'But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”. '
This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.
Even George Orwell who fired a rifle at fascists eventually concluded that "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’"
I think the Charlie Kirk thing scared people straight for a few weeks but I've definitely seen an uptake of submissions to HN about various tempests in teapots such as the recent drama about an open source project that was big in 2005 and only niche since 2012 or something about waffles and now a laptop maker that tweeted a link to the wrong thing or something.
There is still this emphasis by certain on canceling people at conferences and stuff because they are "fascists" but a lack of recognition that the democratic institutions that they like so much are putting "fascists" in power throughout the world -- and if they want it to be different they're going to have to stop dehumanizing people who vote the wrong way and talk to them. The message of "you are bad", "your society is bad" just doesn't sell, in fact Black people don't want to hear about they weighed down by the legacy of slavery, they want to maximize the life that's in front of them.
Thing is that people find meaning in believing "society is bad" so it serves the interest of this selfish meme to put "fascists" in power; the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or Fox News couldn't have done a better job engineering a fifth column for the left which would keep the right in power permanently.
In what sense is the current administration not a fascist one? They are consolidating plenary authority in the executive, erasing democratic norms, enacting lawfare against political enemies with the DOJ, abducting undesirables to torture camps in legally untouchable countries, pardoning convicted insurrectionists, and treating Blue areas like enemy territory -- up to and including military occupation. This is unprecedented in American politics since the Civil War.
Not everyone to the right of the "far left" is a fascist, but the administration in power undeniably has a fascist core. And people who actually study this stuff professionally largely agree.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
Whether or not it is, the repetition of that word by you and your friends is a magic spell that brought that administration into reality. For years it has been "Kier Starmer is a fascist" or "White people are fascists" or "Your local police department is fascist", etc.
A certain amount of blame can be laid at centrist politicians who can't take advantage of left-wing populist sentiments because they are too afraid of donors. [1] But an ultra-left that is obviously warming up the ovens for DHH because he said something stupid once and might come for me because I'm cisgender just seems fascinated with fascism because they're jealous the same way Charlie Kirk was fascinated with "cancel culture" because like David Horowitz he wished he could punish anyone in academia who he disagreed with.
[1] Look at the donors who will give money to anyone who isn't Mamdani no matter how bad because they don't have faith in the ability of blue state institutions to completely frustrate and hamstring anyone who tries to do anything.
As a somewhat conservative Christian -- not some frothing-at-the-mouth liberal -- reading this left me feeling vaguely nauseous and made me want to ensure that no amount of my money went into this guy's pockets again. This is not some witch hunt over subtle ideological differences. It's literally the kind of thing that David Duke would have been saying a decade ago.
"Whether or not it is, the repetition of that word by you and your friends is a magic spell that brought that administration into reality."
Based on my observations over the last decade, I vehemently disagree on the direction of causality here.
And to be clear, DHH was deliberately aligning himself with Tommy Robinson - a British street agitator who rose to prominence after being kicked out of an avowedly fascist party because of his insistence on prioritising violence over electoral politics (the party's "political soldier" leadership at the time sought to give equal weight to both).
Using the term "fascist" in that context isn't about cancelling someone, or targetting them unfairly - it's an accurate description of the specific ideology that they're advocating.
Your answer to a long list of very specific arguments is vague gesturing in the general direction of an imaginary group of people whose only connection is that they happened to use a certain word sometime in the past 10 years?
And these people who have never talked to one another are somehow to blame for the fascist reality they find themselves living in right now because a few of them made hyperbolic comments? I think labeling it victim-blaming doesn't do your rhetoric justice.
Yes this administration definitely has strong, disturbing authoritarian tendencies. The censorious tendencies of the "far left", though, took us a meaningful distance here. Executive power and Congress's uselessness has been accelerating for decades now, but it's not hard to see the place we're at as an extension of where we were.
Jimmy Kimmel's attempted cancellation was just a more state-sponsored attempt at cancelling than the social pressure cancellations of the late 2010s. Sure state-sponsored is what makes it technically censorship but the practical difference it makes for the individual and their platform is almost none. Generating massive amounts of outrage over calling the default git branch "master" is how you get Anduril and Palantir virtue signaling to the right about how their work is keeping America safe and competitive. College student bodies insisting on their administrations doing land acknowledgements is what brought contrarian shit-stirrers like Charlie Kirk to colleges in the first place.
And as a result the modern Democratic party is broken. The "far left" has been obsessed with destroying the Democratic party's coalition because of their insistence on ideological purity. The center left moderates have been vilified and alienated and are too shy to endorse populist left candidates like Mamdani because of how much they've been punched. Free speech advocates have been exiled as progenitors of "hate speech", only for the current administration to use the same "hate speech" rationale to silence the opposition (labeling something as stupid as "Antifa" dangerous.) Left libertarians have been sneered at for so long as agents of greed and enemies of state capacity that now that the state is trying to quash the freedom of those on the left, the left libertarians don't want to speak up.
So yes we're in bad shape, very bad shape. But I have zero confidence that it's the "far left" who is going to save us. If anything I think if the "far left" and the MAGA-ites continue the way they do we're going to end up in an American version of the Spanish Civil War. I think the MAGA-ites just realized that nobody is willing to adhere to historical American norms on liberal democracy; the emperor has no clothes. Might as well push liberal democracy as far as it can go since nobody is willing to fight for it.
EDIT: I'm expecting downvotes for this opinion and it's one I don't share on lefty social media spaces because it's always a very disliked one but I'd welcome actual discussion on this. The closest I've seen to a rebuttal is "if we need to moderate our positions then we become as bad as the other side, so what's the point?" which I also disagree with. An inability to talk about this is yet another mark that shows how far the gulf between the sides are in the US.
This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.