How do you weaken an insidious ideology?
Letting insidious ideologies flourish and debating them in the marketplace of ideas doesn't work.
So how do you do it?
Letting insidious ideologies flourish and debating them in the marketplace of ideas doesn't work.
So how do you do it?
Most ideological death marches I have witnessed in my party have also been accompanied by lack of debate due to unilateral threats of de juro or de facto expulsion by some sort of manufactured consent that seems to come from nowhere.
Solutions however won't be wholly accepted by the ruling class favored by the current ideologies since these "insidious ideologies" oppose their position and power and "mandate of heaven". The ruling class can risk subverting themselves or surrendering power.
Aside from defending free expression as a matter of principal, yes it actually does work over time.
Except during a brief, half-baked spell of McCarthyist schizophrenia in the 50s, the United States, during the whole course of its massive cold war with the USSR, never saw fit to ban support for communism, the publication of communist literature, open talk in support of communism, or even the existence of an actual communist party inside its borders (thanks 1st amendment). Despite this, said ideology simply having to compete in the marketplace of ideas and practical reality, slowly turned into more of a running joke than any real threat in any meaningful sense to U.S society.
Bear in mind the obvious too: once you create the legal right to legally repress insidious ideas, it's a very small leap for successive administrations to also start banning "insidious" ideas, meaning anything they happen to not like out of some self-serving convenience. In the west, there has been, since 2016 in particular, an intermittent fever of force-fed fears about the so-called dangers of misinformation, one promoted by media and politicians both, only for that very same idea to be used by one robust list of real authoritarians specifically to crush disagreement with their particular variants of nonsense, mendacity and propaganda.
More people in the US take communism and socialism seriously as an ideology than ever did during the Cold War.
I also doubt that communism as an ideology was ever a "threat" in any meaningful sense. Actual communist states, sure, but collectivist ideology can be found everywhere in American culture, from social welfare programs to unions and progressive activism. The current frontrunner for mayor of New York is a self-described socialist.
And it didn't work with the Nazis - we debated and denounced that for nearly a century and white supremacist ideology is still popular. Antivax has become not just mainstream but integrated into American policy. Conspiracy theories, racial realism, UFOs, antisemitism, all of it debated and criticized ad nauseum and ad infinitum and none of it has gone away.
>Bear in mind the obvious too: once you create the legal right to legally repress insidious ideas, it's a very small leap for successive administrations to also start banning "insidious" ideas, meaning anything they happen to not like out of some self-serving convenience.
Fair, but I really don't see how letting disinformation and hate run rampant and answering it only with polite debate and criticism when the authoritarians control the means of communication and discourse is much better. Part of combating harmful ideas (after recognizing that such a thing exists and truth has value) has to be attempting to limit the rate at which such ideas propagate, and for that mere debate simply isn't enough.
Maybe the state isn't the solution but free speech alone also isn't.