“One thing we have really found is a place to feel comfortable being ourselves,” Dean said. Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.
One party controls the entire legislature in all but two states. In 28 states, the party in control has a supermajority in at least one legislative chamber — which means the majority party has so many lawmakers that they can override a governor’s veto. Not that that would be necessary in most cases, as only 10 states have governors of different parties than the one that controls the legislature
This can only end badly as conservatives seem to have no problem ruling over land in empty states.
Have you been paying attention the past 25-50 years? I’m not someone who became a pessimist because of Trump. The problem is largely structural, baked into our social, political, and economic institutions. It’s because I’m a student of history and politics that I think the way I do. The patterns in our political life over the past several decades have many historical analogies, none of them good. I believe in fighting back, but sometimes strategic retreats are necessary to win a war.
i’m not currently in a position where a “strategic retreat” is possible. if fascists take over, i’m fucked, and alot of the people i love are fucked. so forgive me if i don’t want to die to win your war. the reality is, no matter what you think you’ve discerned from historical records, the information landscape, the technology, and the material conditions are different now then they were then, and having such certainty about decades into the future is, to my mind, mostly foolish. analogies are not prophecy, and portents of doom are useless at best. doomers suck, the world has changed, is changing, and will change, and if we don’t involve ourselves with that process then your prophecy will come true.
i dunno, this whole attitude just pisses me off, honestly. i don’t care for your imagined apocalypse. people need help right now, fascists need bashing right now, not decades from now. maybe you are currently politically engaged, taking the necessary steps to stop this bullshit in its tracks, that would be great, but to be honest that usually isn’t the case for people who seem resigned to just let the tide take them. the reality is that we’re all going to die, regardless of if fascists take charge or the earth burns or we all live in paradise. everything we build is gonna turn to dust. and we can whine about that all we want, mope about how its hopeless, but living life that way is boring and stupid. the past is just books, and the future is just stories. all we have is now.
i genuinely used to feel the way you do, too. it turned out it wasn’t because i really had enough knowledge to be certain the world was ending (fun fact, you don’t. nobody does, and every single person throughout history who thought they did died of something that wasn’t the end of the world, or is currently living in a conspicuously not-ended world.), but because i have clinical depression. if you already want to die, you can confirmation bias your way into a near infinite quantity of information justifying that belief as it turns out.
The point of my statement was, in part, that people like you are fucked either way. If fascists take the country, you’re fucked, and if they take your state and the states that don’t suck leave, you’re fucked. So I honestly don’t understand why you think I want you to die for, or even be involved in, “my war.” By my estimation, none of it effects you. You’re going to be a hostage whether others can escape or not.
I agree people need help and fascists need bashing right now. However things change, that remains true. And, actually, I used to feel like you. I was politically engaged (studied politics at university, was the Secretary of my college Dems group, volunteered and worked on political campaigns, voted in almost every election) for 20 years, which is why I feel the way I do now. And putting my decades of severe clinical depression into remission only made me believe this more strongly. I want to finally really live, and a fascist takeover of the whole country will really put that in jeopardy. I’ve studied our institutions and historical analogies enough to know how bad things are. If you have to deny that, if you have to believe the electoral system will save us, to get through the day to live somewhere you can’t leave, I can’t begrudge you that. But don’t come for my political knowledge or involvement. I have receipts.
i dunno man. i guess you think what you think. i need to not get pissed off online, its a waste of energy and i get super hostile with people. but if you think you can untangle all the threads and have any real certainty that things are gonna go this way or that way or whatever the fuck, you’re probably wrong. there is no predictive scientific process to determine how political systems are going to shake out, and the ideas people have about how the world functions vary so drastically that making predictions decades into the future might as well be a spiritual process. it tends to spit out whatever convictions you already have about the nature of the world. i’ve got a bit of a fixation with cults and conspiracy theories, the knots our brains can tie us into are fascinating to me, and one thing that comes up again and again is just how little the way we think about the world must rely on the facts we actually know with relative certainty, and how pernicious a feeling of certainty is for determining the truth of anything at all. if you actually do feel in any way certain that you are correct, especially about future events, that usually isn’t a good sign.
i think there is a danger that things may get very bad. believe me, i am intimately familiar with the historical context, and am not just telling myself happy stories to cope. i am doing that, but i also have what i think are well founded reservations about the predictive power of historical accounts. i think its ultimately irresponsible and unproductive to be soothsaying, and pretty foolish to boil down the monumentally complex sociopolitical quagmire we’re wading into to a binary choice. it ain’t, and your individual brain probably hasn’t stumbled upon the clear, well defined answer to what the next few decades have in store for us. if it did, that path would be clear and obvious to everybody, and we’d all agree with you, especially if we had all the same receipts. unfortunately, that’s literally never happened, and doesn’t even happen for things we do have relative certainty about, like the efficacy of vaccines in preventing disease. nobody knows what the fuck is going on, and the future is largely opaque to us. it isn’t entirely opaque, and its certainly not useless to use what we know of the past to inform our view of the present, but projecting outwards into the future isn’t helping anybody, and its far more error prone than anybody would like it to be.
so yeah. beware. talk about the historical analogies all you want, describe the details of the systems we live under and their observable flaws. those are relatively well understood. but you are making claims about how the future works, and that is not something humans are known for being good at. it actually takes a lot of infrastructure and accumulated knowledge to predict even the physical trajectory of moving objects over time, you probably haven’t cracked sociology.
i would consider not being strongly convicted of your own beliefs just generally. humans really don’t have a inbuilt method of discerning between confirmation and confirmation bias, other than exhaustive experimental research. can’t really do that on a societal scale, science hasn’t been around for long enough to really pin that shit down, and we change really fast. the patterns we’re observing from history are assembled from sparse and often incomplete accounts written by people with no understanding of our many cognitive biases. just… tons of intractable problems. not a solid foundation to build predictive models on.