Smart people on the left have a choice to make: acknowledge nuance or prepare for violence.

The Overton Window is a concept that refers to what’s acceptable in common discourse, the range of ideas a politician or pundit can recommend without being considered too extreme. Our current Overton Window is wide open to left wing ideas. Mainstream discourse promulgated by the mainstream media and thought-leading institutions like universities accepts even implied recommendations of drug use (weed legalization) and violence (punching Nazis), so long as they’re in line with liberal ideology. On the right, however, the Overton Window is barely open. Just the tiniest breeze creeps in. What would have fifty years ago been an acceptable Conservative idea, e.g. women should be encouraged to be homemakers, just about disqualifies you from serious consideration today.

I want to be careful here not to confuse “Conservative” with “right wing,” as “Conservative” may be one of the most misunderstood words in the political lexicon. The caricature we have in our mind of a so-called Conservative, that racist, sexist, golf-obsessed old white man, is actually a relatively fresh idea. Conservatives as such have only been a force in American politics since the 1950s, developed by William F. Buckley et al in reaction to “creeping Marxism.” The word “Conservative” is the direct descendant of the phrase “Classical Liberalism,” which more or less means a belief in preserving the already-very-liberal American social and economic ideals as they existed at the moment of American inception, a sort of Scalia-style originalism. So it’s not that Conservatives aren’t liberal, in fact they are extremely liberal in the larger global historical context. They just don’t want Liberalism to continue too far beyond the point where it was when America was born.

For this reason, it makes sense that our caricatured idea of the Conservative—George H. W. Bush drinking gin-lemonade on the veranda of a well-preserved plantation home—is generally not a fascist. Despite the thumbnail image of this article, in general we don’t accuse these kinds of Republicans of being Hitler. Just about anyone who is president will at one point be caricatured as Hitler, no matter how absurd the comparison.

So Conservatism is not some ancient religion. It’s new, much younger than Liberalism, and is more or less a reaction against extreme Liberalism. Being “right wing,” however, is a different story. That is ancient. Though the etymology derives from the spatial division of the French National Assembly during the late 18th Century, the division between right and left wing thinking is about as old as politics itself. Right wingishness has manifested itself in a thousand different forms over the centuries—from Spartanism to Toryism. In fact, being right wing, like being left wing, has its basis in psychology. Left wingers tend towards compassion, egalitarianism, and individuality, whereas right wingers favor order, tradition, and conscientiousness (this is incidentally why left wingers prefer spirituality and right wingers religion).

The United States, with its emphasis on individual freedom, equality, and an open market, has always been a force of Liberalism. It’s a place where left wingishness has almost always prevailed against right wingishness. Remember your history classes in high school? Weren’t they essentially a tale of the Left repeatedly and distinctively defeating the Right in arduous battle after arduous battle? It should no surprise, therefore, that the American Overton Window is where it is today. There’s a reason why left wing anarchists, even ones who have committed gross acts of treasonous violence, have high-paying jobs at prestigious universities while their right wing counterparts languish in the Supermax.

This is not in itself problematic. As has been repeated ad nauseum, the left won the culture wars of the 1990s, when WASPy white men faced off against rappers and gays for the soul of America. The left won that war for a reason, and now, culturally, we are a more liberal society. The Christian Conservative reactionaries failed, and, in America, they should have. Our Overton Window is simply a reflection of our values, as it is in every other society on Earth.

What’s problematic is when ideas aren’t allowed through the Overton Window not because of their content or quality, but because of who is speaking them. If the Left can simply label speakers of opposing ideas x and then disregard all ideas coming from people who have been labeled x, then the Overton Window stops being a window and becomes an Overton Wall. But it’s a thin, brittle wall made of glass. Overton Walls do not survive for long in the West. Either they open or they break.

In the mind of most leftists that I know, right wingers are divided into two easy-to-digest categories: Neocons and Nazis. Pence, Ryan, the Bushes, even McCain, these are Neocons, the pathetic old WASPs we defeated in the 90s, who for some reason refuse to go away. They’re annoying, but we’re used to them. We understand them. They want to sit in their suburban homes and drink cold glasses of milk without the rappers and the gays disturbing them with loud music. That’s fine. I mean fuck you, but it’s fine.

All other right wingers are relegated to the category of “Nazi.” This is because Liberals cannot imagine why anyone who isn’t a stodgy old WASP would ever choose to not be a Liberal. It doesn’t matter that political differences are rooted in psychology or that, if asked, most members of the so-called Alt Right will say, verbatim, “I am not a white supremacist.” It doesn’t matter that the central beef of most Alt Righters is disgust with industrialized Western Society as designed by white people.

No, right wingers are supposed to be old crusty white men, not young dudes with hipster haircuts and 4chan frog avatars. It just doesn’t make any sense, so they must be Nazis. It’s this refusal to recognize nuance that leaves us with ridiculous contradictions like Milo Yiannopolous, the gay Jew leader of the Nazis, or Donald Trump, the MechaHitler who employs two Jews as his closest advisors, has Orthodox Jewish grandchildren, and once fought to allow blacks and Jews into a racist country club. Any right wing politician or pundit who isn’t Bush-esque simply must be a Nazi even if they’re Jewish. There’s no other explanation.

And when you’re dealing with Nazis, there’s really no point in listening, because Nazis want to kill you. That allows Liberals to shut their ears and go “LALALALALA” every time a non-liberal, non-Neocon speaks. I just had an email exchange with a somewhat legendary left wing journalist who is now retired. I asked him what he was reading by the Alt Right that made him think they were all Nazis. He sent me a list of his Google Alerts keyed to “Alt Right,” with articles in A.V. Club, Mother Jones, Washington Post, Jacobin, Forward, and The Guardian. No wonder he thinks they’re all Nazis. He’s not reading anything they actually write! He’s not letting them into his Overton Window, not because of what they’re saying, but because of who he’s heard they are.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In 1995, Bill Clinton gave a speech about immigration. The position he articulates is more or less the exact same as Donald Trump’s position on immigration today. There’s no talk of rapists and murderers, but, policy-wise, we’re talking about essentially the same idea. Check out the video, it’s only about a minute long:

“Americans are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal immigrants entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by American Citizens, and the services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.” He then brags about deporting twice as many illegal immigrants as prior administrations, and says that he wants to do even more in the future.

So why is Bill Clinton’s immigration policy practical while Donald Trump’s is racist? You could say that times have changed from the 1990s, and indeed they have. Hillary Clinton could get away with calling inner city blacks “superpredators” back then and definitely couldn’t today. But that doesn’t really explain it does it? It’s obvious to me that Obama could’ve given the same speech as Clinton today and it would’ve slipped easily through even the most staunch Liberal’s Overton Window. So what’s the difference?

Well, Trump is a Nazi of course. Just look at his rhetoric. If he was a calm and composed Neocon, he would know not to call Mexicans rapists, even though he’d be thinking it, and if he was a Liberal, he’d never even think it. It can’t be that Trump doesn’t know how to say things like a politician (and that’s why he’s popular). It can’t be that he was only referring to some illegal immigrants. No, he doesn’t fit into the Neocon mold or the Liberal mold, so he’s a racist forever and everything he says must be considered with that in mind.

If Trump was a traditional Neocon, like say Jeb Bush, his immigration policy would be easily digested by the left. We’d argue against it based on the idea itself, not the person saying it. Old crusty white men don’t like brown people near their houses, here’s why they’re wrong. It’s what we spent the half century before Trump doing. But when it comes to Trump, our reaction isn’t a reasoned rebuttal, it’s a terrified shriek followed by a plugging of the ears.

For your every day person, this sort of reaction isn’t that rare or problematic. Most people are willfully blind when it comes to politics, as it takes far too much mental energy to be anything else. You hate the other side, and you hate it even more when you don’t understand it. For example, imagine your standard unintelligent impoverished Red Stater’s response to the Yale student screaming at her professor about not providing her a safe space.

There is simply no way your standard unintelligent Red Stater will ever understand the nuance of the student’s argument in this case. They never will, and it’s not their job to. It is, however, intellectuals’ job to. If Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley argued about this video back when arguments between right and left wingers were guided by intellectuals, you’d probably come away with a strong understanding of both sides. But, for the most part, unintelligent people don’t watch intelligent people argue about the nuance of political ideas, nor should they. Tribes are tribes and you can’t question too much if you want to stay warm and comfy inside of one. I’m not expecting most liberals to try to understand the new crop of right wing intellectuals. That’s not their job. But I am expecting you, smart progressive person reading this article, to give it a shot.

Smart Liberals are supposed to process ideas from the other side so they can fight against them. But they have largely closed their Overton Windows, not just to right wing ideas, but to right wing speakers. In doing so, they are refusing the hand of a partner with whom they have danced for millennia. Their hatred of the right has grown so large that they won’t even get in the ring and spar. They refuse to be touched.

This approach has bizarre results. Just look at what happened during Trump’s speech to congress. Democrats sat, refusing to clap, as Trump admonished money in politics and spoke of a lobbying ban to fight against it. They sat as he decried corporate corruption and offered tariffs to empower the working class. And they made faces like this.

This is completely insane. Utterly bizarro world. Liberals should be standing and cheering any time someone talks of destroying corporate greed and corruption in the name of the working class, yet here they are sitting and making dour faces. Not because of the ideas, but because of the man speaking them.

Don’t get me wrong. Some young, hipster-haircutted right wingers are actual Nazis. Go no further than Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, where you can find gems like “One doesn’t need to feel that the proverbial ‘all Jews’ are dedicated to fighting against us in order to see that a blanket exclusion would be useful.” This is obviously fucking terrifying, particularly because Spencer does have legitimate clout with certain corners of the Alt Right. True Nazis, like Spencer and those who follow him, should be treated as Nazis. They don’t deserve a seat at the table. Though I would argue it’s better to fight them with ideas than censorship, as censorship just makes more of them, if you read someone’s writing and learn that they really are a Nazi, you have the right to ignore them. That’s because people who advocate use of force to exclude certain groups along racial lines aren’t listening to logical arguments in the first place. If you’re anyone besides a Christian white man, you’re automatically flawed and your words are also flawed and therefore anything you say is wrong. There’s no acceptance of nuance, no analysis based on ideas or content, only a priori judgment based on genetics. This is about as unintellectual and SJW-ish as it gets.

But this is also why we shouldn’t fear it. Nazism doesn’t work. We have history, facts, and logic to prove that. It doesn’t terrify us when someone advocates for Marxism, yet the follies of Marxism have killed many more humans than Nazism has. Why should we be any more scared of arguments for Nazism?

And it’s because of facts, ideas, and history that the overwhelming majority of young right wing non-Neocon intellectuals categorically reject Nazism whilst being labeled Nazis. In one particularly annoying example, a long and somewhat genius treatise by a tech guru named Curtis Yarvin titled “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” was written off by two MSM journalists because it contained the body headline “What’s So Bad About Hitler?” This is five words of over 30,000 in which Yarvin explains exactly what was wrong with Hitler…and Stalin and Mao and a whole lot of other people. But apparently the reporters were assigned to write a piece about how Yarvin is a Nazi, scrolled through his article, saw a single provocative Hitler line, and wrote off not just his work, but his entire person as Nazi-sympathizing. Then this conception of Yarvin follows him everywhere, including other projects that have virtually nothing to do with politics. This isn’t fighting against hatred. This is just idiocy.

Most of the insights I’ve come across while exploring the contemporary right wing have been fascinating, simply because I’m so unaccustomed to hearing them. Yarvin, for example, wonders why we support nationalism in countries like Kenya, but abhor it in countries like Germany or the United States. Another writer explores forgotten violent leftist movements of the 1960s. Another believes that society actively destroys the monogamous relationships upon which civilization has been built for thousands of years, and contemplates the results. Michel Houellebecq, in my opinion the only living member of the literati worth reading, illustrates what it would look like if Islam took over Europe, and has of course been called hateful because of it. Here’s an intellectual who calls himself a Tory Anarchist. Here’s one who calls himself a pro-gay anti-Nazi anti-feminist. Here’s one who wrote a book about how to dress.

These “right wing” intellectuals share very little in common—they range from neomonarchists to anarcho-primivitists—besides a few consistencies. They all reject identity politics and so-called “cultural Marxism,” and, as such, they almost all abhor Richard Spencer, because actual Nazis are the ultimate identity politicians. Yet Spencer has somehow become the face of the Alt Right, thereby forcing staunchly anti-ID politics writers like Milo Yiannopolous to disclaim the designation entirely. In reality, Richard Spencer is a nobody with appeal mostly amongst kooks who would be Nazis anyway. His relevance is generated in large part by a terrified Left who holds him up as a mascot for every single right winger who doesn’t fit the Neocon mold.

The other thing they share in common is anonymity. Almost all the writers I refer to in the above paragraph have written under an anonymous pseudonym. This is because, as has been said elsewhere, “HR is Blue Pill.” If you’re right wing, you’re inevitably going to be called a Nazi, and if you’re a Nazi you can’t get, or keep, a job. How many professors have had to resign for right wingishness? And this is in academia, the one place where intellectual flexibility should be placed at a premium. Imagine what it’s like being non-Neocon right wing in Hollywood or Silicon Valley, where there are no principles concerning intellectual diversity at all?

Here’s why this matters. Imagine the unthinkable. What if Donald Trump and the Alt Right aren’t actually Nazis?? What if all the terror and anxiety are for naught? What if they’re just people psychologically predisposed towards a different ideology, and in a relatively minuscule way all things considered? What if you didn’t have to react? What if you could listen, but you’re choosing not to? Imagine how frustrating it would be to be one of the people on the other side.

In my last big article, I was criticized for fear mongering in my conclusion, and I’m sorry to report I’ll be doing the same here. When Overton Windows become Overton Walls, they get smashed. When an entire way of thinking becomes essentially outlawed (If you’re Alt Right you’re a Nazi, if you’re a Nazi you must be silenced), you’re asking for violence. This is what happened in Nazi Germany, it’s what happened in the Soviet Union and it’s what’s happened in countless third world countries. When the Overton Window becomes the Overton Wall, people stop talking and they start fighting. A cold culture war becomes a hot war war. It’s already happening:

People on the right are already wildly applauding “Stick Man” who supposedly “protected” right wing speakers from violent Antifa thugs. People on the left are applauding Antifa for “protecting” left wingers from crazed Alt Right Nazis coming to deport us all to concentration camps. The promulgators of both of these ideas are nuts, just ignorant fools from the intellectual dregs of our respective camps. And, for some reason, we’re letting them, our lowest common denominators, dictate our beliefs and actions. We’re being dragged into violent conflict by the absolute last people who should be making any political decisions whatsoever. The smartest of us are acting like the dumbest of us.

If every young right winger who isn’t a WASP in a suit actually is a Nazi, then we’re facing war no matter what, so really no amount of refusal to listen is going to help. But if they aren’t, it’s not hard to see to why they’re rooting for violent Stick Man. It’s not hard to see why this thing is spiraling out of control.

Smart people on the left, you have a choice to make. Either open your ears or prepare for violence. It’s the only justifiable position anyway. If these young right wingers really are all Nazis, then violence is inevitable because there are so many of them. But if they’re not actually Nazis, refusing to engage with them in a battle of ideas is going to cause a battle of arms. This is what happened in pre-war Germany, where early Nazis were prosecuted for hate speech, which only made more Nazis. Goebbels himself was “regularly dragged into court on charges of anti-semitism.” Obviously, it made no difference, and probably only strengthened Nazi propaganda.

We’re at a precipice here. The country is never going to completely come together, we’re too big and too far gone for that. I’m not advocating for getting along—400 million is simply too many people to govern under a single ideology. At some point, there will be a negotiated settlement for either stronger federalism or a series of national divorces. But it’s up to intellectuals on all sides to decide whether that process will be peaceful or bloody. Liberals, age old controllers of the American cultural conversation, are the ones with the impetus to decide first.