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...and, most crucially, equivalent analogues to these things, where one-to-one replication is not possible. Those are the rules Blue Tribe has very evidently operated by for many, many years.
And it's worth noting that my claim is not that Red Tribe doing these things would destroy Blue Tribe. It is that Red Tribe doing these things would be a significant escalation, that Blue Tribe would absolutely engage in significant escalation in response, and the outcome of that escalation spiral would not be survivable for anything we would recognize as Blue Tribe now.
...But leaving that aside, you claim:
Over the last decade, it seems to me that I have seen all these advantages degrade significantly. Trust in the media is cratering. Major media organizations are conducting mass-layoffs. Culture-production centers are visibly withering. The knowledge-production apparatus is now under siege, and Red Tribe is orienting itself to make that siege lasting and merciless.
To me, it seems obvious that our recent political history has a pretty simple story: post-civil-war through the 1960s, we had a more or less unified country, with elite institutions operating as the thought and memory of the common man. In the role of thought and memory, it was easy to steer the large mass of people wherever the elites wished them to go, and because the elites and the commons were more or less in tune, they didn't want to steer them anywhere the common man didn't particularly want to go. In the 60s, the elites diverged in values sufficiently that they attempted steering that the common man did not readily accept, and the elites and commons began to diverge. The more that divergence grew, the less the common man trusted the elites to serve as thought and memory, and the more they did their thinking and remembering for themselves, the more evidence of divergence they retained. This process ignited a chain reaction that accelerated slowly and then all at once.
In the 90s, the phrase "mainstream media" marked you as a kook. By the 2000s, it marked you as an upstart. By the 2010s, it was a necessary descriptor to accurately describe the realities of the situation. By the 2020s, the term "legacy media" is legitimately appropriate. Trust in the ability of Elite institutions to provide thought and memory continues to degrade as common knowledge of their malformation continues to accumulate. The entire ecosystem is dying.
Which is a long way of saying, I like our odds.
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