This is pure speculation and will never happen, but imagine that all the people in the US were warped to an identical set of twin worlds to live, but the population would be split where all the liberals and all the conservatives would be put on different worlds. For the people right in the center, they could be given a choice in a sort of purgatory and decide which world they wanted to move to.
For one, which society do you think would be more prosperous and robust? There would still be a spectrum of views of course, but shifted to the left and right, with authoritarian/libertarian impulses spread all around.
Which would have a harder time thriving for the lack of the other “type” of people?
Are we talking about a hypothetical America, suddenly rid of the 65 million or so Clinton voters and their kin, but otherwise still in a world like today, with Canadians to the north, Mexicans to the south, etc, or are we talking about all of us conservatives transported to some new place, to start over from scratch?
Unchecked and unchallenged by the opposition, The Party does not only the stuff they’re good at, but also a significant amount of the stuff they’re bad at.
Supporters become disillusioned by this and either:
[ul]
[li]Revolt, and from the resulting social, economic and political upheaval, opposing factions arise that somewhat resemble the original two-party system[/li][li]Splinter peaceably into opposing parties.[/li][/ul]
IOW: nature abhors a vacuum; the system reinvents itself in a fairly short period of time.
I’d argue that the liberals would perhaps do marginally better (a lot more scientists and strong thinkers among them), but would very, very quickly become a lot more conservative. There seem to be links between surviving in a threatening or hostile environment and conservative thought. As Scott Alexander put it in the “Thrive/Survive Theory of the political spectrum”:
The fact that we’d be “starting from scratch” would shift our political leanings quite heavily. Gun control makes a lot less sense if you need to hunt for your food or fend off wild bears. Laissez-faire do-what-you-want freedom leaves the margins for survival that much more marginal than a clear heirarchical control structure where everyone knows what they’re supposed to do and does it. And so on and so forth.
Then the liberal one - I’m seeing a society that’s pretty much like Scandanavia, there.
Whereas the Conservative one (based on the current US conservative agenda), with laissez-faire economics, no environmental regulation, no social welfare, reduction of most civil liberties except guns, religious intolerance - I don’t see it being a very sustainable place. Continued large wealth disparities and terrible living conditions for the masses, historically, are a recipe for discord.
I ran this through a computer simulation and found that most liberal voters would be aborted by their parents at the exact time that most conservatives die in the same hunting accident. 100% of the time.
Has anyone done an actual survey in different engineering fields to see the actual percentage of conservatives to liberals? And even there, I bet the number of social conservative engineers is infinitesimally small and looked upon like some sorts of bestial creatures to be shunned and spat out.
And even if the conservatives had a few more engineers (certainly not more tech engineers), the liberals DEFINITELY have more scientists.
If we skipped ahead a million years, I wonder if we’d see a repeat of the time machine, could this be the later stages of human life and civilization after a seed stock of conservative governance?
Is there going to be some sort of magical totalitarian constraint that keeps it Liberal or Conservative? (but somehow also provides sufficient flex for it to function)?
If one group disappears, the remaining group will find that some issue that was trivial when there was an enemy around is now insurmountable, and break up into two or more quarreling groups. This will repeat fractally.
What threats? Almost all the threats we have to deal with are from are fellow humans, not wild bears. I see the liberal world eventually ending up something like the Federation from Star Trek. In fact, if it weren’t for isolationist type thinking, I think our actual current world was headed in that direction. Trump and his kind (including in other countries) have unfortunately ruined that vision of the future.
The conservative world, being mostly conservative Christian, would most likely end up like a Christian version of Iran. If civil war were to break out at some point, it would be more likely in the conservative version than the liberal version. It should be obvious which one I’d choose.
What threats would you encounter if you had to rebuild civilization from the ground up? Wildlife, because predators haven’t been as relegated to far-off places. Disease, because widespread medical care needs to be reinvented. We’re fast, but we’re not magic - modern medical care would be a couple years coming. Starvation as well - agriculture is hard, and I wonder how many people know how to farm effectively. This wouldn’t be a cakewalk, and we’d be in for a few years of surviving. Many probably wouldn’t.
OK, I’m going to stick with “the system reverts to something functionally similar to what we have now”. I’d say the timeline for that is a small number of decades, and the process is anything from peaceful reform, to all-out war.
