by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The popularity of people asking the Internet about the possibility of an impending civil war in the United States says a lot about modern America. I say this because it’s easy to bandy about the abstract of a “civil war” in the most powerful, ostensibly most stable nation in the world without really thinking about what it means.
It seems as though America, collectively, has begun to worry about its fate on an existential level.
In the immediate future, there are two points in the future when a civil car is a possibility. In the near term, something to do with the 2022 mid-terms might be enough to push us over the edge. If, say, Steve K. Bannon’s plot to corrupt election boards is successful in 2022 to the point that one side or the other makes a major political miscalculation, it’s possible the country would begin to split between Blue and Red.
The time, of course, is the 2024 presidential cycle.
This is what the book The Fourth Turning would have us believe. And it makes sense. Republicans are, on a systemic level, autocratic and anti-democratic to the point that if they have it within their power to deny Biden re-election in 2024, they will. And, in fact, things are so bad that Biden could lose fair and square and we could still have a Second Civil War.
But I still think around late 2024 — early 2025, the United States will face three existential choices — autocracy, civil war or military junta.
At the moment, I still don’t know which one of those three choices we will pick. Usually, if history is any guide, when things grow existential, the actual path of history is selected because of very specific tactical events that no one can predict in advance. That’s why Foundation-like “psychohistory” is so difficult to do in any practical form.
But, yes, I would say the United States at the moment is, in fact, careening towards a situation where a civil war is a very real possibility. All the macro metrics, at least, are pointing in that direction. Here are the reasons:
- Republicans have come to glorify political violence
Something you see a lot these days within the bullshit echo chamber of the MAGA New Right is the belief that because “liberals won’t leave us alone” that they are being “driven” to extremism. There’s a lot of leading not-so-vague talk as to what all this would ultimately mean. But it’s clear that for a number of “thought leaders” within the MAGA New Right that they have accepted that at some point in the future, they’re going to have to resort to violence to get what they want. - Republicans no longer believe in democracy
It is now clear that like any good fascists, Republicans no longer believe in democracy unless it’s for the specific purpose of gaining and keeping power. This view of the system they’re supposed to a part of leads them do extremely distablizing things that help push the country to the brink. - Trump 2024
Just Trump being the 2024 nominee would, in itself, be enough to cause a civil war at some point in late 2024 – early 2025. He just has a special knack for “owning the libs” in such a way that if he stole in 2024 election and said the “quiet part outloud” that Blue States would grow so enraged that it would be they, not Red States, that left the Union and caused a Second Civil War. But Ron DeSantis is polling exceptionally well at the moment, so either Trump politically shivs him at some point, or he co-ops him, making him his VP, opening the door to DeSantis becoming America’s Putin at some point down the road a little bit. - Steve K Bannon.
Bannon and his toadies are actively working to destroy the framework that we use to administer free and fair elections. So, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where this gambit works in ways that Trump himself is too idiotic to pull off personally and it will be so egregious that, again, Blue States leave the Union and we have a Second American Civil War. - Extreme negative polarization
We’re in for a bump four or so years, no matter what, because negative polarization, on a systemic level, has reached a critical mass. When one of your political parties is fascist and would rather crash the global economy instead of even appear to work for the good of the nation — you got a problem. - A lack of shared values
As the big blow up on Twitter in the last 24 hours about a Stephen Colbert song and dance gag about getting vaccinated proves — we can’t even agree on what’s funny. A combination of this and negative polarization is leading to the United States being two nations, one Red, one Blue and when we get around to attempting to elect the next president, the system simply won’t be prepared for the passions it will stir up. - A potentially historic miscalculation on the part of Republicans
It’s possible that, much like European powers in the lead up to WW1, when the time comes and Republicans have a choice between peacefully transitioning us into autocracy or fucking with us all so we want to take up arms, they will choose the latter not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s possible that by the 2024 — 2025 period, Republicans will see a civil war as their only choice to consolidate power, even if it’s clear that they could get everything they ever wanted within the system they so obviously loath.
And, yet, it’s also possible that we’ll slip peacefully into a Russian-style autocracy and only a few more “woke” people like me will scream at the top of our lungs that we’re no longer a democracy.
But because for the average person nothing will have changed — at least in the near term — it will all be a lulz and it won’t be until 20 years of uninterrupted MAGA New Right rule that growing numbers of people might notice that something, at some point, changed.
