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That is a solution, but it seems like a pretty bad situation if that's what the solution always is. Is the marketplace of ideas dead? Liberalism dead? Conflicts can only be resolved by vibes based voting against your enemies? I really hope you're wrong. There's so many vibes and so much noise in each election, and it's pretty much a tossup which side wins in the end. "Normal", reasonable people may be the loser in 2028, through no fault of their own.
You didn't notice the jackbooted stormtroopers stomping all over said marketplace? Everyone from Reddit powerjannies to the US Government itself?
Again, did you not notice the former liberals decrying "freeze peach", and suppressing confederate flags, politically incorrect children's books, and the like?
This isn't 2009, when Racefail marked the end of the recession of Political Correctness. It isn't even 2014, when this stuff really started ramping up and some high profile events like Gamergate demonstrated it was winning. It's 2024. The battle lines have been apparent for a long time.
Yeah. I get it. Rhetoric getting increasingly underhanded, and rationalism tried and found impossible/useless, leading to everyone going to their secluded corners of the internet.
But if the marketplace of ideas is truly an antiquated concept, it's only a matter of time until its corpse starts to obviously reek. I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable. I don't know that it's going to lead to literal civil war, but there doesn't seem to be some mechanism for it getting better.
Are you familiar with the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept? If not, I would highly recommend it.
I would argue that this reek is what you are observing around you at this moment.
No, it is not. The present arrangement cannot last. The highest-probability positive outcome is a collapse of centralized power leading to durable federalism. A soft separation, if you will, where Red States and Blue States get to do things their own way in their own areas without being able to impose their preferences on the other. In many ways, this is pretty clearly how things have been drifting for some time, with sanctuary states and state "legalization" of marijuana; Red Tribe is starting to dip their toes into similar efforts in nullifying federal firearms laws, and is likely to continue doing so with increasing success. As polarization increases and the tensions ratchet up, actually enforcing the law becomes increasingly impractical, and cooperating with the other side's enforcements becomes increasingly unacceptable. The path of least resistance is to just let people go their own way.
The highest-probability negative outcome, as you hint, is civil war.
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