I would love to be wrong, I like supply chains and functional infrastructure. But here’s why I think things are going to get worse: the BLM outrage is just the pimple on top of the boil. It probably could have been something else if the timing was different. What we’re looking at is a largely mechanical process, a societal bottleneck caused by elite overproduction, conflict between those surplus elites, and popular immiseration, ultimately leading to a government debt crisis. (There’s an effort post about Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics theory in my post history if you’re a doomer too.)
It’s like a pressure cooker. Pressure has been building up in the pot for decades. The Chauvin verdict let off a little steam and temporarily reduced the pressure, but nobody turned off the stove. It’s inevitable that the pressure will build back up. Over the short term, concessions to the mob can bleed off pressure and keep elites where they are, keep stonks going up and Amazon delivering our stuff, but over the medium term, the fundamental forces causing the pressure buildup aren’t going to change. They can’t. Elites need cheap, desperate labor and the money printer to keep brrrring, plebes need our cheap Chinese crap and our bread and circuses to numb the pain. The current dominant liberal elite needs identity politics to split and control the working people, so they can’t let up on the BLM racism hype.
Right now the right is floundering around, but that won’t last. Concessions to the mob will cause the rise of counterelites who will ally with a counter mob. Trump was the sloppy version of this, but they won’t always be sloppy. Things are going to get spicy and by 2030 Balkanization or worse is a real possibility. Turchin predicts all of this using MATHERINOS and SCIENCE.
Anyway, I am definitely a moron: I thought there would be outbreaks of violence after the Chauvin verdict, and there weren’t.But that pressure cooker is still on the stove. You can see the outrage machine trying to start up again with the teenager in Ohio and the “it was just a harmless teenage knife fight, y’all.” Eventually a police killing with the right optics if you trim the film judiciously will coincide with comfy looting weather and then it’s riot time.