Power and strategy: some incomplete thoughts

The Nazis are coming to Madison this Saturday. What is the appropriate response?

There are two main schools of thought on this, as far as I can tell. One is that parties such as the Nazis are so abhorrent that they must be met with loud resistance in the form of a counter-rally (for arguments, see: 1, 2, 3). The other is that the purpose of the rally is really the counter-rally; that is to say, the Nazis wish to gain the attention of the public sphere, even negative attention, and thus to best thwart them we should ignore them (for an argument, see: 4).

I'm not sure that either of these is absolutely the right response. I think that the best plan of action depends on a number of things, not least of which is the strength of the group. A thought experiment will illustrate why. Imagine three Nazis marching around Capitol Square, swastikas flying high, with no crowd assembled, just scattered tourists taking pictures of the curiosity. No attention in this situation means no converts (where's the allure?) and no power. Now imagine the same three Nazis marching, but add, say, fifteen thousand Madisonians assembled in protest. Those Nazis have significance now; they are seen as more powerful because it required fifteen thousand of us to fight them; and they may actually gain in real power by converting a handful of idiots, who take a look at the imbalance and think, "Gee, as a white male I guess I really am oppressed!" Oops.

The tables turn, though, when you have not three Nazis but three thousand. Three thousand Nazis marching around the Capitol unopposed is a sign of tacit acceptance. Three thousand Nazis and no counter-rally says that you have a significant fascist contingent in your town and you don't care. In a situation like that, we really are bound to counter speech with more speech.

I understand this so instinctively that I have to imagine other people do, too, at bottom. The hard problem, the reason we are seeing polar positions advocated with no acknowledgement or discussion of the strategy beneath, is twofold: It's difficult to define the threshold value where the best strategy changes; and it's difficult to predict in advance how many Nazis there will be.

It's a problem that's come up for me before, but never such a textbook case as this. I have a bias to assume that other people are like me and that things which I find obviously stupid are not serious threats. In college, rms10 kept a collection of web pages written by pseudoscience wackos. I thought the whole thing was hysterically funny, and I didn't get why she occasionally seemed to find it depressing -- why bother worrying about a handful of idiot loons? It wasn't until the rise of IDC in the last few years that I began to understand, and to see that I might have miscalculated.

I've seen this bias in other areas of my life as well. I tend to feel kind of indignant when I see someone responding emotionally to what I view as a minor threat to a shared worldview or value system. By taking such a person so seriously, I say, you are giving to him the power that is and should be ours. I still think that the basic strategic principle here is sound -- we should be careful not to grant power to our enemies that they do not have already -- but I need to remind myself now and then that our estimates of others' power are always flawed, and the only absolute rule for responding is that there are no absolutes.

Well; in any case, due to serendiptious prior scheduling, our response to the Nazis will be V Day Night, with all the victorious victuals we can eat.