Wiki - The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
The problem is that people label everything and everyone “Nazi” or “fascist” these days and with that they justify not tolerating any type of experience or opinion they find uncomfortable.
This leads to basically ignoring a whole bunch of people. But their problems won’t stop simply because you ignore them. Instead you now have people who were on the verge to vote right wing, now definitely voting right wing because they feel the left ignores their problems (which is true).
I don’t think that’s “the problem.” There’s been a global resurgence of actual fascism over the last 20 years. Nationalistic, racist, xenophobic, dictatorially structured, scapegoatism, corporatist, all the boxes checked. It’s been my experience people complaining about the term being “watered down” have dipped their own toe too much in that pool, i.e., they think some elements of it are excusable, sympathize with the actual fascist figures, and hence rush to their defense.
Fascism never caught on anywhere with the public in any country because the whole population was all suddenly cartoon villains. The public got sold a belief system that was appealing to them, that made sense to them, that’s how they fell for it. They’d put in elements of truth into what they were saying, or appeal to basic grievances that the population had.
Or perhaps some people aren’t fascist when they are angry about the communication problems with refugees, for example . Perhaps they are just simple minded, a bit stupid, politically uninterested, whatever.
These people will always exist. They don’t go away when we hate them a lot. Or when we label them as fascist in some kind of Gotcha moment.
A practical solution would be to deal with their problems. Which can easily be done if you are willing to pay a bit of money for community centers etc., which could help with communication and integration tremendously.
It’s a mislead interpretation of what tolerance means that makes people wilfully blind to these issues. They will even risk having a party like the AFD growing in seats for this.
Understanding any problem is a crucial condition for solving it. That includes accurately understanding and characterizing what’s going on. The goal isn’t to name-call people sucked into a fascist movement, it’s to not bury our heads in the sand and pretend fascism isn’t making a huge comeback. That includes actually being able to explain to these people the nature and structure of a fascist movement so they can understand how they’ve been duped.
But the right’s problems are things like “black people exist” or “trans people exist”, or really just a bunch of variants of that for different people they hate. The Nazi comparison isn’t invalid, and there’s absolutely no reason for the left to entertain their problems as legitimate.
You just generalized a huge side of the political spectrum as simple minded racists. Then you said that for that reason, their problems don’t matter.
Don’t you see a problem with that?
No it’s not. I mean for example people who live next to a refugee home and asked for help to deal with the problems that came with it. Just really boring problems that could have been actually resolved. Like people dumping their trash on the streets, ignoring driving rules, minors stealing in corner shops, stuff like that.
In these neighbourhoods it could have been prevented that the people don’t want more refugees or even vote for AFD. But instead, when people mentioned these issues, they were called racists or Nazis. Because it was uncomfortable to talk about it and everyone wanted to seem extra tolerant.
I wonder if people still think it was worth it to ignore these complaints as petty. That behaviour has antagonized a bunch of people from the cause. Only for the short gratification of a holier than thou attitude.
