by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Things are kind of depressing right now in the United States. People keep telling me that I’m being “terribly negative” or “hysterical” to suggest that there is a greater-than-zero sum possibility of a Second American Civil War starting around 2025.
Other people have told me that “rich people won’t let a civil war happen” because no one gives a shit about poor women in Red States not being able to have an abortion. If it doesn’t hurt their bottom line then the wealthy of Blue States will not object to a new MAGA dystopian hellscape and will support Blue States “bending a knee” to our new MAGA overlords.
And, yet, I keep thinking how, in principle, the reason why liberals in Blue States are so angry over the overturning of Roe is very similar to what happened to Slave Power around the time Lincoln was elected. There will come a moment of truth for center-Left America.
Once we bend a knee to the end of reproductive rights not just in Red States but across America, we’re going down a slippery slope towards the entirety of the United States being politically identical to modern Russia.
And that’s the element of all of this that people are missing, I think — MAGA is so dumb and politically greedy that they could very well push America to the breaking point simply because they want to “own” liberals with a jackboot to the face for eternity.
There could be a point, around Certification Day 2025, when Blue States, rather than bending a knee, begin to leave the Union because MAGA has grow so radical and haughty that they won’t see any other option. But there are a lot of obstacles to this happening.
The monied elites of America really would have every reason to “bend a knee” to fascism as long as they could still make money. But there could come a point when the extreme ideology of MAGA is so severe that the average American in Blue States begin to risk their lives for abstracts rather than cold hard cash. Or, put another way, it’s possible that what is seen as an abstract now — something like “reproductive rights” will become concrete in the minds of millions of Blue Staters and, as such, we have a civil war.
And, yet, we’re still too far out for me to be able to game things out.
Right now, it seems very obvious that the center-Left is to weak in the US and we’re just going to peacefully slide into autocracy. But the official overturn of Roe is yet another stressor on an already weak American political system.
We’re just going to have to wait and see, I guess.
