of which is the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Technology plays a major part in this split.

We also suffer a highly asymmetrical information-scape in which response to ugly ideas is not always possible. Again this is ironically exacerbated by technology that promised to ameliorate the problem by "connecting us all".

In any case, the healthy mind does not mistake expressed feelings, wishes and fantasies or even blustering statements of "intent" (eg. "I'm going to f*king kill my mother in law") from actual reality and actions in the world. In this state of "sanity", free from fear, one is able to engage in reasonable disputation.

[delayed]

For me the "proof" of the pudding is that the Jan 6 mob are all in jail. Actions were met with actions when the line was croseed.

The disturbing thought is "would they be in jail had they succeeded in dragging Pence bodily out and hanging him?"

They came very close to a successful coup. The protections in place got razor-thin on margin. As an engineer, that makes me question the robustness of the protections.

> The disturbing thought is "would they be in jail had they succeeded in dragging Pence bodily out and hanging him?"

We're fully into the realm of hypotheticals now, but I suspect not, and we would be in a new history written by the victors - terrifying as that would be.

> As an engineer, that makes me question the robustness of the protections.

Rightly so. And maybe we would be in another rotten phase of bloodshed and chaos. But as a fellow engineer, maybe with a little more scepticism, I question whether an engineering approach to human destiny is such a great stance. Without asking "Protection of what, for whom, from who, and to what end?" we're trying to engineer against change in the abstract, without a full understanding of what that might be.

After all that's happened, all those people who supported Trump are still around, and still harbouring their disaffected ideas. We must deal with them as we find them, as fellow humans.

Silencing any group, no matter how much we disagree with them is only a road to more trouble.

Anyway, I'll probably miss further in this thread, so an interesting and thoughtful exchange, Thankyou.

I can't imagine the Secret Service or the military would have been sympathetic beyond more than a handful of individuals.

The Secret Service's ultimate loyalty is to the President.

And military loyalty is hierarchical. It doesn't take more than a handful of individuals to execute a takeover. Consider how Germany's military submitted to Nazi control. Consider the percentage of the US military that fought on the side of the Confederacy in 1861.

I would expect "classical democracy" to be ancient Greece.

It's a strange redefining of terms. In a discussion about terminological abuse and language control, no less!

Your expectations are not definitions either, are they?