> allowing the electorate to smell their bullshit.
You need to look at the numbers. Far-right parties are growing everywhere in Europe... One is nearly the largest party in Sweden.
You need to look at the numbers. Far-right parties are growing everywhere in Europe... One is nearly the largest party in Sweden.
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.
.. 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.
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.
So a society would need to be a bit intolerant to stamp out intolerance, making it overall more tolerant.
You _need_ tolerance to accomodate liberty. Otherwise those who do not tolerate your liberty will prevent it.
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.
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.
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.
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.