What's the solution? I have so much to say about this piece, I couldn't possibly write it all here in the responses.

I was a student radical in the late 60s, a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). I had my lungs filled with tear gas at anti-war sit ins. I marched on the Pentagon and proudly pissed on its foundation. I protested economic injustice and battered mail boxes with a baseball bat. Radical leaders who were on the FBI's most-wanted list slept on my couch.

That revolutionary movement was destroyed by its own divisiveness... one faction advocating blowing the system up (literally, with bombs) and others in support of tearing the system down through the system itself. Neither side won.

Yes, we're always looking at a continuum (or, in more contemporary terms, a spectrum) of political ways of thinking and behaving. But that spectrum has shifted worldwide so far to the Right that "the middle" would have been considered extreme 30 years ago. The meaning of certain words like liberal change in their connotation over time, often because those words are strategically vilified by the opposition.

Liberal here in the U.S. became a very stigmatized label because the Right associated it with communism, socialism, and, more recently, wokeism... so scary to gullible, easily manipulated, anti-intellectual Americans. I have proudly called myself a liberal all the way through. And, I'm more socialist than capitalist and wear my wokeness proudly. However, I don't think that striving for civility is necessarily the same as giving permission to fascists or their cruel, self-interested policies.

I do, however, agree that civility hasn't worked and that we've enabled fascists to use the structures of so-called liberal democracies to do their dirty work. But, here in the U.S., the liberals I know are outraged. We also feel frightened and desperate, helpless and exhausted.

I'm sorry, but I think a lot of what has been expressed here, as intelligent and scholarly as it is, is simplistic and generalized to the point that it doesn't acknowledge how nuanced the problem is. All I see is Us against Them, which basically negates the entire concept of a continuum and, in the end, leaves Us with no tangible path or way forward. It's pretty much the same kind of rhetoric that took down the revolution from within in the late 60s.

I'm a lifelong liberal. I hate fascists. What's next?