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If discourse and argument fail to quell the intolerant, a tolerant society must be willing to use censorship and even violence to defend itself. If we let them trample all over our values, tolerating them for the sake of being the "better person", we'll be the better corpse sooner rather than later and history will remember us "Look how nobly they did nothing!"

If our history is ever written, that is.

I think their party should be banned and all funds currently donated and accounts related should be redirected to counter facism efforts and education.

Don't know what's there to be so smug about. "Oh you would rather ban them in a constitutional process than to wait for them to seize power and fight a bloody civil war, or worse?" Yes please! I hope we all much prefer the first option.

Ban them now

They won't, in no small part because the AfD has enough seats to block the attempt. Also, doesn't help that lots of the enforcement wing of the German government (particularly in the national security services) are AfD or AfD sympathetic.

We're well past the point at which Germans can do to the fascists what they did to the communists back in the 1990s - ban the party outright and seize their assets. Now they've actually got to make this a political fight, rather than a legalistic one, because they turned their backs on the AfD for far too long.

There won't be democracy in Germany if the AfD gets into power. You need to stop the wound from gushing before you can worry about setting the broken bone.

There is a difference between conservatism and being a threat to the democratic order. Germany has conservative parties that are perfectly valid, it's just that the AfD is not one of them.

Banning the party isn’t going to help.

Yes it will. It'll mean it won't be standing in elections, and that's only fair because it's an anti-democratic party... and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.

Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy's survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user's first few swipes.

There's nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there's plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn't like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.

It sends a good message. It doesn't send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of 'we hear you, but try again... a bit less fascist-y please'.

Banning AfD is the best short term solution, it needs to be followed by a stronger social focus of the government.

One reason for conservative and right-wing sentiment is fear of the future in the populace. Fear causes people to try to isolate themselves from "others" and wanting to horde and protect their stuff instead of supporting others.

If the government is able to alleviate those fears, they will not see a need for fear anymore. But that is a long process, which constantly gets sabotaged by commercial outrage media, foreign intervention, social media, conservative/right-wing politicians, etc.

There will always be a subsection og the population that adheres to fascist ideas. For a liberal democracy to function, these ideas have to be ostracized to make sure that no fascist party can establish itself in a major way. Some far-right voters will vote for minor far-right parties, some will vote for more moderate conservative parties and some won't vote at all. The key is to keep them from uniting while appearing moderate enough to win over some more moderate voters.

Zero? Yep, that seems like the right size.