by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
On a personal level, I’ve found that American political system now lacks the grease necessary for a functioning liberal democracy. I simply can’t talk politics with my conservative relatives because we live in different factual universes. We can’t agree on facts. And our strongest beliefs are at such absolute cross purposes that we can’t have any political conversation at all.
This is not good.
If people who disagree politically — especially people who are related — can’t engage in any political discourse then your liberal democracy has a pretty big existential crisis on its hands.
Because what happens is either one side begins to feel disenfranchised and comes to see the attraction of political violence or they tune out and you have an autocracy. That’s why we face such a stark choice in 2024: civil war or autocracy.
There are no easy answers. I have no idea what’s going to happen one way or another. But I do know that, if you just look at macro trends and do some back-of-the-envelope extrapolations we are so fucked. We’re in for some historic political instability in the next few years, culminating — one way or another — in the 2024-2025 timeframe with autocracy or civil war.
Again, I don’t have any easy answers for you. I have no idea what you should do. But it is definitely something to keep in the back of your mind going forward.
