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Treated as a threat to society and target for law enforcement. Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to decades in prison as punishment for being the anti-antifa. Resisting leftist thugs will not be tolerated. A bunch of right-libertarian stoners get COINTELPRO'd in the Governor Whitmer kidnapping FBI-led conspiracy. Etc, etc.
These groups are filled to the brim with feds. The police state works and is aimed in one direction.
Is this what we're calling seditious conspiracy these days?
This is funny given the verb you used to describe the maybe-entrapment the Wolverine Watchmen faced was a program that almost solely targeted leftists.
I mean there is some truth to it. The left has done very little to confront the insurgent DSA despite the far left having some pretty odious people and policies. Generally the center left is afraid to rile up the extremely online people who make the most noise and as a result are pretty feckless at addressing bad stuff happening on their side.
The right wing establishment, on the other hand, works hard to make sure insurgents stays out of real power. They keep a tight leash on weird splinter groups with unorthodox ideas, especially on Israel etc. I think that is a good thing as the optics for right wing insurgents are often terrible and involve people just as bad as DSA people. Nobody is coming to your rescue if you make some weirdo militia group to police the border.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but could I get specifics?
I mean, I'd argue both Trump presidencies are a pretty strong argument this isn't the case. The right wing establishment 10 years ago was the Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, Jeb Bush crowd. The adults in the room, as they were so fond of reminding everybody. They pretty spectacularly failed to defeat the right flank insurgency that first emerged in the form of the Tea Party but eventually fully cohered around Trump as MAGA. The GOP is an insurgency become establishment. It's just that there's always another insurgency, like the Groypers, or your militantly anti-government militias, or whatever Tucker and MTG and Massie may or may not be scheming.
How is Trump analogous to the DSA? He's not radical either in social or economic policy.
How are they more reasonable and moderate than Trump?
Ok, this is getting absurd... "Let's balance the budget" is now seen as the same kind of radicalism as "let's implement socialism"?
You wouldn't consider this radical? Or restricting asylum to only white South Africans? The scale of his usage of tariffs? Taking 9.9 equity in Intel? Trying to overturn a century of legal precedent on birthright citizenship? You might agree with all of these things, but I don't think it's crazy to say they're outside what had been the established mainstream for decades. I mean, isn't that exactly why Trump has been so wildly popular? He gave voice to all of these nascent issues the more right-leaning base felt the establishment had been ignoring or feckless or kowtowing to Democrats on.
I mean, lazy answer is they didn't do all those things I just said Trump and his admin did. But to at least have something more to add, none of them seemed inherently hostile to NATO, nor as fawning of various dictators as Trump. Pretty much anything that diverges from the Blob is definitionally radical given the totality of the Blob.
No, obviously it's not. All I said is that MAGA developed out of the Tea Party, which I don't think is particularly controversial to say given there's an ideological and stylistic connective tissue between the movements. I didn't compare the the DSA to the Tea Party apart from saying they served in the role of insurgents. I mean that structurally, instead of implying they are somehow precisely equivalent. There was a neocon establishment, it was challenged by the Tea Party, and it was eventually displaced by MAGA.
The proposed scale would be pretty radical. Have I slept through them meeting that goal, or actually being on track of doing it, or officially stated that is their goal in a place that is not Twitter?
In my opinion the refugee question in America is a too marginal to call a movement in any direction "radical", but I suppose I see where you're coming from.
About as radical as FDR. Which to be fair is pretty radical, but that's not how he's remembered by the mainstream.
About as radical as inventing a right to abortion out of thin air, o reinterpreting the second amendment to allow the current scale of gun control.
Sort of, but not quite. The thing is that the establishment was promising to do something about all these things for decades, but were doing the opposite once in power.
Fair point, I don't think this is actual policy beyond Stephen Miller's fever dreams. I would still argue it's pretty radical to message support for deporting a number so massive it would by necessity include millions of citizens, if significantly less radical than actually doing so.
I appreciate the even-handedness.
I mean, I'd have voted for Norman Thomas myself, but even I can acknowledge that 100%, FDR was a radical shift from what had been mainstream up until then. But that's the thing, isn't it? When radicalism succeeds, it becomes the new mainstream, usually because what was radical was actually where the majority (or at least the plurality) was for a while before it finally filtered up to elites.
I mean, no argument here on Roe vs. Wade. I support the policy goal, but I'm convinced by arguments that it was bad jurisprudence. While I like the law to support the outcomes I want for society, I like it to be internally consistent and not politically motivated more. That's what Congress is for.
I think the 2nd Amendment is written in such a way that lends itself to being misinterpreted, but I also think we exist in an uncomfortable tension where the literal interpretation of "shall not be infringed" probably precludes stuff like universal background checks or restricting access to people with severe mental health issues, which are almost universally popular.
Tell me about it. I think this is just what a two party system does once you get far away enough from the last realignment.
Kudos. This is the kind of mature argument I love to see on The Motte, with two disagreeing but intellectually honest sides. How I wish it wasn't so impossibly rare elsewhere on the Internet.
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