Prediction: 2024 will be less poltical then 2020
The media is doing as the media does and telling you to be afraid and look over there how evil your enemies are; in the context of people who tried to ignore politics pre-2020 but find themselves watching politics for an election year for how bad it will affect them this time, may not be aware: this is every election year.
There’s talk that this time, maybe, scarier than the last that the state will end more freedoms, and that something changed last time. I’m being a contrarian and saying no.
Politics is constrained by the general public to some degree, you could debate what mechanisms are in play, how it’s done, whether is it jury nullification, is it the news balances the lie of what views will believe vs what they want them to believe, does the supreme court sometime make new laws that will prevent violence in the streets, I don’t know but I just need one such mechanism.
Tyranny and freedom live in the hearts of the population, in soviet russia 1 in 3 people were informants, no matter what you believe about how good secret police were at their job that mass of people betraying their neighbors is part of tyranny. One such emotion that makes people less free, more willing to betray morals, is fear and many many people were very very afraid of a new virus that made them have to consider that death existed, perhaps for the first time in their lives. I believe everyone reacted to Corona, you start in ignorance, you learn its exponential growth, you worry about the worst case, you prepare mentally for death, and you accept its death rate is that of the flu and mostly constrained to the elderly.
Death is a known problem for humanity, “death denial” is a thing, but humanity has survived periods where everyone suddenly knows about death, and learned to tolerate death, knowing death is not enough to doom civilization. Zoomers may have had their mid-life crisis at 18 and we saw the fallout, whatever their methods of coping that “death is extant”, healthy or unhealthy, they are now *in place* and we have decades before such a drastic psychological event could even in theory repeat.
I do not see a credible threat for anyone that will raise to "experimental bio-weapon LITERALLY EXISTS AND I WILL BE INFECTED” and so when the “boots on the ground” of people being cruel to each other, will probably be worse than in 2016, but I expect that no one will stop me in the street to tell me to signal virtue wear a mask; there wont be jobs listing that say “trump voters need not apply” to any sort of degree that the military contractors were listing “antivaxx need not apply”. I will be less worried, so I expect others will be too, so the volume of angry political debate should decrease at least somewhat even if democracy is dying with everyone always accusing the other side of stealing the election, worse and worse legal warfare as they make more and more outright lies and nonsense legal theories tools to attempt to win an election before/despite the votes.
There won’t be 5 people who accuse me *personally* of killing grandma, no one random will *personally* stop me in the street to tell me I’m on the wrong political side, there won’t be political firings/refusing to hire based on your political side that *personally* affects me. There will still be evil people stealing my money (taxes) ongoing kidnapping campaigns of poor people(the war on drugs) and probably a new psychopathic genocide of individuals labeled nonhuman to be killed by drones(war in the Middle East). But without fear-ridden people to carry out the deeds, and my continued policy of not being near The State’s hunting grounds for victims it won’t reach me.