“You liberals and your safe spaces/trigger warnings/elitism/anti-fascist protests are the reason we have the alt-right” isn’t wrong just because it’s cruel and victim-blaming. It’s wrong because…well, follow that to its logical conclusion.
Suppose you’re right. Suppose we live in a world where a group of overeager progressive students demanding trigger warnings can actually cause large groups of Nazis to march with assault rifles and elect a leader who promises to bankrupt, deport, imprison, assault and/or kill millions of people. Suppose we live in a world where one punch thrown by an Antifa protester naturally and rightly leads to mass curtailment of civil rights for everyone.
Suppose we live in a world where those on the side of justice have to be perfect, have to moderate our language and keep our voices down, have to assemble politely and calmly, or else we can and should expect violent repression.
What kind of world is that?
If we live in a world where overeager college kids naturally provoke Nazi aggression, then the Nazis have already come, and the college kids and the Antifas and whoever else you want to blame today are just convenient targets.
“On the side of justice” - Hint, not everyone agrees that your faction is “on the side of justice,” especially when that faction is willing to do things like overlook sex crimes for ideological reasons. (“But right-wingers ignore sex cri-” right, but you’re implicitly claiming that you are better than them. If you aren’t really, why bother with you?)
Look, there can be dustups without it escalating so much. White nationalists were fringe earlier.
But there is support on the Left for demographic replacement, combined with an implicit belief in ethnonationalism for everyone except white people.
Every time some progressive talks about how “we are the guests of the native tribes here in Michigan,” it supports collective ethnic ownership of the land, which is a core component of ethnonationalism.
You cannot have collective ethnic justice and not have white nationalism.
Either you have civic nationalism without white nationalism, or you have individualism without white nationalism, but you cannot have racial consciousness without white people having racial consciousness, too.
And yeah, historically, white nationalism has been bad. So maybe I don’t appreciate people running around specifically making white people aware of their race and how it’s “problematic” all the time making them identify harder with whiteness.
Spencer’s rally wasn’t even that big! They had to truck people in from all across the country! That whole “anti Nazis” rally in Boston or whatever dwarfed the KKK that were said to be planning to arrive by orders of magnitude.
There might be ways to have ethnic consciousness without causing white ethnonationalism, but they are ideologically prohibited to you, and would probably look more like the behaviors of East Asian soft authoritarian low-democracy city-states than anything you’d see in a diversity seminar.
