Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
The fundamental bargain of neoliberal capitalism is that you'll forgo radicalism, tribalism, and religiosity in exchange for bourgeoise prosperity. It worked, until the gains of industrializing the world ran out.
The internet didn't cause the problem, it just makes it obvious that A) everyone is getting poorer and B) your elites still expect deference for riches they no longer provide.
So why care for a system that no longer works for you? Why care for global prosperity when you're getting none of it? When you bear the burden of upholding the order?
Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.
US inflation-adjusted incomes (whether personal or household) were declining slowly from around the dot-com bust through the end of the Great Recession, but have since made back the decline with a lot to spare. House sizes never stopped increasing, uptake of new technologies is faster than ever ...
If we take the perspective of "the world" (though isn't this a bit of a digression, in a thread specifically about American polarization in a post specifically about American elections?), even recent American economic growth aren't as impressive as the average growth in the rest of the world. State-of-the-art tech is great, but catch-up growth is easier and more important. Living in a bigger house is nice; not watching your children die is nicer. The gains here have not started to run out.
People feel poorer because they can't own homes and they can't start families. That's a qualitative reality that no amount of quantitative statistics can capture. Something that, I note, that our much poorer ancestors accomplished (albeit, with effort, but not an impossible amount of it.)
I think that people feel poor because they have a ton of exposure to people more rich than them. Status is always relative, and the advent of social media (and really modern media in general) has made the wealth and lifestyles of the very rich extremely legible to the middle class. It's that differential that drives people "feeling poor", imo.
As a newly minted social conservative, bullshit.
Having a house and a family was within reach of the working and middle classes decades ago. Social media is a cope. People just have to compare themselves to their own parents to know that something's wrong. Seeing insta snaps of someone's conspicious consumption might annoy the superficially narcissist but if you rent a tiny apartment and you're single in your thirties you know that someone has fucked you.
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Why do you think Americans will prosper off the chaos? American hegemony can't last forever and China seems much more ready and willing to fight for the gains than anyone in the west these days from my view. I agree with the rest of your post but I don't see things working out as well for the US.
History belongs to those that show up. In other words, when your population will be half seniors by 2080, you're not a competitive Great Power, no matter how much automation you have.
To put a blunt point on it: no matter how many Chinese boomers have a boner for aggressive foreign policy, they can write checks that their youth can't cash.
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