Fantasy Tectonics League

      Tamara keeps sharing increasingly unhinged takes on current events that she finds on the Internet.  They worry me.  They worry me in a way that Nixon vs. McGovern or Ford vs. Carter never did, in ways that Obama vs. McCain or Romney never did.

      Because it's stopped being just politics.  It's stopped being about if this or that brushfire war/nation-building is justified* or if the fed.gov ought to try helping the poor or automakers or banks.  Those were all things about which more-ore-less reasonable people could more-or-less reasonably disagree. Both sides often had valid points to make and quite often, the disagreement was not over the notion that something was wrong, but the best way and instrumentality to go about trying to fix it.

      What's going on now is different.

      There's a split over the nature of reality itself -- and both sides can't be right.  Either the election was as fair and honest as the preceding dozen, or it was rife with fraud and cheating that changed the outcome; either there's a shadow war -- with real guns -- between branches of the Feds going on between the Deep State and its enemies, or there isn't.  The pandemic is real or an illusion with a vast, power-grabbing conspiracy behind it.  The President-elect either broke his foot playing with his dog, or he's hiding a house-arrest ankle bracelet as the result of a complicated criminal immunity deal that will result in a second term for President Trump. Either someone in the Administration has been dropping hints of a strange conspiracy and efforts to counter it, or a hoax has spawned a large-scale delusion.  These are not simple disagreements; they show a fundamental fracture over the nature of our (supposedly) shared reality.

      I'm not expressing an opinion about any of these items here.  Because opinion is so entrenched and so irreconcilable, there's no point in arguing one over the other.  But they can't both be right and sooner or later, as a society we'll have to collapse the wave function, open up the box and see what's inside.  What happens after that, I don't know.

      If you see either vision as a kind of doomsday cult, they tend to rebound from contradiction -- they recalculate, reinterpret and keep moving -- but not always.  If it's just a matter of politics, they represent incompatible conceptions of the nature and function of our federal republic.

      What are we counting down to?
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* Almost certainly not, though there may be weltpolitik considerations that involve warfare as a tool -- just don't claim to me it's moral to blow up some poor slob's house and family because he happened to be born and grow up in the wrong place.