Cheering vs Arguing.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Americans suck at arguing about politics.


Most of what the political "arguments" we see on social media aren't  arguments at all, they're what I call "cheering."

Cheering is basically yelling "our team rules!!!"  or "your team sucks!!!" really loudly. It's a great way to get people who are already on your side to get off their butts and pay attention, and maybe even get involved in political activism. That's obviously important. But it's also obvious that just yelling "my side is awesome" isn't going to persuade anyone to join my side.


Actually, cheering can often be the opposite of persuasive. What looks like an awesome cheer from our side usually looks moronic and evil from the other. In fact, members of the other side often use our cheers to make us look bad to people who we might have been able to persuade to join us. Both sides do this, and actually it's one of the only forms of argument that we're any good at.

How do we deal with Nazis?

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It's crazy that we have to ask this question in 2017, but....what do we do about Nazis in America?

Courtesy of Anthony Crider. Shared under Creative Commons 

It's become clear, especially since Charlottesville, that there are a disturbing number of Americans who explicitly support white supremacy, antisemitism, and actual, honest-to-goodness fascism.

How do we deal with these people?

Now, this is a blog about politics, and I’m a political scientist, so the question I’m asking here is how we deal with Nazis politically. 

I'm not going to talk about what to do if a Neo-Nazi or White supremacist or  KKK member is coming at you with a club, or a car, or an armored division. Those are certainly problems, but they're different from the problems that I'm most worried about right now.

What I'm worried about is how we can keep these sorts of people from hijacking our political process. They can vote after all - they're American citizens - and we've already seen that they can convince other Americans to join their cause, or to vote for someone like Donald Trump. It already worked once, how can we stop them from doing it again?

We have two options. First, we can persuade Nazis to stop being Nazis. As preposterous as that sounds, it's possible, and we already know how to do it. But even if that doesn’t work, we can convince the rest of the country to join our fight against them.