The pendulum swings both ways, and right now it is swinging faster and harder than ever before in this country. When it swings back, in a tsunami of the unrelenting rage and profound hatred for the other side, there will be blood. That is the future.
I fear, swinging the pendulum back will not be happen without violence, this time. Too many hate-trains are on collision course with kindness and logic.
Underrated comment. This is deeply true, but points to something ominous. There isn't really a way that this political vortex ends except through ever more extreme policies/pendulum swings.
I said it in 2016, this whole polarization spiral in the US will inevitably result in blood in the streets. Looks like we are sliding further and further towards that abyss.
I hope that 10 years from now, once all the dust is settled, we will be able to hold accountable the people who really caused this catastrophe: the news media. There is no question in my mind that their hyperbole, lying, and greed are the thing polarizing people most of all. I mean, in the past 5 years, they have just moved to blatant propaganda and lies. These lunatics are going to get people hurt, and I hope the people responsible face a harsh punishment for inciting civil unrest.
Another thing to mitigate doom scrolling - read History
What we're experiencing now is part of a broad, generational change. Regardless of your country or the outcome of any one election or news cycle, the far right is emerging as a strong force. It will remain so in most Western countries, maybe for decades.
Understand the broader sweeps and landscape. Understand that you're probably like a drop in the ocean. If you see a part of it that's your duty, do your duty. But do, or do not...
History shows us broad strokes oscillations of political winds, how often things have seemed absolutely terrible, how things swing back often unexpectedly. How even the most influential have little control over affairs...
Note that it's not just a frozen fact, but a growing trend.
Those charts go up up up, meaning that things are going to get even worse for more people if all parameters stay the same.
This never ends well. Radical new ideas take hold in the minds of the frustrated lower classes and then everything explodes into revolutions, wars and rivers of blood.
The reason for the violence is the frustration morphed into hatred on one side and feeling of superiority and entitlement morphed into fear on the other side.
Nothing good can come out of clashing hatred against fear.
Some "skilled" politicians channel the feelings of frustration-on-the-verge of hatred towards other nations or social classes, like immigrants, political unions (EU), etc and that's why you have the populists gaining traction all over the world.
Technology was supposed to save us from this - yet it seems to have accelerated it.
The cherry on this cake is the fact that the biosphere and climate are collapsing, while the population is growing, so something's got to give first.
Yeah, between the pandemic, mask mandates, anti vaxxers, anti maskers, the tp shortage, the election and so called 'insurrection', 2020 was a huge turning point. Everyone found a reason to hate everyone. I'm guilty of this as well.
I'm not a big doomer, but I've never witnessed the country so irrevocably divided.
The current American socio-political environment is a vortex of escalation right now. Moreover, we seem to be moving from rabid polarization to a calculus of hatred. I'm not sure there is a controlled transition from this state, except for a sudden (and potentially violent) 'release valve'.
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I hope my claim is false. I have zero desire to witness/observe the types of historical events that fall under the above category.
Everything took a wild turn after the 2016 election. Electing Trump will be remembered as the time when America's history took a massive nose dive. One thing I think we'll see is the rise of a left-wing version of the Dark Enlightenment wherein a contingent of leftists, disillusioned with democracy after Trump, just go full tankie and start calling for the purges to begin.
And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.
This is what I'm talking about: things will continue to get worse until we drop the "my side is blameless while the other side is literally <your choice of Stalin or Hitler>" charade. What happened was terrible, but months earlier demonstrators tried to force entry into the White House so they could execute a sitting president.
One can point to the 24-hour cycle media viciously vying for eyeballs, and the litany of pseudo-news outlets that have gained widespread audiences and which peddle in division for a major portion of the cause. The electorate are being manipulated by our own. Unless the media on all sides walk back the rhetoric it will only get worse in the years to come.
Events/(choices) like this have disastrous consequences for any hope of bridging the widening polarization. I'm starting to think we may never get back to where we were.
Outrage and censure and ritual calls for apology at any divergence from the party line. If this trend goes unchecked - which nothing suggests it won't - I shudder, literally, to think what will become of us in twenty years. Unspeakable things will happen after closing time in the gardens of the West.
It is boiling over already in the form of newly emergent populism. Easy to ignore if you don't personally feel the pain, but many out there are very angry with the system.
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