"Turbulence"
In the future, the world will just get harder.
So don't be afraid to curse.
Five-and-a-half years ago, my post The . . . States of America shared some cracks that were showing in the state of our union, a mix of news and sci-fi extrapolation. Little did I know. The cracks have grown and the predictions seem to be coming true. Political polarization is extreme, with fellow citizens now fair game for full hatred as enemies, and people on both sides have begun talking of civil war as an actual possibility. The president is leading the way, and the election in a couple of months seems a powder keg ready to blow. Things look grim.
In 1960, Americans were asked whether they would be pleased, displeased, or unmoved if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party.Respondents reacted with a shrug. Only 5 percent of Republicans, and only 4 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset by the cross-party union. On the list of things you might care about in child's partner — are they kind, smart, successful, supportive? — which political party they voted for just didn't rate.Fast forward to 2008. The polling firm YouGov asked Democrats and Republicans the same question — and got very different results. This time, 27 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset if their son or daughter married a member of the opposite party. In 2010, YouGov asked the question again; this time, 49 percent of Republicans, and 33 percent of Democrats, professed concern at interparty marriage. . . ."If you look at Americans' positions on the issues, they are much closer to the center than their elected representatives," Iyengar says. "The people who end up getting elected are super extreme, but the voters are not."But even as American voters remained relatively centrist, they seemed to be getting angrier and more fearful of the other side. . . .Iyengar's hypothesis was that rising political polarization was showing something more fundamental than political disagreement — it was tracking the transformation of party affiliation into a form of personal identity that reached into almost every aspect of our lives.If he was right, then party affiliation wasn't simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them. If Democrats thought of other Democrats as their tribe and of Republicans as a hostile tribe, and vice versa, then the consequences would stretch far beyond politics — into things like, say, marriage.And the data was everywhere. . . .What was surprising was that the bias partisans exhibited for their out-group exceeded the bias white participants showed for black people, or that black participants showed for white people. According to the test, Americans are more automatically partisan than they are automatically racist. . . .Together, the two experiments suggest that partisanship now extends beyond politics — it's becoming a fundamental identity in American life, and may well lead to discrimination in completely apolitical contexts. . . .Iyengar's hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages."Political identity is fair game for hatred," he says. "Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints." . . ."The major take-home here is it’s relatively easy to score points by attacking the opposition and touting the goodness of one’s own party," says Westwood. "If you’re trying to get the largest return from voters, it would make sense for politicians to try to activate social identity rather than focus on policy."Winning an argument, at least when you're talking to co-partisans, is less about persuasion than about delegitimization — the savvy move isn't to try to build a better case than the other side, but to make clear that the other side is the other side. . . .Party and ideology have become powerful forms of personal identity, and the way they inform our lives — who we listen to, who we help, even who we love — now stretches far beyond the political realm.
We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it’s here and what we can do to temper it.Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites . . . elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. . . . they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. . . . they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts. . . .Typically, tensions build between elites who back a leader seeking to preserve their privileges and reforming elites who seek to rally popular support for major changes to bring a more open and inclusive social order. Each side works to paint the other as a fatal threat to society, creating such deep polarization that little of value can be accomplished, and problems grow worse until a crisis comes along that explodes the fragile social order. . . .Is the U.S. likely headed for still greater protests and violence? In a word, yes. Inequality and polarization have not been this high since the nineteenth century. Democrats are certain that if Donald Trump is re-elected, American democracy will not survive. Republicans are equally certain that if Trump loses, radical socialists will seize the wealth of elites and distribute it to underserving poor and minorities, forever destroying the economy of the United States. Both sides are also convinced that the other side intends to change the democratic “rules of the game” in ways that will make it impossible for them to compete effectively in future elections. In such conditions, elections are not merely contests over policy preferences; they become existential battles for the future of the nation. Whichever party loses is likely to view the results as rigged and the outcome as intolerable.The upcoming election therefore offers several outcomes that could trigger mass violence. . . .In short, given the accumulated grievances, anger and distrust fanned for the last two decades, almost any election scenario this fall is likely to lead to popular protests on a scale we have not seen this century. Trump’s claims of millions of fraudulent mail-in ballots and a rigged, unfair election may be playing with fire; but our model shows there is plenty of dangerous tinder piled up, and any spark could generate an inferno. . . .American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline. . . .How can Americans end our current Age of Discord? What we need is a new social contract that will enable us to get past extreme polarization to find consensus, tip the shares of economic growth back toward workers and improve government funding for public health, education and infrastructure. . . .This has already been, and will continue to be, a violent year in America. We need to brace for post-election violence and prepare bipartisan methods to ensure that the election outcome will be widely regarded as fair and legitimate. It will take heroic efforts to rebuild the political center, to join businesses and workers in partnership and consensus, and to restore fairness in both taxation and public spending. Only if all sides can again recover a stake in our government, no matter which party controls it, can we avoid sliding into a crisis that will undermine our Constitution and pit Americans against each other in a way we have not seen for generations.
This is very real and widespread. In addition to my county commissioner, I've heard similar from my brother-in-law, the president, and many others I know less well.
A Facebook post calling on [my local] Countians to arm themselves and prepare for conflict with the Left this election season has sparked a swift backlash online, with some commenters concerned county Commissioner is calling for a new civil war.In the message posted to his personal Facebook page Sunday morning, he writes about the “drums of war” he says he hears in the social unrest that has followed the police killing of George Floyd in May. In a litany of “thumps” meant to evoke drums, he lists street violence, violence against police officers, looting and vandalism as signals of a “coming war.”He then calls on his followers not only to vote this November but to “buy a firearm and ammunition and take a class now to learn how to safely use it to defend yourself and your property, know what’s happening around you at all times.“This is not a joke nor is it hyperbole. It is a real fight for control of America… and control of you. Here is another thing that isn’t a joke or hyperbole; I’d rather fight and die than live in their dictated world,” the post reads.It ends with this message:“And right now I’ve got my own war drum — and I’m waiting for the other side to give me reason to pound on it. And I will. Say when.”
All of this has me thinking of a couple of quotes from Yuval Noah Harari, previously shared in The Fictions That Give Meaning to the World.
Most people presume that reality is either objective or subjective . . .However, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level. Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. Money, for example . . .People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs or national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements among people who already agree on the basics.
And where I hope we get back to, from "Us" Not "Them":
. . . If we learn only one lesson from the Founding of America--from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lives of the Founding Fathers, it is that the government is an “us” not a “them.” Government does not do things to us. We, through the instrument of our government, do things. If we don't like the things that we are doing through our government, we are free to do other things. That's how this whole self-government thing works.There is, of course, a catch. "We the people" is a collective entity, not an individual will. Since we don’t always agree with each other, the “us” that is the government will sometimes act in ways we, as individuals, do not support. That’s how participatory democracy works in a large republic. Part of being a grown up, and a citizen, is accepting the fact that the democratic "we" will often not agree with the individual "I." When we insist on speaking of the government as something other than ourselves, we are actually saying that people who disagree with us do not have the right to take part in the democratic process. . . .
We have to figure out how to be us.
Kittens think about impending doom
Of course, those are just some of the short term worries. After that comes the big climate apocalypse. In the headlines today are unprecedented wildfires on the west coast, new amounts of hurricanes and storms in the Atlantic, and record-setting glacial melt in both the arctic and the antarctic.
From over six years ago:
Global warming creates weather extremes.
When the warming apocalypse happens, would you rather get stuck in?
The Frozen Wasteland
The Scorched Wasteland
Monster Storm Central
Floodland
From now:
Millions will be displaced. Where will they go?For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States. . . .Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.
Good times. Good times.
This is one of three posts about the state of my world today. For other topics, see:
posted by Degolar @ 10:58 AM
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