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Notes -
I am loosely of the opinion that we've already passed the maximum likelihood of civil war in this generation. If anything, the Culture War as a broader battle seems to be calming down, although this particular incident perhaps points the opposite direction. Both sides seem to have reached a point of being too tired of apocalyptic rhetoric to be energized by their own positive attributes: last I checked, both candidates have higher unfavorable polling numbers than favorable numbers.
More broadly, I'm coming around to a personal hypothesis that the introduction of the Internet as a social medium is starting to have run its course. We had a good couple decades where it was almost the exclusive domain of the young and well-educated, decaying September by September as normies have gradually settled the digital frontier. For a while, the discourse was Blue (with a strong helping of Techno-Libertarian) because the population was more generally. And as that faded, left-partisans were able to evaporatively cool dissent (cancel culture) in the space to maintain the partisan atmosphere. But evaporative cooling only works so far: at some point it cools to the point where people start noticing that the emperor has no clothes: I think we saw the peak of this in 2016, where the strongest efforts of blue partisans weren't able to completely ban online red-tribe rallying points. The Internet can no longer be maintained as a partisan territory for either side.
And I think that's generally still true. The forced-to-be-online interactions of 2020 seem to have had major effects: renewed efforts to ban red-tribe online spaces and such, but forcing everyone online doesn't really change that evaporative cooling is played out. Instead, it seems like the period of rapid social (and possibly also economic) change that the Internet has wrought seems to be coming to a close.
It's not the best-supported hypothesis, but it seems plausible enough for me.
I actually heard a radio segment on NPR of all places talking about how in marketing, companies are going back to politically neutral-leaning stances. Partly, according to them, because people are getting economically pinched and some of the worst woke stuff is in some sense an economic luxury, and also because a lot of the performative stuff plays just as bad with some big audiences as it does well with others. So, the general trend is: back to traditional marketing, you won't see as many of the Pepsi police-line ads anymore.
So yeah, I really don't think that we're going more nuclear. I'm always struck by most interviews by reporters - you get a few nutjobs that reporters sometimes seek out on purpose, but by and large people are just incredibly normal and down-to-earth more often than you'd think, and also on the individual level, more heterodox as well. The only caveat is if we manage to find ourselves in a war again -- wars have special social forces that can be very problematic.
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