[pdonis]

Your claim 2) does not imply your "expect to see" 2). Why? Because democracies don't have to incubate leftist movements in their own country. They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.

This, in itself, is not an argument for the "reactionary" claims Scott is arguing against, for reasons I have already given. But it is an argument against Scott's "alternate model".

Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to vote for policies that move further and further left. Which I think is a fair description of what has happened in "democracies" over the past century or more. Whether this tendency can continue indefinitely is a different question.

[wharvle]

These are interesting claims and points, perhaps, but remain disconnected from the original material. In particular:

> They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.

This needs an immense amount of development to maybe qualify as both connected-enough to this topic to belong in Scott's piece, and a strong enough claim to be worth either explaining and refuting, or adopting and defending. You're claiming that things like declining to prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example of an action that acted as an outlet for what would otherwise have become domestic US leftist political violence in the US. There are, like, several things about that, and your other examples, that need to be filled in before it might be clear that makes any sense at all, plus some kind of pattern of this kind of thing increasing over time needs to be established that can't easily be explained by other, more-straightforward factors. Notably an awful lot of these examples are failures to act—what's that about? How's that an outlet for a kind of "energy" that would otherwise push the US closer to a reign of terror? Why should we think that sort of thing can act as such an outlet? What's the connection between those things? I see none whatsoever—it is not obvious this should be entertained as a relevant and strong line of inquiry.

> Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to vote for policies that move further and further left.

Maybe! But it doesn't appear to make them ever-more violent in the specific way in question. The real events and trends we have before us really don't appear to fit—not to fail to fit your claims, but by the claims made by the folks Scott wrote the piece to address. (This isn't me arguing against you—I follow that you do get that what you're aiming at is Scott's alternative model, not that you're arguing in support of the Reactionaries)

You have proposed some reasons different from Scott's that this may be the case, and fault him for not addressing your proposed reasons, but it remains unclear to me that there's a strong line of argument there, specifically as it relates to the topic at hand. It's not clear to me that he should have brought it up, or that it makes his argument weaker that he did not, let alone that it's part of some set of "schoolboy mistakes" to have not done so.

What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for failing to address this stuff. I definitely am not convinced that failing to entertain (or even mention) some kind of, "the 'temperature' of US leftist domestic political violence has, perhaps, remained cool only because we did stuff like not do much to help Chiang Kai-shek" explanation, constitutes an elementary error.

[pdonis]

> You're claiming that things like declining to prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example of an action that acted as an outlet for what would otherwise have become domestic US leftist political violence in the US.

I am making no such claim. My claim is simpler: Scott's argument is that "liberal democracies" are the best way to prevent "state-sponsored violence". But that argument can't possibly be valid if "liberal democracies" in fact cause violence in other countries.

Scott's rebuttal to that claim is to gerrymander the definition of "state-sponsored violence" so that it only counts if it's against the citizens of the "liberal democracies" themselves. But that is exactly the problem: people like Scott can pat themselves on the back about how great "liberal democracies" are only by ignoring the historical record of "liberal democracies" sponsoring all kinds of violence in other states besides their own.

If Scott were to remove the blinders he put on by defining "state-sponsored violence" in such a narrow way and take an honest look at the historical record of "liberal democracies", he would never have even tried to write such an article. Instead he would be directing his intellectual resources towards a much more useful inquiry: why do "liberal democracies" sponsor so much violence in other countries--especially when, in every other country besides their own, sponsoring all that violence never even leads to liberal democracy? Why don't they see the obvious contradiction between their stated principles and the actual results of their actions? But that question isn't even on Scott's radar, because of his ignorance of history.

[pdonis]

> What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for failing to address this stuff.

Scott's argument--not his anti-Reactionary argument, but his argument in favor of his alternate model--depends on particular historical claims. Those claims are false, and they're false because of the historical errors he makes. Those historical errors are not about small or peripheral points. They are about points that are central to his argument. I have already explicitly quoted and discussed them and I won't repeat them here. I just find it difficult to see how Scott is not in error for failing to spot these historical mistakes that he makes, particularly in view of his reputation for supposedly being much better than average at making valid arguments. Making valid arguments is not just a matter of using reason correctly. It's a matter of reasoning from correct premises, and making sure that you are in fact doing so.