Signs of a Dying Empire

[galaxy]

(08-03-2021, 02:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Well, well, well. America got a political breather with the defeat of Donald Trump, if in a close election that could have gone the other way easily. Democrats kept the House and got a working, if the definitive bare majority, in the Senate with what were some surprising D wins of both Senate seats in Georgia. I'm going to say this about Jon Ossoff now: as the first Millennial in the US Senate he is one of the most obvious prospects to be President of the United States from his generation. Oh, he's Jewish? If we can vote for someone with a black African father as President we can vote for a Jew to be President.

Of course, on the very day in which Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Senate seats  from incumbent Republicans, Donald Trump's most fanatical supporters who accepted the indefensible claim that Donald Trump "really" won stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of the Electoral votes with the aim of selecting a result of their choosing.

What President Donald Trump sought to do that day was what many dictators have done, nullifying an election that he has lost. We got a breather, but at the same time over 600,000 Americans have died of a respiratory virus that most of us thought just never showed up in an advanced industrial society. Over 600,000 people have ceased breathing because COVID-19 overpowers some of our most effective and desperate means of saving lives from shortness of breath. Most importantly, the vast majority of those deaths was preventable with appropriate behavior, like wearing masks, washing hands frequently, social distancing, and (finally) getting inoculated.

Related to this - after giving it some thought, I'm increasingly believing that if the climax of this turning has already happened (hopefully it has), it was November 3, not January 6. A Crisis climax involves the entire society and affects every part of life. January 6 was a normal day (or, as normal as a day near the peak of a pandemic can be) for those not in and around the Capitol - if I had not checked any news sources that day, I would not have known what was happening. At the moment of the storming, in fact, I was receiving a furniture delivery. There are probably millions - yes, millions - of people in this country still even now who do not know about it, or only have a vague idea of what occurred.

November 3 was completely different. It was impossible to not know what was happening. It was all people talked about for weeks. It was an obsession. Businesses were boarded up in Washington DC. All braced for impact. Instead of the chaos that most expected, for four days an eerie calm descended upon the nation - everyone locked in position, waiting, until the general public became confident in a Biden victory on November 7. It felt as if someone had pressed "pause" on the 3rd and then pressed "play" on the 7th, and anyone who went to a public place between those two times could feel the tension in the air. I know I did.

I'm starting to wonder if the 2020 election is best understood as a sort of peaceful or indirect civil war (the climactic final battle of the culture war?) and everything since then has been an aftershock. 1/6 is perhaps best compared to the Lincoln assassination, as an act of reactionary aggression (and/or failed attempt at a Hail Mary victory) by a fiercely devoted member/members of the losing side shortly after the loss occurred.

If this is the case, then it likely points to:
- the coming 1T beginning relatively sooner rather than later (potential starting point: 2024 election?)
- toward it being more similar to the post-Civil War 1T than the post-WWII 1T. It will be a rebuilding time, not a rebuilt time.
- The "cold civil war" may continue, but it will feel gradually weaker in prominence, and ultimately unimportant. It may be reduced to oversized arguments over small things, to the point that people will almost laugh about it. It will not threaten to split the nation apart. The two sides of the culture war will very slowly begin to correspond less perfectly to the political parties, which will become more and more similar, even as they claim to be as different as ever (and may superficially seem to be diverging even further).
- This 1T will be a relatively energetic one, unlike the post-WWII one. Society will not become "robotic."
- Even though the 2020 and 1896 elections bear a remarkable resemblance, and 2024 and 1900 may well continue this, the Seventh Party System will ultimately look more like the Third than the Fourth, with "general intensity" decreasing for a while after 2024 and a tendency toward narrow wins in all parts of politics. We may see a very clear mirroring of the Third, with Democrats repeatedly winning the Presidency by narrow margins while Congress is always narrowly divided and flips frequently and erratically.
- The conformity of this 1T will not be "society tells individuals what to do" (like 1946-1963), it will be "society tells individuals what *not* to do" (like 1865-1886). We are already seeing this develop - in fact, the beginnings of this can be seen as far back as ~2013.

Just throwing some thoughts around, I guess.


Edit - okay I really need to figure out how to express all my overtheorizing better, writing longposts really is not great, sorry about that