Whether they want to or not, politicians and the ultra wealthy are going to have to get out of bed together. The affair is over, if for no other reason then their own physical safety, then at least for their financial safety.
If income inequality continues and there's less and less available jobs for working age men, those men will find something to occupy their time, and I promise you, it won't be selling wood carvings on Etsy. I cannot remember where I heard this, and I'm going to butcher the quote, but it went a little something like, "When you take away a man's ability to earn his way, you turn him into a revolutionary." I'm almost certain I got that wrong, but that's the gist of it. We need a huge jobs program and we need one now. An enormous infrastructure bill would be a good start to calming down a lot of this nonsense. Employed people with disposable income rarely want to upend the system.
If we continue down this path, then the cold civil war that we're seeing waged mostly on the Internet, but occasionally out in the open, is going to turn into a hot one. And I guarantee you, if things escalate, you'll find Russia taking advantage of this by sending groups of their special operators to train these people, because no one in the world has more experience with urban warfare than Russia. And if you think that the American military is entirely unsympathetic to these people, you are starkly and dangerously wrong.
EDIT: And yes, I've been hearing / reading / seeing references to the "boogaloo" for years now. It seems we might be facing it sooner, rather than later.
The people who attacked Capitol were employed with disposable income.
If the system was working, wages wouldn't be stagnant for 50 years. Housing prices wouldn't have nearly quadrupled. College education prices wouldn't have nearly... you know what, I don't even know the correct modifier... gone up by 5000%. In 1971, CEO pay was at best 30-40 times the median salary of an employee at a company. If you made $10,000 a year, the CEO might make $300,000-400,000. The very best CEOs rarely made multi-millions.
This is not a sustainable system.
The problem is, these people don't really have the education to know how to attack the system to correctly dismantle it (in fact, it might not even be possible to dismantle it from a non-violent / institutional standpoint, but that's another conversation), so they instead riot and install Viking Pepe as their leader.
I agree with you that until we fix the rot in the system that leaves so many in despair, unrest will continue to escalate.
I think I'm being downvoted because most of us that post here on HN are either thoroughly entrenched in the system in some way, or we're elevated beyond these problems which mostly affect poorly educated lower class people.
We have tons of FAANG employees that post here, tons of wealthy entrepreneurs, lots of startup founders, etc. None of us really have jack shit in common with poor disenfranchised people. But we better start making it a priority to look into, else I fear we're going to find ourselves in a very unenviable position.
I think I meant to say that they had already succeeded in upending the system, and now they were trying to lock it in.
Downvotes appropriate; my bad. :-)
I am going through lists of Capitol stormers. I am finding cops, former firefighters, former officers, teachers, real estate agents, professors, lawyers, CEOS, etc. If anything, these people have some of the better jobs. I am sure there are unemployed people in there and there is selection bias, but it is hardly exclusive.
Some articles of employed people:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-protests-fal...
https://www.newsweek.com/here-are-people-that-have-lost-thei...
As a species, we're not exactly martyrs. Its the reason one man with a shotgun can hold 26 people hostage. At best, if every person bum rushed him, he might get 2-4 shots off. That's the absolute best case scenario. The logical thing to do is a coordinated attack, because then you ensure the safety of the group instead of your individual safety.
So it goes with this. If hundreds of people were willing to storm the Capitol, its because hundreds of thousands - possibly even millions - have the same sentiment, but for whatever reason - distance, fear of reprisal, etc. - couldn't physically be there.
I think that incident was 1) just the start of many more riots / clashes and 2) evidence of much larger, broader problem that we need to solve.
Exhibit A: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/01/10/retired-air-f...
> And if you think that the American military is entirely unsympathetic to these people, you are starkly and dangerously wrong
This is a serious problem. Either the incoming democrat administration lets it fester and be "protected" by people who will cheerfully discuss their murder, or they carry out what could accurately be described as an ideological "purge".
> Russia
They sent a spy to solicit the NRA, who was hugely successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina#Involvement_in_U....
Perpetuated by whom? Why would anyone involved want to blame unemployed men? Those who support storming the Capitol wouldn't want to portray themselves as "frustrated, unemployed men," and those who oppose it wouldn't want to blame a supposedly innocent group. Where does the perception come from?
That's not always protected, depending on how you're defining it. Seditious conspiracy is a major felony.[1]
A person is allowed to speak generally about political change. "Trump is a jerk, we should throw him out!" would probably be protected.
"Trump is a jerk, we should march to the WH after work today and physically remove him" might not be protected (though the bar to conviction would be pretty high - government would probably have to prove you actually meant to do so, not just "making noise").
IANAL, so that above is meant to be very general.
The trick to stochastic terrorism is to incite other people to do it without quite overstepping the arrestable line yourself. A sort of distributed "Nuremberg defense".