Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Fool proof method for arguing with fascists: apply their logic to them.
They think their beliefs are universal. But the second you characterize them as the out-group of a violent in-group, they’ll quickly qualify their statements. Be a rhetorical mirror to their misanthropic, suspicious, hateful worldview.
There was a book about authoritarian personalities I was reading a while ago that was fascinating and depressing. It had a study that showed right wing authoritarians are also willing to hunt down themselves
Suppose the federal government, some time in the future, passed a law outlawing various religious cults. Government officials then stated that the law would only be effective if it were vigorously enforced at the local level and appealed to everyone to aid in the fight against these cults.
[…]
Who can ’em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to join that posse. Ditto for persecuting homosexuals, and ditto for religious cults, “radicals” and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian Social Credit Party, the Confederation of Regions Party, and the mainstream Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others.
Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a “law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians.” (I told the subjects that right-wing authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.) RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law, they were being the very pople whom the law would persecute, and the posse should therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their brains: “If the government says these people are dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped.”
Exposing the right’s hypocrisy doesn’t really do much. Many of them know but don’t care. Many of them don’t know but also don’t care.
Sartre: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity
Fool proof method for arguing with fascists: apply their logic to them.
They think their beliefs are universal. But the second you characterize them as the out-group of a violent in-group, they’ll quickly qualify their statements. Be a rhetorical mirror to their misanthropic, suspicious, hateful worldview.
There was a book about authoritarian personalities I was reading a while ago that was fascinating and depressing. It had a study that showed right wing authoritarians are also willing to hunt down themselves
From this book https://theauthoritarians.org/
So I wouldn’t bank on their self awareness
Big ups for Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians. Great book.
May I introduce you to The Alt-Right Playbook
TL;DR: they absolutely do not care.
There is only one party that cares about hypocrisy. And it ain’t the conservatives.
The point isn’t about getting them to stop, but to help more moderate people realize what they’re doing.