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Maybe Sweden is different. Here in the states, we are tolerating problems far worse than Sweden ever had. Wokeness hasn't diminished much if any.
The major blue cities have a murder rate that is more than 10x what Sweden has. And the public schools in our major blue cities have been terrible forever. San Francisco public schools are less than 10% white now as everyone either sends their kids to private school or moves to the suburbs.
Yet these American blue cities are not "lurching" (a mild slur by the way) to the right, far from it. In the past decades they have become woker and woker. If anything, it is the suburbs and rural areas that are becoming more conservative, despite having many fewer of the problems created by lack of rules enforcement.
Edit: I think I might have caused some confusion. By "slur" I mean that lurch is being used as a slur here. "My outgroup moves like a drunk or a zombie". I do not mean that there is anything wrong with the word lurch.
Among average liberal suburban normies in the US, one generally accepted narrative regarding political history is that Republican administrations between 1968-92 have committed a horrific, unspeakable, terribly evil etc. crime against BIPOC by enacting a policy of mass incarceration of African-American (and, to a much lesser extent, Latino) young men in the name of the 'war on drugs' and 'law and order' in order to pander to the racist sentiments of hwhite garbage humans. (As far as I know, nothing of this sort has ever happened in Sweden.) Therefore there's no chance at all of any politician making the kamikaze decision of trying to drum up support for law and order.
I do think that the spectre of Donald Trump allows people to tolerate a higher level of crime and dysfunction than they otherwise would.
People weigh their own safety vs. the social undesirability of voting Republican. In our current epoch, the surge in murders and crime hasn't been enough to overcome the very strong social undesirability of Donald Trump. So they continue to vote for progressives despite a worry that things aren't going that well. Because the alternative of a "literal fascist dictatorship" is worse.
I don't think it's social undesirability at this point. The main issue a lot of people (myself included) have with Trump is the fact that he is likely to bring about huge systemic instability. Most people who have some vested interest in the current amalgamation of systems and institutions in the US are very reluctant to support the sentiment of "it's all rotten, tear it all down" coming out of the populist right these days. Conservatism used to be about avoiding rapid change due to the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Now it seems to embrace it.
It would be nice if critics of "huge systemic instability" had a general theory of what "huge systemic instability" actually consisted of. For an example, weaponizing the federal security services against political opponents seems like something that should be pretty damn destabilizing, but somehow it's never accounted such. Likewise, a coordinated campaign to foment serious racial conflict, culminating in massive outbreaks of organized political violence should probably give one pause. One of the most thoroughly black-pilling moments I can remember is when, during the BLM riots, one of the moderate blue regulars here opined how they just wanted Trump gone so things could calm down.
You changed too much, and now our trajectory is both blind and ballistic. We repeatedly warned you not to do that, and you either ignored or mocked us. You burned the stability, and now you complain that we're not sacrificing our values to replace what you willfully destroyed. Conservatives are realists; they aren't going to pretend that things aren't as they plainly are. Rapid change has been happening for years now, and further rapid change is inevitable. The only question is what the nature of that change is to be, whether some new stable system can be salvaged from the rapidly-disintegrating wreck of our previous construction.
At the risk of sounding a little preachy, I don't think your us vs them mentality is doing you any favors here. I'm not sure what you think my views are, but I'm pretty sure the "you" described above doesn't encapsulate them particularly well. I'm not if favor of moving in the current direction and haven't been in a long time.
I am, however in favor of moving slowly. Despite what you may think, we did not end up in this situation overnight. Institutions have moved away from their traditional roles bit by bit over the last several decades. If we want to reverse any of this with any semblance of our current society intact, the progress is going to be equally slow. Thinking that we can quickly fix anything by tearing institutions apart is just going to make the situation far worse. We'll loose what we still have.
I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere. Some situations really are us vs. them. This is one of them.
Seven years ago, the previous iterations of this community were worrying over the insane levels of runaway polarization spreading through every corner of society, and how this needed to be corrected or there would be hell to pay. The problem was not corrected, and now there is hell to pay. An "us vs them" mentality continues to deliver superior predictive power. What benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
Well, it's a shot in the dark, but my guess is that you are a fairly average moderate light-blue Blue Triber, with some serious doubts about the excesses of the Social Justice movement and considerable nostalgia for the 90s-2000s era. I could be wrong, but it seems a reasonable guess. In any case, it is at such "moderates" that the above critique is aimed.
And other people are in favor of moving quickly, and moreover have done so. Results matter. Facts on the ground matter. You have to actually engage with what has happened, and what is likely to happen next. I see no way that "moving slowly" is going to be able to do that.
Sinkholes form over years or decades, but the part where the ground opens up and swallows your house with your entire family inside can happen in seconds. Something building up slowly does not mean it remains slow once it starts rolling.
In any case, I argue frequently that it all goes back to the Enlightenment, so that's three centuries back, give or take. The best estimate I've seen for the tipping point past which the situation became acute is 2014, but one can make arguments for the 90s or the 60s. The historical question is entirely separate from the question of what is happening now, though. And what is happening now is a runaway culture war death spiral, driven by mutually incompatible values. It took a long time for those values to become mutually incompatible, but now that they are, things proceed much more quickly.
It seems unlikely to me that you can unscramble an egg, but it would certainly be amusing to see someone try. What's the nature of the problem, and what would a solution look like, roughly speaking?
If I am forced to choose between all the institutions being captured by my tribal enemies and used to crush my tribe and its values without mercy or recourse on the one hand, and destroying those institutions and probably a lot of other things besides on the other hand, I am going to be heavily in favor of destroying those institutions. Sure, there's value in stalling and hoping for a miracle. Barring that miracle, it is not hard to figure out where things are going. We, Red and Blue collectively, continue to search for better ways to hurt the outgroup without individually getting in too much trouble. Soon or sooner, one will be found and used that our institutions cannot survive, and those institutions consequently won't survive.
Trump is a symptom of this process, not a cause. It doesn't matter whether he loses or wins this next election; the process will continue either way. Nothing he has done or might plausibly do is going to cause "huge systemic instability" outside the bounds of the huge systemic instabilities that are already growing at breakneck pace. If the system were not already completely fucked, people would not be lining up to vote for a geriatric con man.
So it goes.
I'll cop to ignorance on my part, whose murder does this refer to?
I know I'm not the one being asked, but I suppose the reference is to the murder of Aaron Danielson, but I could be wrong. In a rather strange turn of events, his murderer was in turn shot dead by police later, and as far as I know, this didn't end up being that much of a scandal, as it appeared to be a clear-cut case of an armed suspect not complying with police commands and threatening officers with a firearm. I still think this was one of the most curious turns in the American culture war altogether.
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