WatDabney

Most of those ‘sectarian’ spaces are the end result of anti-sectarian attempts

This is a vital observation, and not just in this narrower context but in the broader context of leftism subverted by authoritarianism.

The thing is that we actually can have instances free of sectarianism. All it requires is a population among whom enough people hold to the value of non-sectarianism to not only establish such spaces, but for them to continue to be non-sectarian solely because nobody succeeds in driving wedges (or better yet, nobody even tries). And again, this dynamic holds in the broader context and not just in this narrower one.

But of course the problem, at whatever scale and in whatever context, is that we don’t have such a population, and there’s no indication that such a population will come to be in our immediate future either.

And that’s the exact point at which it starts to go wrong.

Through some combination of indoctrination and irrationality-driven-by-impatience, some number of people, faced with that fact, decide that that means that what we have to do is force it into being, which is inevitably doomed to failure, since it essentially boils down to establishing a hierarchy by which some claim the authority to eliminate hierarchy and prohibit authority.

For the purposes of the autocrats though, a group that isn’t really a group is the best kind.

If nobody’s a certain member, everybody’s a possible member.

Future historians are going to have a field day with the fact that, by making pardoning the participants in his failed 2020 coup attempt one of his first official acts in 2025, Trump clearly signaled his intention of destroying American democracy and justice.

With the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a destructively self-serving few, there are only two groups of people as far as that goes - those who would do something to stop it but can’t and those who could do something to stop it but won’t.

When future historians analyze the collapse of the US, they’re going to marvel at how blitheringly insane it was on the way down.