When speech ends polemics begin

The objective of terror is to shut minds. If reason is the instrument of modernity, then the way for traditionalists to defend against the incursions of modernity is with the wholesale application of terror. Terror is how you win the meta-argument about having the argument in the first place.

Terror is not the only reason minds shut. Incumbency of power is also a reason for minds to refuse to be open. Age in the life-cycle is analogous to incumbent power. Sometimes the simple need to act requires the cessation of dialogue and the shutting of minds.

Once the minds have shut, further dialogue has the reverse effect. Dialogue hardens the positions and deepens the entrenchment of the fixed thinking. People stop looking for alternatives and seek merely to confirm their established positions. Communication ceases to mediate and serves rather to ratify the separation.

When speech ends polemics begin. The incumbent in power needs to be able to wield polemics to justify the actions of authority no less than they need to wield all the other instruments of the state fir the sake of maintaining order. Freedom of speech does not preclude the ruler from using police power to enforce the law, nor does it preclude the ruling authority from using polemics to drive home the rationale for its policies.

The naïve left doesn't understand this need for incumbency to employ polemics as an instrument of state and as an instrument of power. The cunning left, which is to say, the left that has gone over to the right, very well understands this need of the incumbents, and so it exploits the naiveté of the grass roots left by undermining its hold on reason and by using the instruments of discourse to serve the interests of raw power.