Sigh now I’m thinking about compromises between liberals and conservatives again. Bleh. But my investment in America being fully-functional has waned with my belief that America’s functionality is an unalloyed good.
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I am still very clear on the idea that if America collapses that is Very Bad for everybody. Civil War, also Very Bad for everybody. But idk, America half-functioning might limit our harm globally. OTOH, I guess a dysfunctional government leaves corporations to run amok worldwide.
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Still, America is very fixable. The next stable state for America is a diverse ruling class that adopts a “anybody/everybody” ethic (“Here for anybody who’s here for everybody”), while allowing the “me and mines” ethic to flourish among the masses with fine-grain local control.
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At present, America can’t deal with the “me and mines” sentiment that says I care about what happens to me and mines, and I want my world to conform to the values of my group/tribe/society.
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This impulse is masked on the left by the need for coalition politics, but it is felt as sincerely on the left as on the right.
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The issue is that on the right, the “me and mines” group is relatively homogenous and therefore acts as a unit (that unit being, essentially, the Republican Party).
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The solution, then, is to compromise by finding ways to let people live in communities that reflect their social, spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic preferences in exchange for giving up political and social power.
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This, of course, does nothing to address the dominance of the poor by the rich (although it would hopefully pave the way to create class proportionality across identity categories), nor to address America’s militarism and malignancy across the globe.
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But it does solve the primary social contradiction that generates most of the energy in American politics at present.
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I guess the tricky bit is that the Republican Party has more or less been totally captured by the me and mines folks (probably bc the Democrats increasingly represent, to many, Them and Theirs).
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And the trade is essentially, give up power in exchange for a promise the new ruling class will allow you to exist unmolested.
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This trade would be stupid if it did not include the addendum: “and if you do this we’ll stop calling you bad people.”
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The trump card the left still holds, all the stronger for how much conservatives desperately protest it, is ethics. Minorities and oppressed people face threats to our lives and freedom from all sides; conservatives face threats to their self-conception as decent from all sides.
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At the end of the day, liberals will have to trade some of their disproportionate cultural power for some of conservatives’ disproportionate political power. This will be very difficult to do, but it is probably the Good Future for America.
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End of conversation
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