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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32543 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I cannot think of any post-Cold War example of a large democracy sliding into authoritarianism.

Well, with the exceptions of widespread, normalized political violence, direct and sustained political interventions by the security services, abrupt and unprecedented expansions of government power into every sphere of public and private life, collapsing social trust and cohesion, metastasizing distrust and disfunction in bedrock elements of the political process, and dangerous political and legal escalations arriving with monotonous regularity, the play was quite lovely dear, thanks for asking.

I think your thesis is just wrong, and that we can easily see the death of Western democracy from where we currently stand, and even pick out some of the vectors more likely to start the tower toppling.

unprecedented expansions of government power into every sphere of public and private life

The draft existed and was employed until the 70s. It's not unprecedented.

Unrest can be imagined as a product of two factors: intertribal hate, and intertribal proximity. The more unrest there is, the more people sort themselves, reducing proximity. But the more proximity is reduced, the more interpersonal connections are severed, the larger our capacity for hate grows. Expressing hate requires methods for doing so, which work on specific configurations of proximity and hatred; new methods of expressing hatred must be constantly developed and disseminated, which takes time. All of this means that there will be peaks and troughs, but there will also be baseline fundamentals, and a trend.

We are, right now, as far from a federal election as it's possible to get, and Blue Tribe currently holds the reins of power. For these basic structural reasons, we have most favorable conditions possible for a lull, and they will not last. We are going to have another election, and no matter the result the basic tribal split will get worse. Reds are not going away. Blues are not going away. No progress has been made on their axiomatic disagreements. Grudges continue to accumulate. Conflict-resolution mechanisms continue to erode. Both tribes continue, daily, to search for ways to express and instantiate their hatred for each other. Such methods will be found and implemented, and the process of division will continue, in fits and starts, until its logical conclusion.

Or maybe I'm wrong. The elections next year seem like a reasonable milestone. What are you expecting?

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