[lamontcg]

The Democrats could abandon neoliberalism and put identity politics on the back burner and pass Universal Health Care, Child Care and College, along with a large boost in infrastructure spending in the midwest, and a reduction in certain obvious issues of regulatory capture (importing drugs from Canada and Europe) and tax hikes on the rich. That'd do a lot to fix the average condition of the worker in the United States, and many of these proposals are actually supported by a majority of Republican voters.

The reality is that we've had a divided population ever since the 90s, and this is by the design of both political parties in the United States, because we have two different competing corporate parties now. And the way we've been provoked to fight each other didn't start with the Russians, we were doing it back in the 90s with Limbaugh and Bill Clinton. They may have thrown a little gas on the fire, but we lit it a long time ago.

And trying to shift responsibility onto individuals doesn't really work. That's like trying to solve climate change by having everyone recycle harder and plays into the old individualistic puritan work ethic mythology which it should be obvious by now doesn't fix anything and just gets us yelling at each other and policing each other.

The government is going to have to change, and corporations are going to have to change and billionaires are going to have to recognize that unrestrained plundering of the economy will wind up tearing the country apart.

And I don't see any way out of this where everyone remains civil and nothing fundamentally changes. The fact that the best solution you've got is to just remind people to be civil at all costs suggests to me that we're going to hit some kind of really bad situation.

And the fact that the proposals that I suggest in my first paragraph are likely to catch a lot of flak and a whole lot of pushing for the status quo and expanations of how those ideas are fundamentally unthinkable and politically unreasonable are why I think we're heading for violence. If nothing changes then the pressure cooker just slowly continues to boil without any release and lecturing the people who are getting angry about the situation that they're not being civil isn't going to stop it blowing up eventually.