Personally my main worry is, as it's been for quite a while, that everything that's boiling over, and any potentially positive outcome that might come in the future, will still fail to hit the root cause of what's allowed this absolute shitshow of an election to happen. The growing degree of partisanship is effectively the worst possible (or at least imaginable from my perspective) failure state of two-party politics.
To be fair, as I've joked elsewhere, the "worst possible failure state" of multi-party politics is Literally Hitler* but that doesn't exactly relieve any unease over the issues with polarized two-party politics. And my inner pragmatist is a tad divided over whether the only likely resolution to this stagnation will be a good thing, or just undermine our political system even further.
The ideal solution would be for increased interest in third parties to undermine the stranglehold, and view their objectives as an overlapping range of points to work with different politicians rather than a list of talking points geared more towards "what will work best for backstabbing the other guy" that we presently have. But voter apathy makes this resolution effective self-defeating, and the very fact we are in such a fundamentally stagnant political condition only further underscores this.
The alternative would be for the direct consequences of partisanship to turn violent, to such a degree that it sours interest in the partisanship that ultimately led to it. I already suspect that, no matter who wins this election, it's going to get violent in the aftermath, to a much higher level than before. That's the part I'm worried about. The cold and pragmatic part of me suspects that, if it escalates to warrant the "second American Civil War" moniker, that might be impetus enough to provoke the requisite distrust in our two-party system that outcome will require.
But the "I kinda like not living in a warzone, thanks" part of my pragmatic side suspects that shit's going to get way worse if that happens, with no certainty that things will get better afterward.
* Disclaimer, while the need to cooperate with smaller parties to gain a workable majority was a factor in how Hindenberg's idea to pull a certain dipshit Austrian into the fray helped cause that, a necessary secondary prerequisite was being able to use that leverage to undermine opposition parties, increasing their level of political power relative to all other parties still participating. The Reichstag Fire Decree's impact (making the Communist Party of Germany de facto banned from participating) likely being the tipping point that ensured the Enabling Act went through.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4227321 times)