4. The forecast is sincere, and accelerationists are looking forward to whatever comes next.
Here's a less hopeful option: Perhaps some Americans believe democracy is dissolving — and they welcome it. They're some sort of accelerationists, deliberately not fixing each new crack (or even creating more) so the whole edifice will more rapidly tumble. They're eager for the new order, whatever that may be. Perhaps they believe they'll get to design it.
5. It's political anomie and apathy, and the "democracy dying" rhetoric isn't insincere so much as unsupported by courage and conviction.
This is Savage's take in The Atlantic: that Democrats are guilty of "inexcusable complacency," more concerned with preserving their own election prospects than free elections, and in thrall to defeatism (branded as realism) which leaves them unwilling to take radical action (namely, ending the filibuster) to pass the legislation Biden endorsed. The Republican variant of this might be along the lines of this 2020 column in The Week by Matthew Walther. "Any politician can serve [the causes of modern social conservatism] because they are not really causes but clichés," he argued. It's easier to tweet about democracy dying than to take real steps to resuscitate it.
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