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You seem to be conflating the ability to debate with the existance of objective ethical facts. That sounds like a bit of a false choice to me. What kind of ethical experiment would reveal an ethical truth in the same way in which jumping of a cliff reveals a physical truth?
It also strikes me that our belief that slavery is wrong is not really hostage to experiment in the same way in which my belief that gravity exists is. What kind of fact would you have to be confronted with to recognise that your belief ('slavery is wrong') is false?
if such a thing even exists, how do you learn about it? I can't think of any way to prove or test it.
Fascists don't give a shit that you think you owned them in a debate. A fist doesn't care what sweet words come out of a mouth as it's crashing into teeth. This is exactly the blind spot of liberalism that many 20th century thinkers (some vaguely labeled as postmodernists) tried to shine a light on: Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
> Liberals from a previous era would have made ground beef out of an intellectual weakling like Richard Spencer, but to argue a position requires a belief that positions may be argued as well as an ability to think coherently and organize one's own views.
Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power. How did you come to this belief that liberalism has any potency against fascism in spite of the historical evidence?
The fascist may not, but what about the audience?
> Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
In order to gain power, you have to persuade people to follow you. Brute force is a hilariously inefficient way of doing that. Heck, even the ancient Athenians (i.e. Pericles, Demosthenes, etc) realized that it was far easier to persuade people with words than with fists.
>Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power.
And how did Hitler seize and consolidate his power? It certainly wasn't with brute force. It was with rhetoric. Even without understanding a single word of German, I can feel the force of Hitler's personality when I see footage of the Nuremberg rallies.