Comment by Kamq
1 year ago
> In theory sure but have you been following Congress for the past decade?
On one hand, fair. On the other hand, you can only coast along on the old post-cold war bi-partisan consensus for so long without getting new consensus before institutions lose their legitimacy (you can already see this happening a bit).
We can default back to the last time we had consensus for some things, for some time, but you do need to get it again before big changes happen. If you get to the point where the last time we had consensus is before the majority of the people in the system were alive, you either need to hard pivot your society to focus on ancestor worship, or you need to focus on something you do have consensus on.
The problem is that the previous consensus was created by corporate centralized media, and in many ways was actually against the interests of most people who accepted it. Now that corporate consensus has fallen apart, so we've got two tribes each focused on the specific ways they were screwed over, with each ascribing the previous state of affairs to the other tribe. In a vacuum their differences could certainly be worked out to support a consensus. But given how well ragebait sensationalism seems to work, and the popularity of feel-good (well, feel-something at least) authoritarian demagogues like Trump, I don't see much hope.