Misattribution of sincerity

There's an increasing concern for disabled people; it's clear that they don't get any additional support despite the pandemic and it's worrying that "you should die for the economy" rhetoric is solidly mainstream.  It's not very far between that and "we'll kill you for the economy", especially since that's what various governments' COVID policy amounts to in functional terms, just a little more random.

This tends to focus on "a drain on society" and the (entirely obvious from a disabled perspective) "I'd contribute more if you'd spend more", either on making economic contribution possible (e.g., the refusal to allow work from home prior to the pandemic; lots of folks could have a job if they can work from home, and not if they have to commute) or on providing basic support (e.g., public provision of mobility devices).

There's a couple-six tactical mistakes in all this.

Firstly, "drain on the economy" in "you cost more than you pay in taxes" terms isn't answerable; that's why the frame is used.  (Generally by people who seek to lower their own taxes to zero; presenting in complete seriousness a plan to cull oligarchs as unproductive might be a useful rhetorical response.)

Secondly, mammonism tries hard to present itself as factual, but isn't in any way; it doesn't accept falsifiability of anything, never mind its axioms.  No amount of pointing out material error will do anything because no mammonite is the least bit interested in being correct.  It's a sort of distributed mystery cult.

Thirdly, most people sincerely believe that it's OK to kill you for not being normal.[1]  Their entire childhood was structured around social norms where you hurt people until they acted normal, they were themselves certainly hurt for not acting normal, and their conviction that you must be normal is axiomatic, irrational, and close to absolute.  (And immutable; success with gay acceptance, such as their was and what there was of it, rested on "I don't want to kill someone I know fairly well" squeems.  There was no general expansion of normal and there was no refutation of "OK to kill you for not being normal".  There were a bunch of personal exceptions and an agreement that you should be allowed your personal exceptions if you were normal, since, well, yeah, having to beat someone to death when you kinda liked them would be icky.)

Fourth, no one (aside from a few marginalised economics hobbyists) wants to optimise productivity, economic participation, or any general measure of contribution; they want to optimise how much money they have.  Even when people aren't outright mammonites; what you hear repeated becomes true, and the degree of repetition of mammonite axioms is well past saturation.  Security arises from wealth, you must obey greater wealth, and there are no permissible collective forms of organisation save those which reinforce the gradient of wealth.  (why, yes, that does describe a slave society,and yes, they do mean that as a constraint on laws.)

So what do they want?

They really do want to kill you for not being normal.  It's a construction of virtue, in part because the people doing the construction derive their social power and standing from participating in the definition of normal.  (Every time you see complaints about "kids these days" and novel communications platforms?  The base complaint is "they're getting their construction of normal from a source that isn't me".  It's a real threat to the existing general social construction of power if the source of the definition of normal shifts.)

Everything else is a rationalisation for how they can want that and be a good person.  None of it is any more falsifiable than any other faith statement or any other rationalisation; no amount of pointing out that money is an entirely profane collective rationing system for agency that doesn't function without a state guarantor makes a dent on mammonites, because they know that money is the materialisation of the love of God and you can't have it, and you certainly can't have any of theirs.  (When it's not and can't be your money; money is inherently and inescapably socialist.  Agency isn't; agency is inescapably and particularly your agency.  That difference in scope is where much of the problem comes from once, structurally and socially, money and agency are equated.)

Is there a more helpful frame?

I think so; removing friction.  All this implicit difficulty in stairs and curbs and narrow stairwells and so on is a cost, and just like the deaths that lead to carbon monoxide detectors being required, it's a cost there's a general social motivation to reduce.

Places where ramps come in, splitting stairwells, the ramp gets a lot of use by people with roller luggage, garment racks, and so on; it perfectly straightforward to point that out as general utility.  Perfectly straightforward to point out that current escalator design optimizes the wrong thing.  It's not normal to want to make regular daily life more difficult, is it?

(Well, yes it is; it provides display opportunities, and thus status.  Trick is to move the basis of status.)

The city engineer should be seen about towing a little instrumented cart, and public roads rated by where the greatest force is required; places of business should be rated by the ability to move a volume frame around in them.  You get the fire marshal and emergency services to do that one; can we get the stretcher to you? stuff.  Only you make sure it's one of those scissor-lift gurney things in current use, not an old-school pole stretcher.  If this coincidentally improves mobility devices, and if there are much less-publicised mobility device requirements, well, the point is to make the regulation harder to argue with.  It's normal to want them to be able to get the stretcher to you.

(This general idea of not making things difficult can and should be extended all over the place.)

From there, there's the idea that there's a general public responsibility to expand possibility.  Not for the worthy; not for immediate, direct, economic reasons, but because that's what it is normal for a society to do.  A society which pretends to prosperity by denying opportunity is both weak and a lie. [2]

(One could, in past times when some people believed in being judged after death, sometimes get somewhere with notions of duty and obligation; pretty much everybody getting hurt by COVID in the Anglosphere is that way because of government failure, and the successor government acquire an obligation thereby.  Nobody actually believes this today.)

So, yes, there's an immediate need to worry about all this and to care for the stricken in the specific and in general; insisting that it's wrong to measure people's worth with money won't work, because to a first approximation no one here in late capitalism believes that.  Pick a value of normal people want and advance that.  It might work.  "This is cruel" won't work; it never worked when they were kids, after all, and now they know what virtue is.

[1] it is OK for drivers to kill people if the people aren't in cars because driving is normal; walking and riding a bicycle aren't.  It is entirely that simple, which is also why it's so wretchedly intractable.

[2] "medical technology unable to free you from specific constraint is insufficient, and should be improved with the goal of attaining sufficient capability to free you from your specific constraints for all the values of you in society"  would be a controversial statement. (in large part because people correctly suppose that corporates would get the tech first, and make being able to edit you a condition of employment.)  It's still the appropriate social goal, and one where part of the goal has to be a social and systemic context where it's possible to have the capability as an increase in general possibility; your agency is increased by this, not decreased.

Utility of legitimacy

One of the obvious things about COVID-19 has been the clear demarcation between "people will act collectively" and "people won't act collectively" societies; the former do vastly better handling infectious disease outbreaks.

Why?

People ascribe legitimacy to a government which, minimally, does not frustrate their purposes.  Ideally, it will advance their purposes, but in generally it's sufficient that it not frustrate their purposes.

I think it's obvious that societies where people won't act collectively don't ascribe much legitimacy to their governments.

There's three reasons for that.

1. Illegitimate purposes, all of which reduce to enforcing a prescriptive norm.  People who derive social standing and personal power from defining the prescriptive norm detest the ability of a central government to prevent them from doing so, and even though this is much more de jure than de facto at present, both the mere idea and the apparent strong demographic swing against the practice of having prescriptive norm at all have produced a war-of-extermination response among the people used to have that social power.
2. Information contamination, where people who recognise their loss of agency under conditions of mammonite wage slavery social organisation then blame the wrong -- frequently fictional! -- actors, rather than those actually responsible.  Any government not suppressing the fictional bad actors is obviously in favour of the loss of agency, and therefore illegitimate; it's frustrating the purposes of the citizenry in general.
3. A complete absence of even the pretence of uniform justice.  The justice system is utterly mammonite to the point of creating and enforcing caste systems.  Since the great majority of people do not have enough money to get anywhere near the mammonite elect, this also frustrates their purposes.

All of these things are systemically fixable; it's possible to get back to a general legitimacy of collective effort, which we are certainly going to need.  Nobody is going to do any better on climate change than they did with COVID-19, and COVID-19 isn't an existential threat.

None of these things are fixable in a mammonite social context.  And since the mammonite elect have effectively all the agency, this does present serious logistical challenges.

Less than agriculture breaking without a backup plan in place, though.

Polarisation is an inappropriate frame

Like pretty much anything that gets widespread media push, "politics is becoming polarised" is not helpful.

Firstly, there's only one issue.

Agriculture breaks in this generation.  The agency to address this is concentrated in a tiny group of people who are actively and resolutely in favour of agriculture breaking.  (Which is equivalent to "current policies are to be extended until at least 99% of the population is faced with a choice between  abject submission and starvation."  Those current policies are a problem, but they're not the issue.  The issue is the goal constructing society as a machine for producing submission serves.)

This is an outside-context-problem; it's never happened before.  (Years of dearth are not the same thing as agriculture breaks; years of dearth occur and end.  Years of dearth can be address by transportation, because they're local.  Agriculture, once broken, stays broken for anything resembling a human time scale.)

An outside-context-problem means no one has a suitable cultural response.  It also means that nigh-every available cultural response is inappropriate.

Secondly, money is a means of rationing agency.   This does not have to be passively so; it can be actively driven as policy, as we presently observe it to be.

The confusion between wealth and virtue serves a narrative that those who are not wealthy deserve their fate, whatever that should happen to be.  It's possible to presume wealth is certain evidence of divine favour and to tangle all of politics up in discussions about how much virtue attaches to wealth and whether anyone's fate should be altered and if so, who, and thus prevent any discussion of the actual issue.  We observe this absolutely everywhere across various mechanisms of government.  (Which tells us a whole lot about the degree of meaningful difference at this scale between modes of government.)

Thirdly, any suitable cultural response -- any construction of society, law, politics, etc. -- will in a meaningful sense have to be new in order to address the outside-context-problem.  That's what "outside context problem" means in operational terms; a new solution must be devised, existing systems cannot solve this.

That people retreat to rigid views under threat and high levels of stress isn't surprising; that advertising and grift culture increase stress levels is obvious.  What is less obvious is that no one has any idea what will help, and the closest available approximations -- ideas like uniform justice and egalitarianism -- are intolerable threats to the folks with all the agency, who do their best to make these ideas inexpressible.  What gets lost is that no one has any idea what to do.  This is a lot closer to panicked flailing than polarisation.

Calling it polarisation allows a "red sweater or blue sweater?" narrative, though, leaving aside any mention of it's both hot and raining and no sweater will help.

Feels fail as policy

 Without a positive future to describe, we will lose, and with that loss comes a true, grinding horror of mass extinction, degradation, and suffering. Please, please, please make room for hope.

That's the generally clever Nick Harkaway, falling prey to the assumptions of Christian eschatology.

There will be no redemption; there will be no salvation.  Those happen in the afterlife, which doesn't exist.

The folks getting rich off of open-loop extractive capitalism -- that would be everyone who is in any sense rich -- don't think a future in which they're not doing that is positive.  They've been making that decision for forty-odd years now, and it behoves us to listen.  (There was totally, is totally, the option of a decision to get rich some other way.  It's been actively disdained.)

If we want a future with a smaller mass extinction, there are a number of thing we must do.  Cease fossil carbon extraction; cease outdoor illumination at night (yes, really; it's at least as lethal to insects as pesticides, and it's much harder to evolve around); acknowledge that if what makes you middle class is owning your house your house is still worthless.  Stop using synthetic materials that do not either rot nor get recycled.  Recognise that going on a binge with capital is not income, no matter how long or how much or how habituated the carbon binge has become.

The current oligarchy isn't going to do that for the sake of a positive future; they're mammonites, and the only requirement for a positive future is having all the money.  Having all the money in a complex, healthy ecosystem and having all the money in an underground bunker dependent on filtered air and mushroom-farming based on a steadily decreasing supply of frozen corpses is much of a muchness to a mammonite.

The current oligarchy probably wouldn't do that if the certain alternative was public unanesthetized auto-orchidectomy with a charity shop cheesegrater.

So the hope, if you must descend into the weakness of hope, is not for a less damaged world than there might have been; the hope is not for a quiet passing of extractive capitalism, that supreme engine of war; the hope is the hope of victory.

Victory is having the leisure above survival to fix stuff; victory is having no more oligarchy.  Victory is the prospect of a human population who does not regret their precarious existence.

You don't get that through hope, or wrath, or righteousness; you get that through planning.  You get that through not flinching away from the purpose of the system is what you observe it to do. (The government of Ontario exists to kill as many people as necessary to ensure the cash flow of the existing rich.)

The United States is a failed state

 It's not that it looks like one; it's that it is one.

People have been working since the sixties to make it one.

Once you've got a plurality of the population (and a majority of the white settler population) who think it's illegitimate, it just is.  That's the definition of a failed state, even before you get into the "institutional armed groups who are not subject to civil control" and "widespread terrorism" and "institutional authority not accepted" (for example, Congress not enforcing subpoenas because collectively they can't imagine that they're allowed to do that.)

So, yes, people voted for Trump; they're voting to legitimise the state they believe in, which is a white ethnostate where there are no facts.  ("Educational divide" is excessively abstract; the complaint is that facts are those things that reduce their social status.  You cannot imagine how intensely they're against facts.)  This is why conspiracy theories are popular; it's a way to explain why what they want is necessary.

Lots of people did NOT vote for Trump.  They're voting for what they believe in, which includes notions of legitimate collective action, limits to profit, and a cosmopolitan inclusiveness that accords rights to everyone.  Thing this groups has not figured out is that the other group is incapable of admitting error, so traditional political processes involving compromise don't produce improvements to the circumstances.

I keep hoping they're going to learn.