Measured yes, but not uncontroversial, in large part because there is unspoken agreement among many today that violence is not only a legitimate form of political expression, but is in fact one of the very few practical means of achieving anything. https://twitter.com/StrangelEdweird/status/1347010785042640900

Local politics is atomized, lacks power, and is often a reflection of heavily partisan-sorted residential patterns which preclude functional organization. State-level politics have less and less power, and are viewed as the level where corruption and self-dealing begin to bite.

Not one living soul with less than $100 million in assets truly believes they can have any personal effect on the federal government, and most people see that great shambling edifice as alternating between ossified seizure and threatening, alien exercises of coercion.

Voting doesn’t seem to do much, private organizing doesn’t seem to do much, so what are the remaining options? Some people opt for the pseudo-political self-organizing cadre-ism of social justice, others see the grand gesture of iron as the only option; some move between the two.

The key point is that none of these people perceives this as *their* government. Some say it’s government for the rich, some say for corporations, some say for elites bent on social engineering, some say foreign governments. All say that this is foreign to them, an invader.

Build a society of aristocrats and peasants, get peasant revolts against the privileges of the aristocracy. People will not maintain abstract faith in a democracy where all the important questions are kept off-limits behind glass by Smart People because “that’s not who we are.”