I mean, the rate at which people are dying and becoming disabled due to covid can't be sustainable, can it? This country was running on fumes to begin with. Surely a country with an infamously terrible healthcare system, an economy that runs everything with as little margin for error as possible, and a government that has lost its ability to respond to any major disaster that can't be shot at cannot withstand this kind of catastrophe? What do you think things are going to look like five years from now?
Things will probably be much the same 5 years out, although political tensions will be getting pretty damn hot under the upcoming Republican admin. There will probably be violence like with the 2020 protests, but a "civil war" would just be chuds shooting their ARs into the wind, it's not like liberals are actually going to arm up, and even if they did, they won't organize (not within 5 years).
If the US can't manage to do a vaccine diplomacy that matches what the PRC and other countries have to offer, it will only hasten the "pivot to Asia". 5 years is too short to fully see the effects of this, but it will become apparent in the US first anyway, as rapid inflation continues.
Single family "American dream" housing and lifestyle is like the main reason that life is so incredibly unsustainable, and as the Global South chooses to be exploited in ways that aren't exclusively at the whims of the U.S., it's going to suddenly become unaffordable. A sustainable, but comfortable lifestyle is approximately that of a Japanese person, or even an urban European who doesn't own a car (need to check my sources on that). American brains can't cope with that, and urban multifamily housing and public transit are generally shit because they're for poors of course. This is the starch in the kettle that's going to cause it to start to boil over in 5 years. California will probably elect soc-dems who break left of the Dems after Pelost and friends die off and be ok, but Florida and other places are gonna have a real hard time coping with gas being twice the price.
Hahahaha maybe you'll get a SocDem in SF or LA area, but CA is far from being welcoming to a succ. Maaaaybe if the housing market collapses worse than it did in 2008 you could see this kind of change, but real estate, tech, and agribusiness run this state and is invested in a neoliberal framework. CA just seems ahead of the curve because they are willing to do techno-cratic bandaid solutions like Cap and Trade, Single use plastic bag bans, etc, but the only structural changes the state makes are concessions to the right.
You're probably right, but the electoral power is there, and it becomes a question of how capital is willing to concede as the going gets rough (and yeah there's a solid chance the answer is just CAHSR and medium density development in LA, which is far from enough)
Liberals control the economy (for the most part) and their businesses control the government. The liberals are already armed.
"Progressive" Democratic Party voting liberals