[woodruffw]

That is the eternal question. However, I will submit for consideration that the person we're talking about when we use the phrase "punch a Nazi" is, in fact, a neo-Nazi[1].

Dealing more abstractly: I personally think we are justified in practicing "preemptive intolerance" when the party in question (1) has a bad faith (not merely faithless) relationship with the "language" of our political systems, and (2) demonstrates repeated intent to employ the mechanisms of our systems to subvert them. Both conditions are necessary; the absence of the latter makes the individual a LARPer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer

[teakettle42]

You are advocating behavior that is highly corrosive and fundamentally antithetical to the effective functioning of a healthy democracy.

Weimar Germany wasn’t fertile political soil for extremism because there weren’t enough people punching Nazis. In fact, the opposite — pervasive, normalized political violence gave cover to extremists who could then argue that they were justified in escalating their behaviors.

If I were to follow your own ethos (and to be perfectly clear, I do not), I should be advocating punching you in the street, as your ethos represents a bad faith attempt to undermine and subvert our political systems by using violence to control the words and ideas shared by others.

[woodruffw]

All I've done here is rephrased Popper's words, with some additional conditions. The fact that you don't like it mean that it's in bad faith; I've made no such presumption about you or anybody else in this thread.

And no, that's not what caused the decline of Weimar (and the rise of Nazism). Nazism was preordained by a confluence of political factors, including the need for an easy post-war scapegoat in the form of Jews and other outsiders. 20th century European Fascist movements follow a uniform pattern: the loss of face or sovereignty (Trianon, WWI), followed by irredentism and revanchism towards any group perceived as having either benefited (or merely not suffered enough). Those sentiments culminated in a concerted effort to use newfound civil freedoms to undermine the system itself, chiefly by directing a disposition for intolerance towards those easiest to vilify.

This is all in marked contrast to our current situation and historical context, one where liberal activism has consistently made America freer for increasingly large swathes of its population. We easily forget that you could have gone to jail in 1955 for buying a copy of Ulysses, or been fined for daring to eat a meal with a more privileged race. My sole interest has and will continue to be expanding those freedoms.