How do you guys cope with the fact that the world isn't getting any better?

But many of these require years of grass-roots organization at an unpredented scale. How do you figure so many of these are likely?

First, I agree with you. A number of the predictions above, especially the more far-reaching examples in the last two sections, are far fetched without a radical change to collective action resolution.

A number of these are based on a particular sea change (outside the slow death/rebirth of the GOP) that I expect to occur naturally, as currently discordant factions start to coalesce into federated political alliances that, in solving their collective action dilemma, effectively co-amplify and organize to accomplish collective goals far more quickly.

This shift is graduation of progressive identity discourse from the socially-fractured era of social justice liberalism — that retrospectively would be characterized by slow progress and continued self-defeat by game-theoretical equilibria that are regrettably obvious only in hindsight — to the socially-unified era of economic justice liberalism, which will be characterized by its comparative velocity and expedience of its collective social and political reforms in service of the constituents of the republic rather than the manufactured and discardable entities constructed by a ridiculously small number of global elites.

I suspect the above will occur quite naturally as a result of the ongoing evolution of social theory and public discourse that increasingly multiplies, enumerates, and normalizes all existing or novel divergencies in sociopolitical identity spectra. It seems as this continues we will reach critical unification thresholds, marked by what could be termed normativity collapse.

For example, the first thresholds have already been reached in intersectional neighborhoods (e.g. queer folks, immigrants, bipoc, women, etc) and next at the intersection of concentrically larger adjacencies, until the adjacent unfederated spaces formerly defined by (non-inclusive) identities simply become too (graph-theoretically) sparse to cohere around a shared notion of normative identity effectively flattening these social strata into increasingly massive federated alliances.

Once this process is complete, the notion of normative/dominant social strata may sound like obsolete or irrelevant artifacts to the average person, for whom diversity and divergence IS the norm, such that the only identifiable societal enemy left is the one shared by every one.

If this is all too abstract, just imagine the LGBTQIA+ community keeps adding letters, until finally some portion of the remaining heteronormative individuals, who didn’t feel represented by any other non-normative identity along the way yet identify with the cause, are finally inducted as insiders to a full spectra alliance identified comically by the entire alphabet. In a nutshell, that could define a stage of normativity collapse, especially if they are a majority, because the only cohesive identity that remains outside the alliance is just… being anti-alliance.

In short, I expect a continued relativization/diversification of “identities” until the very idea of externally-imposed labels just seems backward, and even the few who might wish to defect because of some other group, cooperate regardless, because the alliance/coalition is the only way they can achieve their goals.

I’m not sure where the point of critical mass is in that trend, but I know it leads to sudden and massive improvements of everyone’s lives and, I think, our society as a whole.

We're locked in for 6-10C of warming over the pre industrial baseline. That will be catastrophic for most large land animals at least. Best we can hope for now is delaying the warming with geo engineering.