The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.
Or we need to stop using words like fascism, tyranny, racist just because someone disagrees with us. That shift to cooler more informative language is just as difficult for educated people. Even on HN, so many threads devolve into Godwin’s law. I will say that one exception is education about human cognition. Trying to reason without a strong grasp of our own psychology and good ways of framing epistemological problems is like writing software without regard to hardware. Useful to some extent but prone to unforseen gotchas.
Or maybe a middle that's not dominated by dogma or ideologies. There's many pieces of truth located pretty far from the center of various political ideologies, but the ideologies taken as a whole also contain a stunning amount of falsehood and simplification.
I would hope we could have both. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the policy platforms of any politicians who have claimed to be in the middle.
Being left or right doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw reason and critical thinking out the window. Being an extremist, sure; devotion to dogma is often a feature of extremism, but that's not the same thing.
The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.