Many people do. I see this as a dangerous problem. Weimar Germany also really wanted the right to reign and it didn't turn out well. The party here was founded in part by two literal Nazis and a bunch of skinheads. I don't really care what people want when they want them to rule.
I'm caught in a (philosophical?) dillemna though: I don't want the right to rise to power because I fear for the future of freedom, but I would be repressing freedom by ostracising/excluding the right from electoral eligibility. Is technocracy the answer? Have some kind of determinable objective truth rule? How do we mitigate for failure to identify the objective truth in that case?
.. and on continues the shower thought.
Overall I'm worried, though. There are many hallmarks about the current political climate that have been present in the not-that-long-before any major conflict in history. I really, honestly, am worried there will be some large conflict in our lifetime.
Forget tolerance I want liberty back. What makes tolerance so good that it should be prioritized over everything else? I want everyone granted certain inalienable rights and then allowed to live how they want as long as they abide by their rights and the rights of others. If people want to use their right to vote, follow the process, and support something that others disagree with, that's liberty in action.
>(...) as long as they abide by their rights and the rights of others.
In other words, you want to prioritize tolerance over liberty.
Not even the most hardcore anarchist wants to live in a society where someone else's right to swing their fist doesn't end where their own nose begins, which is what true liberty entails, although they will vocally denounce any form of tolerance even as they implicitly accept it for themselves.
And it's worth pointing out that you don't even actually disagree with the paradox of tolerance in this regard, since the inflection point of tolerance/intolerance Popper claims should be a party refusing to recognize the rights of others or to act within legal bounds - the paradox of tolerance was written as a response to the result of German "tolerance" for Nazism at the time.
No one is actually arguing that mere civil political disagreement shouldn't be tolerated, but rather there is a recognition borne out of history that authoritarian beliefs, if not pushed against, will overwhelm the body politic in a similar way as cancer. Accepting the paradox of tolerance means recognizing that some prejudices and systems of belief are inherently harmful and that their adherents will never simply accept peaceful coexistence with others within the framework of a just and civil society.
Nazis will never play nice, and casting them as a victimized and oppressed group with legitimate grievances with whom we should empathize, and whose arguments we should consider (or reconsider, since nothing the far right has to say is actually new,) will not end well for anyone.
And to serve the forum's inevitable reflex towards whataboutism, this is not to let extreme leftism off the hook. There just happens not to be a surge in hard left ideology happening around the world at the moment, so mentioning the left in the context of this specific conversation for the sake of "balance" wouldn't be relevant.
Perhaps the answer is more ignorance. I doubt most of the political groups any of us worries about is actually as large and as ill-intentioned as we imagine, but rather than have no idea we always know just enough to feel in danger. Feeling in danger, we seek to control first and understand later, and that makes our political neighbours feel threatened, and so it goes until the centre cannot hold.
Perhaps the paradox of tolerance requires a deliberate agnosticism about how people unlike us live, a turning away from information that would turn us reactionary if we only had part of it. That used to be the default in an era of slow communication, but it could be cultivated deliberately if it's what's needed.
It is indeed one great famous weakness of democratic systems, the fact that they typically end up incubating anti-democratic systems that replace them. The ones who do not (e.g. UK Parliament) usually manage to survive by negating their democratic nature when it is expedient to do so (i.e. limiting representation with very draconian measures, so that "revolutionaries" are kept out of power).
I do hope that, and believe society should strive for, the utopian ideal of education that is plentiful enough it would make the need to be intolerant (of intolerance) redundant. I understand it might be immature/naive to expect that "if only they understood the facts, they would change their mind!" but one can dream.
I think your comment is insightful but I don't have an answers to any of this. I just wish that stuff was what we were trying to figure out of a society rather than the trash going on these days.
I think you're right that we could definitely be on the eve of something about to happen, especially combining those observations with recent geopolitical updates.
>Is technocracy the answer? Have some kind of determinable objective truth rule? How do we mitigate for failure to identify the objective truth in that case?
That's probably not even the most pressing problem. The most pressing problem is that the rulers in a technocracy are also self-interested, and simply knowing how something works is no proof against being a bad actor. Recent history is rife with experts tilting things to their advantage, and deflecting criticisms of unfair behaviour by saying the unwashed masses simply didn't know enough about the decisions that just so happened to transfer a lot of wealth upwards doesn't inspire confidence.
If you don't respect democracy as a way to harness the wisdom of crowds, maybe you can respect it as a pressure-relief valve.
I've always viewed the popularity of the far-right as being a result of a general sense of hopelessness that turns to resentment.
Right wing media feeds off that hopelessness and apportion blame to a convenient target, one that usually can't speak up for itself. The homeless, immigrants, benefits claimants are favourite examples.
At the same time they portray the people responsible for the decisions that lead to that hopelessness as uniquely competent by taking a tough approach on the scapegoats.
The only real way of reducing the temperature is to make those people more secure, financially and socially. You don't care if your neighbour is a Polish plumber if you're not worrying about making rent/paying bills.
Conservative parties normally won't enact the measures necessary to cool things down, since they typically benefit electorally and convincing those already in the pipeline is extremely difficult.
I see that as a reaction to the previous raise of the intolerant left. If that is so, it's self correcting and the entire extreme right will go back into being treated like the clowns they are as soon as they get any power.
Many people do. I see this as a dangerous problem. Weimar Germany also really wanted the right to reign and it didn't turn out well. The party here was founded in part by two literal Nazis and a bunch of skinheads. I don't really care what people want when they want them to rule.