When our current political system will die
The Democratic Party is patiently waiting for the death (or at least permanent disabling) of the Republican Party as their base of whites who fondly remember the days of Jim Crow dies off and whites in general become a small enough demographic that the percentage of racists and cranks in our midst won't be enough to add up to an electoral majority at the national level.
A similar demographic change could end the stranglehold both parties have on political power.
When people who grew up getting their news from a local paper and TV become a minority, that will be the end of it.
Progressive talk show hosts and pundits rail about the sins of the mainstream media, the Sunday talk shows, columnists at the major papers and what stories those papers get wrong or don't choose to cover at all.
But younger people don't even tune in those sources. We have a myriad of sources available to us online, and if someone is just repeating empty talking points and bringing no real facts or new angles to an issue, we simply move on to a source that does.
I'm fifty, and feel like I sit in the middle of this. I grew up with TV and physical newspapers, but shortly after 9/11, I realized I could get better and more information in five minutes online than I could from any TV news show, and I had already given up reading the print edition of the local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, except as a Sunday brunch ritual. When they raised the price and cut back content, I gave up even that.
Even though I don't rely exclusively on the LA Times, NY Times, or some equivalent, I still feel a kind of reflexive deference when their take on a story differs from the progressive one, even if the progressive one is backed by reputable studies, declassified government documents, or whistleblowers with solid credentials, and respectable news organizations around the world.
There's still a part of me that suspects that pre-packaged "conventional wisdom" is true, that the ghost of Walter Cronkite is guiding the writers and editors and newsreaders of the mainstream news media toward accuracy over balance and the public interest over the owners and investor class.
I'm not sure how much younger than me they are, but there's a generation coming up who won't know who the hell Walter Cronkite is.
When they become the voting majority, no one will be able to convince them that they have only two choices, and there are things that they shouldn't know. They will know the other choices and they will find out what those in power don't want them to know.
And if some old fart calls some opinion of theirs a conspiracy theory, they will know there's a decent chance that facts will eventually leak out making today's conspiracy theory tomorrow's ho-hum accepted history.
When they become the majority, things will start to change faster than our pot laws are now.
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Yes sir we are going to get our comeuppance now.
