Originally Posted by
arus2001
My unspoken point when more or less setting off this thought chain is that we've had a steady degradation of the middle/lower class since the 80s. Wealth distribution, liveable wages, levels/quality of education, cost of said education, access to affordable healthcare, access to jobs, and then some, are all woven together into what helps to account for a citizen's level of happiness. Toss in the Deplorable talking points as a wild card and you'll then get differing reasons for why the other stuff is in a bad place, though often disassociated with the reality of it all, but nonetheless an effective distraction because individually solving these problems for yourself is pretty much impossible barring winning a giant lottery.
Nonetheless, we've got gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression at play, of which the right tends to be the beneficiary of more often than not. Their current poster boy in the form of the President is very much Not A Good Person(tm) and the concern his traits have emboldened others of similar mind is not unfounded. What would four more years of that do to us? Or if a younger, more charismatic 2.0 springs up? You simply can't keep treating certain demographics as sub-human and not expect an eventual backlash from them and their allies. How often is Florida the center of some form of electoral controversy? Georgia should probably have a different governor right now, too. Or a glaring lack of outrage that Alabama is even entertaining putting a pedophile in office again. It's just, like... holy shitballs, man. We're just supposed to believe the right when they say they're not like all the bad people, but they still vote for them anyway. I'm sorry, but at some point, a certain degree of complicity has to be established. If voting is our new warfare, then those are their bullets shot at the rest of the country. And surprise, bodies are hitting the floor, literally and metaphorically.
Of course, should you be sitting there rolling your eyes or thinking I'm being overdramatic, I'll just say we're not past a point of no return. It's getting close, though. We're just a few more tax cuts for the rich away. Some more jobs/markets moving out. More kids being unable to afford college while low-skill jobs get automated. More falling into crippling medical debt. More infrastructure crumbling without sign of repair. Toss in a random natural disaster that trashes an area and gets under-aided by FEMA for good measure because climate change is a hoax. We've already seen inklings of the discontent through the electoral college and how those are annoyed that people hundreds, if not thousands of miles away somehow have a (greater) say in their own immediate local needs. To say the system is broken and/or corrupt is probably an understatement, but y'know, incrementalism...! Yay....?