11-02-2020, 10:24 AM
(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote:(11-01-2020, 06:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-31-2020, 08:02 PM)User3451 Wrote: The debate over things like lgbt rights has been settled
A return to conformity in the next high is outside of the context of the culture wars. The culture wars will be done in the next high. That's the point. They're already done now, just a lot of people playing catch-up.
I would have never guessed that the gray champions would be Trump, Biden, hillary and bernie. Nonetheless, we will move through this crisis and discard neoliberalism and the reactionary right.
I expect a recalibrated economy, progress on climate, new infrastructure, and a repudiation of extremism like radical islam, Trumpian, wokism and the like
Basically, what society as a whole deems settled remains settled.
........
Ask me in a couple days how I expect America to change. First comes the 2020 election. The wait agonizes many of us.
I just don't think this election is a referendum on the direction of the 1T
Biden is not a grand new day, he's a 3T throwback.
The next 4 years will still be core 4T
Mass death from COVID-19 isn't going away fast, and there will be plenty of people whose complications from COVID-19 will shorten their lives. I used to think that the Lost had much shorter lives, on the whole, than GI's and the Silent because they smoked like chimneys, but the influenza epidemic of a century ago led to plenty of premature deaths that had nothing to do with smoking (I saw lots of Lost dying of such heart failure and nephritis when they were in their twenties and thirties... and this is before I even discuss vehicle crashes that resulted from bad cars, bad roads, and bad driving).
I see Joe Biden as a transition to some 'new normal' of the upcoming 1T. The last Crisis will not end in victory parades. The closest thing to a big celebration will be mass inoculations, and those might come with a hitch (you celebrate and you get a poke with a needle.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.