i agree that the risk of war between major powers is essentially nil, but who said we need a conventional war between major powers to have the kind of destructive, world-altering effect the great war had?
i'm beating a dead horse now with this in this thread, but i'm pretty convinced that another american civil war is on the way in our lifetimes. i think trump's election is the first domino in a chain.
knowing the history of what happened at the start of the last century, and that humanity really likes to destroy an entire generation of itself every 75-100 years or so for the last 500 years makes me awfully pessimistic about what we're in for.
I understand the concern, for sure. Trump is the most concerning development in American politics in a long time, with 2016 perhaps being the most concerning year in Western politics in a long time.
However, I am not convinced that some bad years make for an unalterable trend. I think another reasonable interpretation of recent events is that we're going through a time of upheaval and tension akin to 1968 - difficult, for sure, but not catastrophic in the end.
Some lessons may have to be learned by elites - perhaps both leftish elites (that we should treat middle America as an ignorable backwater at our own peril) and rightish elites (that perhaps it's necessary to take care of a social safety net and government-funded programs for increased opportunity to ensure social cohesion). And those may be learned in a difficult way.
And we are probably starting to realign in a real way, with Democrats grabbing up more and more urban elites (even in the south) along with non-whites of all walks of life, and Republicans basically grabbing up all of the rest of the whites. Sanders Democrats will remain somewhat awkwardly-placed, but I think things have a good chance of basically moving in this direction.
But I still don't think there's nearly enough evidence to panic about something like civil war yet. We are a divided country, but I think there are lessons learned from experiences like this. There will always be blips on the road forward, and they can be rough, but I don't think we are near true disaster yet.
Perhaps more cynically, I also don't see much of an economic incentive for something like a civil war, which was clearly not the case for the Confederate States of America.
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