alt Hacker NewsThis is is deeply ignorant historically. The US has cycled through extreme division over and over. There was 100x more civil unrest over Vietnam, civil rights, reconstruction, early labor wars. We've had 4 presidents assassinated, one shot, but survived. There were 2,500 domestic bombings in the 1970s. In 1972 there were 31 plane hijackings - 1 every 12 days.
There is a lot of hot talk, a lot of insular bubbles working themselves into online frenzies, but it is, objectively, a boring, passive time out on the street. No, there is no cliff.
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The anocracy variable is at the highest level since the first Civil War. Technically the system is blinking red, and the lack of street fighting is not an indication of Civil War, it's law-abiding discourse that separates polities from power access that determines Civil War.
Of course man, everything is 'just fine'.
Outside of the USA: talk of invading Canada, Greenland, indiscriminate execution of people on the high seas, a tariff war that seems to be a series of own goals, destabilization of NATO, the burning of 75 years of goodwill.
Inside the USA: military in the cities, half the country is being depicted as 'the enemy' by those in power, an embarrassing cadre of incompetents are in powerful positions and are wrecking the departments they are nominally in charge of, North Korea style adulation of an idiot leader, attacks on judges and members of congress are on the order of the day, teams of masked man snatch people (men, women, children) off the streets and out of their beds, endless violations of the law by the authorities, naked power grabs and abuse of pardons, attacks on the free press, destruction of the machinery of the state are the order of the day.
Those things you mention were bad, but they were still within the framework of the normal functioning of a state, it never looked as though there was a real chance of the USA fracturing or turning on itself no matter how bad they were. But this time it looks very much different. If you can't see that then that's fine with me but 'historical ignorance' is an easy card to play if you have already decided that what's happening right now in the USA is business as usual, and to me it does not look like 'business as usual' at all. This is unprecedented, and it is getting worse every day.
What I think is happening is that the 'flooding the zone' strategy is working so well that people are simply no longer able to keep up with all of the assaults and they hunker down, hoping that it will pass them by. That's a coping mechanism.