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I think what tends to happen is that lack of accountability makes it almost impossible for the system to correct course even as the need for such course-correction becomes absolutely obvious. There's no mechanism for filtering out incompetents, there's no feedback for the leaders to judge which decisions are actually improving matters, so we get the iron star catastrophe.
Covid kinda showed many of the seams. It really seems like the elites are running very low on effective tactics for reigning in discontent. I don't see how they'll effectively resolve the Israel-Palestine divide without alienating some large portion of the population. It seems unlikely that they'll achieve true 'victory' in Ukraine. They can't even solve the problem of drug overdose deaths in the heart of the capital, let alone the outer reaches of the empire.
You can only run away from consequences for so long. I'd wager most of them are gambling that they'll be dead before the chickens actually come home to roost.
Why wouldn't "brute force" be effective tactic enough?
By the time you're resorting to pure brute force you've probably lost so much legitimacy that you're asking for revolution or coup.
Of course this doesn't mean it'll actually happen.
From where? I know I keep harping on the German Peasants' War, but I think it's a good analogy for the relative positions of ordinary citizens and professional militaries. Modern governments like that of the USA are effectively "rebellion-proof." It wouldn't matter if tens of millions of gun-owning Americans decided to rise up in revolution, because it would only take ten thousand or so regime-loyal troops to crush them utterly.
As for coups, the upper ranks have all been too politically captured to want to carry out a coup, and the lower ranks don't have the capacity to organize one.
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