Folks on the left and the right should both remember that at the end of the day, the next presidential election is important, but not the most important thing that will ever happen.

Whoever wins, it's only 4 years. You're not going to save or destroy the country.

For the left, remember that America survived 8 years of George W. Bush, despite his best efforts.

For the right, remember that America survived 8 years of Obama, despite his best efforts.

For the left, remember that America already survived 4 years of Donald Trump, despite Ray Epps best efforts.

For the right, remember that America already survived 3 years of Joe Biden, despite his deployment of shunananmaprezure and batacathcare.

Far more important than any single election are the general trends in public opinions, and it's those things that help inform what's really going to happen as the people who are doing things end up percolating through the system.

People forget that George W. Bush and his agenda wasn't just his, a lot of people agreed after 9/11 that something big needed to be done about islamic terrorism, and not just on the right. Most of the congress and the senate voted to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan regardless of their rewriting of history later -- he appeared to be going with the cultural consensus of the time.

People also forget that Barack Obama and his agenda wasn't just his, a lot of people agreed after the war on terror and the ensuing assault on civil liberties as well as the collapse of the economy after the 2008 that big changes needed to happen and at the time it appeared that he was going with that cultural consensus. People forget that the Democrats had a supermajority in the senate for a short time, people were voting en masse for Democrats rejecting the Republican paradigm of the moment.

At the moment, there is no broad cultural consensus around either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. 2016 was a coin flip, 2020 was really a coin flip, and it's possible this November will be one as well.

MAGA populism is the answer that came out of the collapse of the Republican party in 2008. In my view, it's an objectively better ideology than the 2001-2008 strategy, even if Donald Trump as its avatar is kind of a bumbling blowhard.

I was actually hoping that the Democrats would catastrophically lose 2020 because they're working off a strategy book that assumes it's still 2008, and a lot has happened since 2008 including all of us learning that the things they did to "recover" from 2008 didn't really work and everyone's lives have gotten a lot harder.

Anyway, my other post talks more about this cultural consensus, but it's just some whitepills for people who think the world is about to end. It's gonna be ok bros.