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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Are you familiar with the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept? If not, I would highly recommend it.

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 would argue that this reek is what you are observing around you at this moment.

I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable.

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.