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Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately? The internet, and really any sort of mass media, likes centering people on "sides" whose political position really does amount to this sort of mutually recursive tribalism (do whatever is most Right/Left, which is whatever pisses off the Left/Right the most, which is whatever is least Left/Right, which is whatever pisses off the Right/Left the most...); but those people's votes and political allegiances are largely locked in and the only way in which they have agency at all is producing and responding to hype (in states of low hype they might become so apathetic that they themselves fail to turn out to vote; in states of high hype they produce an infectious mood that might assume some of the reality distortion field nature). Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".
If you are talking about predicting who wins the elections, I would say you are probably right. In terms of lawfare, partisanship, resistance, etc. though, it's pretty much human nature that if one said hits the defect button, the other side is more likely to defect once it gets the opportunity.
If the Trump administration hands out millions of dollars in settlements to January 6 protestors, conservative organizations, etc., will a future democratic administration turn around and sue them? I actually tend to doubt it; it's rather a big escalation. But even so, mutual escalation obviously can spin wildly out of control very quickly.
That is sort of true, I think, but as long as the grounding provided by elections persists, this seems like a natural damper on any spinning out of control. Wild defections tend to be bad for the handful of things that the mercenary voters do care about, except perhaps the hype/vibes dimension; and even there, the jury is still out on whether Trump (as a candidate whose hype value was entirely built on promising to press defect) was just an outlier in this regard. (Biden surely was the least "own the cons" candidate of the last three fielded by the Dems, and he alone managed to eke out a win against Trump.)
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