politics

Yea but they are going to escalate anyways.

There is some cost that will be too great for your enemy, and it need not be attrition.

The wealthy are few, and they have nice lives of safety and comfort because they can pay a subset of the workers to protect and serve them. Be that police, politicians, private security, etc.

There are 3 cost / benefit calculations in play in this scenario.

1. For those with wealth there is a cost to squeezing the population, the benefit is increasing their share of the wealth. Resentment, social instability, etc. These things aren’t free, wealthy people have to pay for security, pay for media to keep the populace on their side, pay for politicians. If the cost to obtain wealth outweighs the benefit, it isn’t sustainable to continue pursuing it.
2. Those that serve the wealthy. They get paid through salaries, benefits, access to power, and social status. They cost is that they work against the interest of the rest of us to protect the wealthy.
3. The rest. Society at large is a game where the cost is giving up violence, allowing the state to monopolize that. The benefit should be that the state wields that in the interest of the common good. That contract appears to be broken. So now we have a new cost / benefit scenario playing out. The cost of action against the state has been made very high, you see the groups 1 and 2 know how to play this game. They will beat you, they will imprison you, they will kill you. When those groups start ramping up the costs you should realize it’s for a reason. The benefits of tearing down the state get higher and higher the more authoritarian it becomes. The state would like to have your obedient labor without providing anything back to you. At some point people realize that there’s more benefit in destroying or reforming that system, which generally ends up with the people in group 1 and 2 having less comfort and power.

Terror really isnt the thing group 3 should be focusing on. Cost is.

It should be expensive to be in group 1 or 2, so expensive that people don’t want to be a part of it anymore. That’s how you win this group fight. You can see that groups 1 and 2 realize this and so they want to make the cost of doing anything to jeopardize their groups as high as possible.

It remains to be seen if anything will come of it. Americans have proven to be incredibly willing to accept insanely high costs that only benefit the few wealthy. They will go into bankruptcy to pay for egregious healthcare. They will fund the police 100x over the social systems that would prevent crime in the first place.

We are at the end of a nearly century long project of the wealthy propagandizing the populace. So much that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” a phrase intended to mock the idea by being plainly impossible is just a thing people unironically say.