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A bit long, but well said.
Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely. They threw absolutely everything from the intelligence agencies to the courts to the actual assassins at him, and still got waxed by a lone reality TV star and real-estate mogul. Twice!
Come on. Do you really think that
(a) the deep state wanted to murder him
(b) that they would wait till election season to off him
(c) that they would decide that a sniper bullet would serve their goals better than, say, heart failure after an overdose of viagra?
(d) that they would be likely to miss?
Now you can add any amounts of epicycles to make all of that plausible. Perhaps the plan was that JD Vance would get elected Americans would vote for him simply because they dislike assassinations. Only Vance was really a democratic operative whose presidency would discredit the GOP for decades, allowing the reptiloids running the Dems to defeat the last Illuminati bastion in the US. But they did not know that the Illuminati had acquired precognition from alien artifacts from Area-51, so they knew precisely how much to adjust the shooter's scope for maximum dramatic effect.
The deep state shouldn't be considered as a rational actor. No reasonable person would think 'OK we've got Biden as our old and withered presidential nominee, we can just run the country while he's out of it. But let's put in Kamala as a talentless, charisma-deficient vice-president and then when 2024 comes around and Biden is predictably incapable... uhhh... well better think up something clever then!' But they did that anyway and fumbled it.
We already know that they don't use optimal strategies, they're not going to do an assassination properly either. If they try to assassinate someone, it'd look like their military campaigns and spending programs. A giant mess.
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Or that they had chosen not to do what it took to resist public input indefinitely even though they technically could have if they were willing to burn enough of the commons. That's the main thing I'm worried about here - relations between the left and right aren't great right now but there's room for things to get much, much worse if both sides just keep escalating the way they have been.
I'm not particularly interested in litigating the question of who started it, because I don't think that's likely to be a useful question to ask here. Instead, I wonder what achievable state of relations (and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable) would make each side feel secure enough in their position to stop escalating.
Why not? Suharto is my immediate go-to example, but there's also the Reconquista and the Edict of Fontainebleau as what comes to my mind next.
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No, there are paths there. They're just terrible paths that amount to Pyrrhic victory, and which we don't want to take. The obvious one is "nuclear war, half of SJers literally die in a fire, the other half get blamed for weakening the West and thus allowing Beijing/Moscow to challenge us".
I press x to doubt on the SJ debate remaining salient in the event of a full nuclear exchange
"Millions die in nuclear fire, women most affected"
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Scenario A - Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Trump attempts to assert federal authority. Blue states defy him, and organize around making that defiance as effective as possible. Blue tribe wins an election, and attempts to assert federal authority. Red Tribe states defy them, and organize around making that defiance as effective as possible.
The norm of strong federal control over the states dies. Without a superpowerful federal government to fight over, conflict between the tribes decreases, as each realizes that imposing its will on the other is simply not worth the effort; better to facilitate population transfers of those unsatisfied with their current tribal environment, and let history sort it all out. Legitimate federalism defuses much of the culture war, as people are free to pursue their values in their own regions, and to move if this is impractical.
Scenario B - The Land of Peace and Plenty
One tribe or the other delivers unquestionably effective governance, even by the other tribe's standards; significantly better schooling outcomes even for inner-city black kids, notably effective and just law enforcement, a clear road out of the long-term economic stagnation, an automation revolution leading to an explosion of wealth and dramatically-increased living standards, etc, etc.
Much of the current mess is driven by policy starvation, moderate political approaches chronically unable to deliver the goods, leading to the public turning away to the increasingly radical fringes in search of still-credible policy options. One side or the other actually delivering undeniable policy wins even from the perspective of the opposing tribe could possibly defuse the escalation spiral as people adopt policies that actually work. From the Blues, this might be YIMBYs or the Abundance guys. From the right, it might be things like the Mississippi Miracle or Trump's crime crackdown, which seems to have been drawing support recently even from scattered democrats. Admittedly, this seems like more of a long shot, but there's some evidence that a lot of even our most serious problems might actually be choices, and if that fact could be made stark enough, people might choose differently.
I think your scenario A is off the table for now; even Newsom has not been able to resist Trump's authority.
Scenario B is not happening also. Because even if Trump could deliver that effective governance and to the Democrats it would never be enough. It would be bad because Trump was doing it. And because he can't; e.g. delivering notably better schooling outcomes for inner-city black kids is beyond the President's power. He's doing best on immigration enforcement; despite all the cries, the horror stories are limited. Where's all the brown US citizens black-bagged and dumped in Tijuana? I've heard of one held for 3 days, which is bad but the ordinary sort of bad that happened every day before Trump.
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They didn't kill him with a heart attack post-2020 election for reasons I legitimately do not understand. I am not saying they should or shouldn't have done this, I am just confused why they didn't.
Germany must have started stocking up on heart attack guns this early, and there were none left to use on Trump.
Are you referring to those dead AfD people?
Yup, though mostly having fun. I haven't really looked into it, and I don't know if the German establishment would take things that far.
The establishment probably wouldn't, given how risk-averse most Germans are.
The establishment's far-left Handlangers, though...if they actually had the mythical heart attack gun, I'm perfectly sure they'd find someone willing to pull the trigger. Mid-level AfD candidates being the target doesn't strike me as unlikely either, given that those are both soft targets and highly detested by the left.
But that's assuming such a thing exists and somehow found its way into the hands of very discreet extremists.
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The online battlefield has shifted though. Would Trump 2016 have happened without Reddit and 4chan? Those don't exist in as usable a form these days. Twitter was a huge coup, but that's still "two steps back, one-and-a-half steps forward".
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