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Is "cancel culture" an actual thing?

It seems to me that when, e.g., students protest to stop some RW from speaking on campus, they're not suppressing his free-speech rights but exercising their own. The 1st Amendment guarantees nobody an audience.

Biden's infrastructure plan

has drawn some criticism because it does not include high-speed rail, only an upgrade and expansion of the conventional rail system. Europe and China and Japan have HSR, why can't we?

Also, so far as I have heard, it includes no funding for local mass transit. That's something that could really improve the daily lives of millions, quite apart from getting cars off the roads.

Are these things, for some reason, not politically viable at the moment?

Why is this pandemic so politicized?

We know why it was politicized to begin with: Trump was counting on a low jobless rate to propel him to re-election. Confronted with a pandemic it would necessarily require job-killing measures to contain, he reacted, as he usually does, like a toddler, and denied the existence of the problem. But why is it still politicized NOW?!

Does the U.S. even need to be a military power any more?

It seems to me that there are no countries left that really need American military protection -- even South Korea and Taiwan can take care of themselves. Why, decades after the Cold War ended, do we still need to spend as much on defense as the next 10 or 11 biggest-spending nations combined? Why do we need a global network of 800 military bases? Why does this republic need an empire?

No, we're not going to have a civil war. Not one that lasts more than a day.

When the Southern states seceded from the Union, they were still states -- organized, functioning political entities with taxing authority, in a position to form and fund a real army, with real professional officers and hundreds of thousands of enlisted men -- an army capable of putting up a credible fight against the United States Army for four years.

But the present political divide in America is not between states, it is within states -- between traditionalist rural areas and cosmopolitan urban areas. You can't make a civil war out of that, only a culture war in the suburbs and exurbs. If every private militia club in the United States were to gather in one place and join forces under a unified command, they would not last 15 minutes against any state's National Guard. Considering how much military equipment (and, presumably, training) local police departments have been acquiring in the past decade, they probably could not even put up a fight against the local police or sheriff's department.

So, what's all this talk of civil war? What does anybody think can actually happen, that would amount to one?

There are four factions that matter in American politics now

For some time, the GOP has been going through an intra-party war, between the Old Guard Republicans -- in the Reagan tradition, mainly concerned with protecting business interests, and who are intellectually guided, if at all, by The National Review and the editorial page of the WSJ -- and a white-working-class right-populist-nationalist insurgency, which manifested first as the Perot campaign and Reform Party; then as the grassroots Republican backlash against W's immigration-reform plan; then as the Tea Party; and most recently as the Trump movement. The latter current, in addition to its electoral power, also includes more frightening aspects such as the "Patriot" movement -- the militias, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, QAnon, etc. White nationalism is also a significant subcurrent of the populist-nationalists, although not all people committed to this faction are NECESSARILY racists. The pro-biz variant of libertarianism known as "vulgar libertarianism" is also a subcurrent, although whether it is a subcurrent of the Old Guard or the populists is debatable.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are going through their own intra-party war, somewhat less acrimonious for the moment, between the Old Guard Democrats, your basic love-me-I'm-a-liberals and centrists, including many liberal/centrist Rockefeller Republicans who fled the GOP when it lurched hard-right; and a grassroots left-populist-progressive insurgency, many of whom are not afraid to call themselves "socialist," most recently manifested in the Sanders campaign (the last one, I expect, given his age). This last faction is the only one of the four that (1) still regularly produces any new ideas worth listening to, and (2) appears to be at all growing. It is part of a leftist American tradition that has been mostly dormant since the Socialist Party of America broke up in 1972, but now appears to be re-emerging.

Which side are you on?

Democrats need to soft-pedal social liberalism, play up economic populism

If we do enough of that, we can win over the red states.

Let's face it, the American culture war was already WON, for all intents and purposes, when Buchanan declared it in 1992. All progress since then -- legalizing SSM, the ongoing normalization of transgenders -- has been in the nature of what military types call "mopping up." There is no possibility of going back -- the religious-right agenda is doomed by demographics, not racial but generational: Studies show the Millennials are less racist than any elder generation, less xenophobic, less sexist, less homophobic -- and less religious, with at least 25% of them avowed atheists or agnostics.

The REAL fight remains -- real because a lot of very rich and powerful interests will be fighting hard and to their last breaths on the other side, because it's about money, income inequality, distribution of wealth -- the things that matter most, even to a socially-liberal CEO.

I'm not saying Democrats need to go backwards on gay rights, transgender rights, or anything else; there is no need. I'm only talking about a change in priority and emphasis. We need to start publicly and repeatedly hitting the message that America's Public Enemy Number One is our own plutocracy -- rich people wielding political power far, far out of proportion to their numbers, and mostly not on the left side -- there are many more and mightier Koch types than there are Soroses or Buffetts.

Trump appealed to the white working class, partly through their racism, but also with a whole lot of vague economic-populist talk.
Well, what the white working class really wants, more than anything else, is an adequate supply of blue-collar jobs that will allow a person with only a high-school education to earn a middle-class income, like it was in the 1950s. If we can only deliver that, or even show a plausible path to it, they will vote D, and swallow their frustration about immigrants and abortion and the browning of America.