Good one. Certainly worth the debate it isn't going to get.
Every now and then the liberals like to shift gears and proclaim an end to toleration of conservatism and conservatives. Ideally, they'd like to frame us up on some b.s. charge and ship us off to Siberia the way the Russian Communists did (Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is depressing, but instructive). But then an election forestalls their denouement.
In spring 1993, a Clintonista scribbled in the damp pages of The Atlantic Monthly that the great debate was over; that conservatism had had its Reagan Thermidor, and that now the halcyon election of a slimy rapist on one of the weakest pluralities in U.S. history meant that it was *all* over for conservatism. Liberals and their isms and itches had won history, not just the Electoral College, and it was time, this flatworm insisted, to criminalize policy differences and conservative speech, and start sending conservative Republicans like Newt Gingrich to the gulag, if not the chair.
Then the election of 1994 occurred, and the People sent Newt to the speaker's chair.
Damned elections.
I was in high school when that article was published.
My Social Studies teacher, a man I respect to this day, brought that into his class and told us this is how things like genocide start.