Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests
by hpoe on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:46PM
(#25663020)
You don't need to go that far back in the mid 1800's one Senator beat another Senator almost to death on the Senate floor.
Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests
by xapata on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:50PM
(#25663069)
Anecdotes (US History) are useful for building hypotheses, but I like statistical evidence for testing those theories. Unfortunately, our best source of democracy data (Rome, at least 52 Greek city-states, Greek leagues, etc.) may be 2k years old. Obviously, we don't know much about the media of the day, so it'll be hard to test some of the modern social media theories. Maybe we could compare the behavior of different municipalities.
Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests
by oblio on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @05:32PM
(#25663566)
The tribalism part is easy: prosperity. Just like a fed snake is calm, so an extremely prosperous society is peaceful.
A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil...
In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down.
So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.
Rather than making conjectures about why today is different, it might be more helpful to investigate why some time periods weren't rife with tribalism.