Well. We had several ideological purges earlier in 20th century, and I can tell what will happen next:
every netizen will be triaged by a progressive troika, and sent to rehabilitation and education camps. Internet versions (excommunication), or real life ones .
It is crazy to think that ideas can be extinguished. These purges will serve to further concentrate and radicalize the adherents to these ideologies.
edit: I may have been wrong, it seems deplatforming might work. [0] TIL! I had often read that echo chambers exacerbated radicalization but it seems more research has yielded better data to turn over that conclusion.
edit1: it seems like radicalization is more nuanced, and different ways to handle communities based on its composition (eg. it is different to introduce someone to an ideology vs pushing a person already exposed into a more extreme view). Found this video to be informative [1].
Is there evidence of this? It seems like there are two views - that having an "open market of ideas" to debate things is how we should move forward, or that deplatforming is the way to move forward.
Communism, as a political movement, was largely extinguished in the US during the 20th century through purges and deplatforming.
How many communist organizations do you see, these days? How much reach do they have, compared to the 30s? How much political power do they have, compared to the alt-right, today?
Extinguishing that idea into the fringe seems to have worked rather well. As did de-nazification, post WWII. It's only more recently, when platforms started enabling fringe groups, has fascism crawled back into the light of day.
Well, given that Communism was outlawed in the US [0], it seems sensible that the membership numbers would decline. Do you think it is sound policy to outlaw ideologies? I don't think that making something illegal is akin to deplatforming.
Given that the act was, as said in the article you cited, never enforced by the government, the deplatforming through ideological purges, 'cancel culture', and media suppression is what actually killed the movement.
So, yes, this actually proves my point. Buring ideas, and canceling the people espousing them does, in fact, kill political movements.
If your goal is to drive a political movement into the fringe, deplatforming works. If your goal is to have an utterly tolerant climate for political movements, regardless of how abhorrent they are, then, well, we're all observing how it's working out right now. Not very well, I must say, but there's always time for things to get worse.
Hardly. Classical communism died out all over the west even in places without McCarthy, because people in the west could see what was really happening in the USSR and other places. The idea of having a revolution to replace the bourgeoise with the workers was tried, people watched, they saw it led to dictatorship and so it just got harder and harder to be an open advocate for that. "Deplatforming" had very little to do with it.
And really, communism didn't actually die. It just altered its terminology a bit, but the core ideas remained widespread. How do we know this?
Well, one reason is that academia is still full of people who claim to believe in Marxism:
At least outside engineering subjects. So that's a pretty big hint it didn't really go away.
But another is that what we're seeing happen now is pure Marx. Divide the world into two camps, one that oppresses the other. Argue that the oppressed group is victimised, which is why it's the oppressors that own the assets and the wealth. Argue for fixing this with forced wealth transfers, forced replacement in positions of power. Then start to actually implement it, all backed by reams of impenetrable ideological texts, purges, witch hunts, show trials and so on. Claim at all times it's all about equality, even as deeply unequal systems are created before everyone's very eyes. Dare people to point out the double standards and attack them when they do.
We've seen it all before. The words change - proles and bourgeoise were replaced by black and white, imperialism with white privilege or patriarchy, and so on. But scratch the surface and you find Marxist arguments, still there, they never went away.
Why? Perhaps because anti-communists got intellectually lazy. The USSR and to some extent the Nazis made their case for them (Nazi being "National Socalist", lest we forget). Anti-communists didn't really have to build intellectual arguments for their case when the Berlin Wall was making their case for them.
But it's been decades since the wall fell. People haven't really been pushing back on Marxist arguments until very recently and even now, their intellectual muscles are weakened by inactivity. Meanwhile the Marxists have been camping out in academia for decades, brainwashing generations of students into believing - against all data and evidence - that the world can be neatly split into black and white, victims and oppressors. And now we're reaping the whirlwind.
> The idea of having a revolution to replace the bourgeoise with the workers was tried, people watched, they saw it led to dictatorship and so it just got harder and harder to be an open advocate for that.
Your thesis can't be correct, because:
The idea of fascist ethnostates also ended poorly, the last time around - and yet here we are, watching their ideas enjoy a renaissance.
Observing that ideas have been tried, and have failed, clearly does not kill those ideas. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.
1. Marxist terminology and the notion of class war ("proles" and "bourgeoise" are now anachronistic)
2. Marxist economic theory and the goal of replacing capitalism
The dream of overthrowing capitalism lives on in squats and hard-left fringe groups, but it's dead and buried in the mainstream. China's adoption of it put the final nail in that coffin.
The more generalised Marxist theory of dividing the world into oppressors/the oppressed lives on and is seeing a resurgence. With that I agree.
>"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."
>"The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is extreme danger. I maintain that our society IS in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and "philosophies" can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the "marketplace of ideas" is organized and delimited by those who determine national and the individual interest."
