07-03-2021, 07:11 PM
(07-03-2021, 04:04 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: This 1T will be more like the post Civil War 1T.
One side will win the war but there won't be unanimous consensus. It will just be a peace because of people getting tired of fighting. Each side will live apart and it will seem idyllic because keeping apart will keep the peace for now. Political arguments will be less because of prosperity but also because each side won't keep the other side as friends or company. Politics and religion will be as segregated as the races were in the 50s. That will keep the peace until the 2T because the only way to get full consensus is separated social circles.
In the workplace discussing politics will be taboo and it will be taboo on ads or mixed unknown company.
Because this Crisis Era has no parallel in any prior Crisis in Anglo-American history and is yet to be completed, the forthcoming 1T is hard to predict. We have no shooting war (unless you are counting hypodermic needles "shooting" and getting an injection from a soldier a warlike activity), and how the politics of this Crisis Era will play out is anyone's guess. We had an attempted coup, dammit, in an effort to extend a Presidential term unconstitutionally, for which there is no precedent at any time in American history.
We still have a struggle on voting rights, and how that plays out may determine what sort of 1T we have. We could end up with an extended polarization of America into a relatively-liberal half of the country and a reactionary near-half. If the Right gets its way, then power in choosing the President could revert to state legislatures in some states in determining how the electoral vote goes for those states. Because a 1T is not a good time for political activism of any kind that could lead to an enshrinement of neoliberal economics once the dust settles. What would that be like?
As the billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt put it some years ago, "He who owns the gold makes the rules", and political figures like Senators Ron Johnson and Representative Marjorie Taylor Green could be the norm because they endorse plutocracy at its purest and harshest.
On the other side we could start making adjustments for the realities of
(1) global warming -- the Pacific Northwest is getting a scare with whether more typical of Riyadh than of Seattle... and there could be more We stop this or it can make life miserable and precarious -- especially as its worst effects could arrive in time for the Crisis of 2100, when much of the world's prime farmland and the homesteads of peasant farmers on such land are inundated. I've asked someone who denies the nasty potential for global warming, "where do 200 million people from Bangladesh go?
(2) the end of scarcity -- the capitalist system will have no easy way of making Big Money for economic elites who can exploit a need at dear prices for the consumer. That could slow progress in the promotion of technologies usually lucrative for suppliers. As a corollary, gross need will no longer drive people to do work that they loathe without some purpose other than an animal level of survival. This will change many of the assumptions about life in general, and what looked like the solution to all human problems may create a new set.
(3) the singularity -- when machine intelligence overtakes ours. That could be big trouble.
(4) demographic shifts -- most notably that Africa is undergoing a population explosion when the rest of the world has a stable population.
All big changes have moral conserquences.
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.