UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:
Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:
So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?
Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.
It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.
These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.
There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.
As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.
Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.
The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.
Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?
Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:
The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);
517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;
Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;
Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;
35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;
25% were armed;
18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;
Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;
Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;
22.2% had a criminal record.
Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.
And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.
If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?
But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.
TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:
Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.
Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:
DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.
Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.
MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS
House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.
Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”
And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”
DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.
These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.
But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.
And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.
But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.
But that’s a big if.
Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.
That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.
Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?
Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.
Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.
For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.
It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.
If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.
But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.
UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:
In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.
It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.
“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”
Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”
“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.
…
Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.
Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.
Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”
“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”
As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.
That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.
Ian Welsh
The immigration cops would go for the right 100%
Nate Wilcox
No doubt about that.
One factor the right-wing is constantly harping on is how combat ineffective female soldiers are. I’m guessing women in the military are leaning Dem.
Is the right right?
shagggz
I’m always amazed by how the possibility and rich history of agents provocateurs is never acknowledged. We are simply to take the chants of “hang Mike Pence” and all the rest at face value. The cryptofascist seeds of distrust run too deep for any challenge to the uniparty to rise above petty warlordism.
Bukko Boomeranger
There are other ways to have a civil war besides having organised sides, with their own uniforms and objectives and territory they control. The terms “civil implosion” and “social cohesion” are mentioned in this post. What if that cohesion goes away? Frays, gets irritable, heaps of peeps become uncooperative? When every interaction runs the risk of becoming a confrontation because each party sees that OTHER moron is showing one of the opposite side’s signifiers?
The colour hat you’re wearing! You uttered that buzz-phrase that THEY say, but WE never speak it! You eyeballin’ me? Only a _______ does what you just did! Get outta my face, ______!
Civilisation depends on a certain amount of civility. Too much friction, stuff stops functioning. More and more, people are basing their actions around the chips that are on their shoulders. The senses of entitlement and intolerance are escalating. How’s the U.S. going to operate if every time you check out at a cash register, there’s a good chance of snarling? From the clerk, or AT the clerk, or with somebody behind you. The plumber finally came but he wouldn’t do the work because I wanted him to wear a face mask on account of his cough. I went to the school when they called me at home about Little Suzie and I wound up slamming my fists on the Plexiglas because of how those mofos were acting!
The social temperature in Amerika is rising. USAnians seem to be hating each other more and more. They might not be dressing up in Blue or Grey and seceding by the entire states-full, but unity is REceding. Americans HATE other Americans. I can envision the place slipping into “a war of each against all” (to paraphrase Hobbes. He SHOULDA worded it that way.) Lotsa stuff is going to grind to a halt when comity goes bye-bye. Imagine a civil war where society just atomises, dissolves, DEvolves, into individuals, clumps and groups. You won’t have to wait long before your imagination comes true!
someofparts
This kind of loops back to the previous post about people not being able to make good decisions when all the information they can access is dishonest. The people I see these days couldn’t stop scrolling around on their phones long enough to organize a civil war.
Larry
Where J6s come from just tracks with big states. Of course nobody was there from VT, it has under a million people and tilts older than other states. There’s committed crazies sprinkled throughout the country and they can create terrible stochastic violence like mass shootings. But as well said here, there is no political cause for a civil war. What are they behind? An increasingly geriatric and uninspiring Trump? He’s too busy grifting his supporters to line his personal accounts to really care. A race war? Most Americans aren’t racist and won’t support this. Most Americans live in cities and don’t identify with extremist views of Aryan nimrod. I suspect most Americans would very much support a president that squashes rogue militias or even governors that step out of line. People in Texas are pissed that their power grid is unreliable while their governor wastes money trying to stoke a panic on immigrants.
Dan
I see a lot of Second Civil War fantasizing that seems to either forget that the US military and intelligence apparatus exists or think it’s just going to passively follow this or that faction. If they do even think of it, they seem to think it’ll automatically fall to the far right or something.
As Ian notes, there are certainly elements of it aligned to this or that faction (like DHS being firmly in the tank for Trump), but I think a lot of people forget what the security state, and especially the military, exist for: they are the underwriters of global capital.
We don’t spend trillions on a blue water navy that people have known for decades would lose every battle against simple drone swarms; we do it because it polices the oceans so global commerce can flow. The US is also the heart of the global financial system; any instability here is going to affect the entire world economy.
My best guess prediction is this: we may yet see some Italian-style “years of lead” political violence in the future, but as soon as it gets hot enough to seriously threaten a global depression, the military is going to coup the president and Congress and mercilessly put down resistance.
* Small note on Nate’s question: the US military’s politics is complicated. The vast majority of service members are like the majority of Americans: fairly apolitical or depoliticized. As far as leadership, there are some outright reactionaries, like former General Flynn, but most of the ones who make it to the top are fairly centrist establishment types, like former Generals Petraeus and Milley.
Tallifer
This civil war would be so different from that of the 19th century, because while many Americans are willing to kill nowadays, very few are willing to die for their cause. Union soldiers and rebels were willing to march straight into hails of bullets and shellfire!
GrimJim
ACWII will look a lot more like the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan Civil War/Genocide than ACWII.
While the growing factionalism of the USA will form the storyline, it will be the economic and financial collapse that will be the true casus belli. Right now there are still plenty of resources and to spare such that the “Lazy American Boiling in the Pot” effect is still active.
However, that will change swiftly, and without warning, and sooner, rather than later. And once the goods and services stop flowing, once the city sized ships loaded with cheap goods from China stop coming, once the grain starts rotting in the fields… Then the knives will come out.
The forces will range from regional Military Warlords trying to preserve a kind of peace, to radical political/militia factions out for blood and genocide, to quasi-tribal gangs seeking mere survival. Plus a lot of unaligned everyday folks who are simply going to be doing what they can to survive.
The radical militias will be the worst. Mostly Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists, they will seek to impose their beliefs on everyone they can control, and kill anyone they cannot, or who fit their definition of “undesirables.” Other militias will form to oppose them, but they will be at a disadvantage, as they will not have the mindless fanaticism of the radical Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists, who were born and bred into a culture descended from generations of the Lost Cause and Christian Nationalism movements.
The Military Warlords will not be nearly as powerful as everyone expects. The USA military requires a VAST support system with a budget larger than most country’s entire national GDP. When the USA economy collapsed, there is literally nothing in the world that will be able to replace it. And the military, while it has some supplies aside, is as beholden to the modern JITS as any other business. Plus, the advanced technology used by the modern military requires a VAST system of civilian businesses and transportation system to keep it functioning.
So come the collapse, the USA military will fairly rapidly have to fall back to methods used back in the Vietnam or Korean war, or even WWII. They are just as dependent as we on the civilian gas and oil supply system. How many tanks and planes can they deploy when that stops flowing? Where will they get their food? What happens when all the systems that connect them to their satellite intelligence fail for lack of electricity and civilian contractors? The USA military depends on it’s amazing technological suite for force multiplication and projection. They will have a training advantage over the militias, but little more than that.
As for weaponry, everyone will quickly run out of ammo, unless they are very careful to have set aside materials for reloads… Or unless they have border access and either an ally or something to trade for weapons.
While there are a lot of little gun makers spread throughout the country, there are only a handful of factories producing weapons on an industrial scale left in the USA, and they are all tied in with the global economy, not only for sales, but also for raw materials. Most will become useless once international trade fails, as there is no local raw material market.
So ACWII will fairly quickly go from Yugoslavian-style militias shooting it out to Hutu/Tutsi style machete massacres. And then the starvation slowly sets in, as without industrial level agriculture, what few farms remain can supply maybe 1% of the population…
GrimJim
I should also note that the “State Actors” like Texas and Florida or whomever will be somewhere along the lines of a strong militia rather than a true army. They just won’t have the training or resources, plus, once the zealots truly take power, their numbers will shrink as the non-Zealot police factions bail and join their local regional/tribal militia, limiting their effectiveness.
This is also the case of the regional Military Warlords, as when materiel fails, so too will morale, and when being in the army-o does not guarantee a good lunch, many low-level grunts will just fade away, seeking a better deal. As most members of the military are apolitical, those with no political leanings will so no reason to stick around to try to resuscitate a dead government, while those who have agendas will leave to join their preferred militias.
The Air Force will be the first to go; they depend on the most technology. Hell, their best planes have to be essentially rebuilt after every mission! However, with the Air Force being riddled with Evangelical types, I expect that their resources will be quickly expended in bombing Blue cities, then just fade away when the avgas runs out.
The Army will have a few hardpoints, especially when teamed up with a Navy base on the coast. I expect the area around Norfolk to hold on strong for quite some time, with better access to resources from overseas, provided a strong ally remains solvent elsewhere. Or even if not; the USA is hardly above “requisitioning” goods when needed from other countries, and the Navy will have a strong ground force — the Marines — when targets cannot be persuaded simply by the big guns.
So look to Norfolk and other major Naval bases to be Military Warlord hardpoints, especially when found in combination with Army bases. Heck, nuclear powered ships and subs can even provide power for limited local use on base and such. After all, when you can’t fly planes anymore due to lack of avgas and parts, you might as well put that nuclear pile to good use otherwise.
The coasts in general have the best chance of holding things together, either as rump state governments, military cantonments, or independent militia/tribal cantons. They’ll have access not only to farms but also to fishing and trade. Lesser so for locations along the Mississippi and other major rivers.
It is the interior that will quickly devolve into a No Man’s Land, Mad Max style, with warlords holding onto and based in areas of important resources, such as working oil fields (not fracking fields; these require too much upkeep and tech). These will be old fields that may have been considered too poor for capitalist exploitation but will be plenty rich enough for the local warlord with their fleet of road-warrior style cars and trucks. Like the Angles and Saxons of merrie olde England, they will control their territories using the remains of the highway system, until that crumbles from lack of upkeep.
Then, things just depend on how well the rest of the world holds together. If it does, then slowly things might rebuild to a patchwork of petty nation-states, city states, and wastelands, with just enough trade to keep things going, and maybe some slight redevelopment of important industries in places with enough resources. And every once in a while, a crusade of sorts by the Pseudo-Christian White Supremacists against their enemy-du-jour. Kind of like what we see in backwoods Africa today.
Recovery to anything resembling the modern tech and society of the USA is highly unlikely. The USA has been an empire since Day One and depended on looting its colonies and the periphery and for its wealth and power. That can never be reestablished once it is lost.
Purple Library Guy
Living up to your handle, there, GrimJim.
I think even if roughly that scenario happens, the death/decline level won’t be nearly as bad as you envision. Nothing ever kills as much of the population as you can reasonably think on paper that it ought to. Some people die, but lots of people come up with makeshift ways to survive, help each other and stuff. In terms of international supply chains or the inputs that farms need . . . Sure, the way things are organized now is dependent on X, Y and Z, but if lack of X, Y and Z starts killing people en masse they will come up with other ways to organize things. Those other ways will probably be less desirable in various ways, particularly ability to generate profits, but that may matter less than one would expect when it comes to keeping people alive.
DMC
As GrimJim notes, the militias,as such won’t be so much of the issue as the pseudo-Christians. Between Christian Zionists, Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, and the New Apostolic Reformation, that’s well in excess of 50 million Americans right there. Imagine how many of them are also military veterans, who are already trained to military standards. That changes the equation radically. This makes it look a LOT more like Afghanistan, with the Rebels having the advantage of numbers and being able to blend into the civilian population and get support there from. Picture a couple of teenage goat herders with Enfield #4’s surpressing a platoon of Marines, sitting out at 700 yards, plinking away with the Marines unable to effectively respond short of calling in an airstrike. That’s what we’re looking at potentially, in the US.
StewartM
Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.
That’s because the biggest single factor motivating the January 6th rioters was the “great replacement” bugaboo.
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2022/01/06/jan-6-capitol-riot-black-lives-matter-242162
The motives of the Capitol insurrectionists are similar to those of the 1898 Wilmington coup. Robert Pape, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago conducted extensive research on the 700 people arrested for the attempted coup on Jan. 6. In this week’s episode of “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” he said that race was an important driver for their participation. He revealed that the Jan. 6 rioters came from areas where the white population was in decline and that they believe the “great replacement” theory spread by some pundits. According to this theory, Black people and other people of color are replacing whites and diluting their political strength. These have long been considered to be fringe ideas, but according to Mr. Pape, they are increasingly mainstream.
And it’s no surprise the places they came from. Trumpism was born in California, where conservatives realized that “Holy crap, in less than a generation we’ll be a permanent, powerless, minority in the whole country, just like here” and decided to ditch the whole ‘democracy thing’ to hold power. In that, they ARE like Southerners in 1861, “if we stay in the Union we’ll be a minority and will one day, be outvoted” save those Southerners reacted by creating a new nation with them in the majority, while the Trumpists just want to ditch democracy altogether or at least create a ‘republic’ where, like Orban, is so rigged in their favor they can never lose.
Looking the commentary here, on the perceived political motivations of the ‘enforcer class’, one sees the true intent of the 2nd Amendment—that the defense of the US, and thus the enforcer class, should be broadly representative of the population so it doesn’t’ become politicized. The only way to bring that back, though, would be a draft, as military service always was unpopular, even in the 19th century.
GrimJim
11% of Americans use insulin to survive. They are dead within three months of the power going out.
Between 17 and 20% of Americans need weekly if not daily mental health medication. They are all either dead or reduced to needing constant care within three to six months.
Altogether, some 66% of Americans take some kind of life-saving or life-supporting medication daily. Let’s say that at least half of those are dead within one year of the lights going out. That’s 33% of the population.
During the Rwandan Genocide, about 75% of the Tutsi population was killed in merely 100 days. Like Rwanda and unlike Bosnia, there will be no one trying to stop it, no outside forces intervening. Imagine the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists killing 75% of the “undesirables” they can get their hands on. Imagine many more of those American “undesirables” being able to fight back as they are being genocided (the Tutsis died en masse, not generally have the resources to fight back). It will quickly become tit-for-tat, with no mercy on either side, as the “undesirables” will no longer grant any mercy once they figure out what the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists plan for them. So that’s about 75% of 40% of the remaining population.
Then there will further be a much more massive death all around due to the lack of medical supplies and services. Add in pestilence and plague, and that increases the number.
And about a year in, the survivors will have used up remaining food stocks. If they have been unable to start farming, on a traditional MINIMAL level of about 5 to 10 farmers per 1 non-farmer, there will be starvation.
So…
345,000,000 Americans to start…
less 33% or 113,850,000 from medical issues = 231,150,000
less 75% of 40% (69,345,000) from Genocide = 161,805,000
less ~10% from plague and pestilence (16,180,500) = 145,624,500
And less ~20% due to starvation (29,124,900) = 116,499,600.
My estimate is that there will be only about 116,000,000 Americans left within two years of the collapse and the start of ACWII. That’s a 66% death rate within two years. That’s a minimum, with my being generous on all the numbers.
Estimates based on an EMP attack that takes down the entire USA power grid have been a 90% death rate in merely one year. So I’m actually looking at things with rose-colored glasses…
Ian Welsh
GrimJim.
Might want to elevate that casualty comment. You OK with it?
GrimJim
Note: Right now only 2% of Americans live on farms.
TWO PERCENT.
And all those farms, with the exception of Amish and some Mennonite farms, depend on gasoline and machines. and most of those machines are modern, complex, computer-based machines, which will be useless within weeks or months of the economy collapsing.
During the Great Depression, 20% of Americans lived in farms. This is the only reason starvation was not rampant. Just about everyone was related to or knew someone who had a farm, so they could count on them for some support.
Now, almost no one knows anyone who lives on a farm that is sustainable without advanced technology and gasoline. And the way monoculture has taken over American farms, along with dependency on chemical fertilizers and insecticides, plus the lack of remotely enough dray beasts, classic farming can’t be rebuilt fast enough to service teeming millions.
And so teeming millions will die.
That’s not counting destruction and attrition from refugees from the cities. Refugees are not going to care where or how they get their food; they will take it if need be, over the dead bodies of whoever gets in the way. And they will vastly outnumber the local farmer folk and their local friends. It will be like that end scene in The Day After, when the refugees took the farmer’s cow and slaughtered it, and he went out to complain. He didn’t even threaten them, and they just mowed him down.
That will be played out over and over again, everywhere. 80% of Americans live in a city, which is a literal food wasteland. When they start moving out, it will be like locusts, and anyone who gets in their way simply dies.
47% of gun owners are urban = 130,000,000 guns in the cities.
49% of gun owners are rural = 34,000,000 guns in the country.
You do that math.
GrimJim
“Might want to elevate that casualty comment. You OK with it?”
As I mentioned, my estimate was very generous. A complete economic collapse is not on the same level as an EMP outage. There will still be a lot of functionality, at least for a while… but I think the reality will be closer to the 90% than to the 66%.
GrimJim
Gah, boy, I had a brain fart on that gun owner percentage. Derp. Pay that no mind! I was mixing apples and glocks!
Still, the point remains… urban refugees will vastly outnumber rural “defenders.” The overall math just isn’t in their favor, when it is still one gun at a time per person.
GrimJim
I should also note that there is also a great variance in results based on who is in charge when the Collapse hits.
If Trump wins (and I’m not as sure of that as I was when Biden was running), then he will purge the military to ensure they serve him (provided they don’t coup him out).
Given a year or three, Trump can greatly unbalance the situation, putting the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists in charge of a vast number of resources and greatly restricting their “undesirables,” such that when the SHTF, they can carry out a much more orderly genocide than a civil war will allow. Not to mention he would totally love to drop a nuke on a “traitor” city, such as San Franciso or some other Blue city.
But then, I believe that if Trump wins, the Collapse will come very quickly, as the plans he and his followers have for the economy and international relations will quickly destroy both with massive cascading destruction everywhere, not just in the USA. They really have no idea of how reality works. More than a century of Austrian School BS has led to the development of an economic theory that has no basis in fact, and their plans will essentially pull the tablecloth out from under the whole house of cards…
Mark Level
Culture war utter BS is the only thing ‘Muricans are allowed by the system to demonstrate about. It juices up some folks (mainly far-rightists, Incels who live in mom’s basement, surly “Men’s Rights” type coz the ex got sensible & threw his useless ass out), and on the nominally “left” side it’s just silly signs like “We love ALL people” & performative fakery.
Meantime Wall St. & the War Machine, those “Local business owners” at the bigger scale get everything they want.
Mentioning the DeSantis Militia thing, 2+ years back when I still (stupidly) supported & followed “Beau of the Fifth [5th what?} Column”, he treated that subject and said what Nate says here, it’s nothing to worry about. Now he just shills for Raytheon & promises massive Victory of Ukraine any day now, “as long as it takes” = until the last 67 year old Ukranian Neo-Nazi is dead. . . On a serious note, this kind of thing shows what happens when the marks are full of hate & bite on the Empire’s “hate & kill your neighbors” hook. Slavs who believe they are Deutsche Ubermenschen & must eliminate the “Asiatic” hordes to the East. (Meantime the actual Deutschlanders let their pipeline be blown up by Master & see their country deindustrialize & shrink from influence.) For the Neighbor (not Civil) war theme, see also USA convincing Saddam to attack Iran, resulting in millions of Muslim deaths (by which Israel mainly benefited). before throwing him in the trash.
Very shocked to see a perceptive & germane comment by a certain “T” who used to irregularly comment here, to peals of laughter. Perhaps I should buy a lottery ticket, such Black Swan events happen once in a lifetime.
Willy
I dunno man. Those dissolutions of Yugoslavias and Rwandan genocides usually happen in poor countries. I’d think that a total collapse destroying the USA would happen worldwide first and topple America last.
While the initial phases of Total Collapse were happening elsewhere, why wouldn’t there be an American Napoleon? Or Bolsheviks? Or China making deals with Canada and Wet Bulb hordes making deals with Mexico? Plutocrats with cybertruck robots and reuseable missiles, from Mars? And who’d get control of the land-based nukes?
Maybe we’re skipping a few steps here. All that warlord stuff seems to be in the further future, with something else in the nearer future.
Willy
And civil war in the near future seems unlikely.
Our current style of leadership is where some entitled name-brand clown is only just astute enough to observe mob direction and jump in front to shout “follow me!”, but nowhere near bright enough to keep the mob believing in their solutions for very long.
I once could’ve imagined Elon Musk converting X into a paramilitary force, with Tesla fighting machines and SpaceX reusable missiles, with the help of his supplicant true believers. They’re instead becoming as jaded as at Boeing. Dude wrecked his mystique capital by opening his mouth. Gone are the days of catching a glimpse of designated ubermensch like Trump or Thiel on a superyacht, to imagine wizard-lords eloquently debating over the future of middle earth. We now imagine word salad gibberish about nubiles on Epstein’s fantasy island. Who are our civil war leaders gonna be? I don’t see anybody on the horizon.
Combine that with the fact that most Americans who are still susceptible to plutocrat worship, are far too fat, drunk and stupid to get out of their easy chairs to be heroic for anybody, for long. So no. No civil wars.
But something else, something completely different, is quite likely coming
Arthur
You know, the other day I was strolling through YouTube and came across a news segment interviewing attendees at a republican BBQ in Woodstock. For those you don’t know Woodstock is a northwest suburb of Chicago. The majority of residence are republican of the old style version. Most of the folks shown and interviewed were white, very well fed and I imagine professional people, though no one said what they did for a living. What they did say was that if Trump loses in November they were ready to take to the streets in revolutions. So I got to wondering what their to do list will look for that week: party with the in-laws on Sunday, business meeting Monday, overthrow the government Tuesday and tickets to the Chicago Bulls Wednesday. Of course this is all nonsense talk. Trump lost in 2020 and I don’t see any of these rebels taking to the street. If things are so awful why aren’t they doing it now. And I feel the same about the leftwing rebels who have convinced themselves that walking down State Street with picket signs makes them Spartacus.
No. What I believe, and judging from history, is that we are in for a slow decent, which at times will have varying speeds. And it will be a decent. I have no hope that this ship can be righted, nor if that’s even a good thing. For better or worse the Greco-Rome world, and that’s what it is, is over. It had a good run, about 2500 years, but all things end. What comes next? Who knows.
GrimJim
The entire economy of the USA is a vast, ramshackle, dilapidated house of cards.
One good, stiff breeze could knock it down.
It is entirely dependent on a vast international Rube Goldbergundian system of treaties, agreements, understandings, and mostly, fear of the wrath of the Empire.
That’s us, the USA.
Every other country is either a Banana Republic or doing its damnedest to escape that servitude and go it’s own way.
And Trump, that glorious “Master of the Deal,” is going to take a flamethrower to the empire and the system that supports it.
He intends to “renegotiate” all our treaties, understandings, agreements, etc.
He believes in the “zero-sum game,” that is, if the other guy has anything left after negotiation, he didn’t make a good deal. He believes that you are either a winner or loser, winner takes all.
In the past the USA has generally let its client states and colonies keep something for themselves, even if it only lined the pockets of the dictators and everyone else starved.
Trump won’t even let them have those crumbs.
So, when the time for renegotiation comes, are you going to cut a deal with Trump, who will renege on anything he promises, anyway, or will you cut a deal with China or even Russia?
Everyone knows Trump is incompetent at any sort of military intervention. Remember, the Afghanistan extraction plan was his, including cutting off the local military at its knees months before. If the extraction had gone down while he was still in charge, the pissant troubles we had would have been a complete rout, and all he would have said was, “Well, you were suckers to be in the military, anyway.”
So, he will no longer provide other nations with even crumbs: he will renege on any deal he makes, anyway; he has no idea of which end of the club to use; and China and Russia are waiting in the wings to cut a sweet deal.
How do you think things will turn out for the USA then?
And all this does is bring down the house of cards that much sooner and that much harder.
The economic and financial collapse of the USA is inevitable, and far sooner than later.
The stock market is a grossly oversold Ponzi scheme by an order of magnitude.
The USA dollar is a joke. The only thing keeping it afloat is the empire and its disappearing use as the means of resolving oil exchanges.
The USA has no remaining industry of any value, and does not have the means or wherewithal to rebuild its industry. Even if you guillotined every elite bastard suckling off the test of the modern financial rentier private equity economy, we do not have the native industry to rebuild our industry! We’d have to get our tools and dies and plant from China…
How do you think THAT would work out, eh?
So that also takes care of Trump’s whole “rebuild our industry by using tariffs” plan. Yes, let’s just increase inflation on everything produced outside the US by 100% or more… Because that’s worked so well recently.
But I digress.
When the USA economy collapsed — really, truly collapsed beyond the PPT’s ability to stop it — it collapsed SPECTACULARLY.
Read up on the history of booms and busts prior to the Great Depression. It was called the “Great Depression” because it was the biggest in a long series of depression, which were a normal event in USA history to that point.
Roosevelt and his successors used a variant of Keynesian Economic theory to “fix” the system, such that the previously regular recessions would be rare, and the previously not uncommon depressions would be merely hard recessions.
And they’ve kept doing that for the last 100 years. The Great Recession, where nobody got punished for any of their destructive shenanigans was only a little hole in the dike compared to the collapse of the dam and the flood that is coming.
The USA economy has been rescued from the vicissitudes of the natural economy and the shenanigans of the elite for almost a century.
When it blows… When reality reestablished itself in the face of fantasy, and the house of cards is blown down… There won’t be anything left.
And it will happen, sooner than expected, without warning, and if Trump wins, possibly even before he takes office.
mago
Fuck all. The nominal head(s)of government matter jack shit.
The oligarchs creating and controlling corrupt institutions will have their day as they do now. For a while.
But this talk about insurrection and factions neglects who’s going to manufacture and supply the necessary munitions given limited resources and means.
Also, this blobby weak ass culture is incapable of little more than bluster.
Yeah yeah, ex military fundamentalist dick heads with their guns and numbers don’t matter no matter how much noise they and Chris Hedges make about it.
The doom if it happens will creep in like a ninja through your unlocked back door.
Civil war precludes civil discourse, so maybe it’s on the way.
Timing is everything. . .
Willy
Damn Grim, you forgot the boils, lice, and the death of every firstborn. Moses might’ve done better to just unleash Trump. “After this one, you shall hear such a cry throughout the land that surely you will let my people go!”
I’d tweak this with a focus on the American worker:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/how-europe-could-reinvigorate-their-economy/
and add the punishing of corporations for sending jobs overseas. Too late some might say? Alrighty then, we punish corporations for having sent jobs overseas. Let’s see them civil war over that.
Jorge
I have been told that this kind of security-force-on-security-force standoff happens multiple times a year in China. But, I have no sources.
Tc
Tex, Cal, NY and Fla are the biggest states, and Penna is not far behind. The red/blue split is not regional but urban/suburban/rural. I think the interested interesting split in MAGA world is the rural hicks and the suburban rich nut jobs (embodies by 6/9ths of SCOTUS). who have have faux news media in common but also very different demographics, financial interests and worldviews that are not necessarily compatible.
Its interesting to see how trump doesnt seem to have the traction he had before, and we dont hear about the Qanon stuff nearly as much. But the courts are packed with his hacks and going forward they will either steal the election again, or make democrat governance impossible which weve already seen a lot of lately. No sign yet that the dems are even ready to ditch the filibuster or blue chips etc, which are them tying their own hands behind backs, much less take on the corrupt judiciary.
GrimJim
At this point the USA is essentially a Third World country with nukes and delusions of grandeur.
Most of the USA was a “shithole country” before WWII, and much of it, especially in the South and the Empty Quarter, remains so.
For all their ownership of doodads and gewgaws with bells and whistles, most Americans do not OWN anything. Their cars? Owned by the bank. Their houses? Owned by the bank. Their big shiny toys? Owned by the bank. The foods they eat? A mix of crap and poisons.
The vast majority of Americans do not own anything, and for most, the only freedom they have is the right to choose the master(s) for whom they slave away 40 to 60 hours a week.
They are kept docile by the greatest propaganda machine ever devised, combined with bread and circuses the likes of which Roman emperors could never have dreamed of.
Unfortunately, both the bread (cheap fast food) and circuses (television, now streaming services) are pricing themselves out of the reach of many. Why do you think that the PTB are worried about cheap food inflation and availability of digital pablum?
Without those two, even the greatest propaganda machine ever devised — which would have made Orwell weep at his naiveté — won’t be able to keep the veil of unreality from falling from their eyes.
For when the bread and circuses stop, they will realize they have nothing that matters. That they are slaves. That their entire lives have been a lie. That all powers, all parties, all news outlets have been lying to them from the moment they were born.
No empire is ever built for the enrichment of its people, only for its elite.
They will realize that “We the People” is actually “You the Suckers,” as from the first, the USA was never intended to be a democratic republic of the people, by the people. It was an oligarchic republic of the rich, for the rich.
Remember, the franchise was limited in almost every state to the wealthy landowners, factory owners, and merchants; you average Joe who actually fought the Revolution did not have the right to vote! The masters of the universe quickly realized they’d erred on that case with the Whisky Rebellion, so they expanded the franchise to essentially every white man who could shoot a gun.
But because the game was rigged from the start, it did them little to no good. It let off the steam, kept things from going bad to worse.
And so it has been since that day, every little advancement the people want, the elite fight tooth and nail, until they give up just enough to let off that steam.
But even then, up till the 1920s or so, the USA was a shithole country, a very small handful of elites, supported by a tiny middle class in the cities, with a vast, vast lower class, many of whom lost everything, and often starved when a recession or depression hit.
Then after WWII the USA was the only industrial power left standing, with more industrial capacity and working men than pretty much every other “advanced” nation in the world combined, with factories ready to produce, and no war damage in the heartland.
The Empire, which grew from the eastern heartland, into the west, then the southwest, then to islands overseas, essentially grew to encompass the whole world that did not get stuck behind the Iron Curtain.
And the USA looted every nation under its “protection.” Mafia-style, with bombs.
And during the flush times, because they had literally MILLIONS of men who could shoot guns, for the first time in history, the elite let the commons have a taste of the good life. A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and as we are often reminded by the Republicans, we were allowed to have refrigerators, washers/dryers, televisions, and telephones. How magnanimous!
But those good times are now gone. The rest of the world caught up, and there is almost no one left to loot. The well of the world has gone dry, and the elite are doing every damn thing they can, pulling ever greater and more complicated heists, to pull in ever last dollar, and bleed the commons dry.
They have so many schemes on so many fronts, any one of them could be the tipping point. NINJA loans are back. CDS are back with a vengeance. Who knows what other unregulated financial weapons of mass destruction they have out there?
They are on the verge of dismantling the Federal regulatory government, the last bastion of a fiction of protection of the people against the elite. Imagine what it will be like when there are no more regulations, no more inspections, no more OSHA, no more requirements for anything, just Wild West “Buyer Beware,” complete with a perpetual irrevocable arbitration clause in small print on everything you buy.
Personally, I think one of the most likely tipping points will come from automation. The service industries want to transform every interaction with a customer into a transaction with an AI kiosk. There will come a point when they replace one too many service industry jobs, and then there will be not enough employment, such that the commons can afford to buy enough to keep the whole Ponzi scheme going…
Or it could be the whole Private Equity smash and grab. Right now, it is destroying the trucking industry and the discount store trade. Combined, and you will have whole swaths of cities where people will not be able to find food or gas at an affordable price.
Remember, when people have nothing left to lose, they lose it.
When the fat has been flensed from the flesh of the commons to feed the elite, then it will be time to eat the rich. Because that will be all that is left.
And that’s when the knives and guns come out.
Purple Library Guy
One tiny note on those statistics:
Between 17 and 20% of Americans do not NEED weekly if not daily mental health medication. Most of that is antidepressants, and the evidence on the efficacy of antidepressants, particularly long term use, is mixed at best and worse-than-placebo at worst. There may be tons of people getting it PRESCRIBED, but that’s mostly because it makes the producers a bunch of money. Tons of people were PRESCRIBED Oxycontin. If the US descends into civil war, they won’t be getting that stuff, but it won’t make that much difference and they’ll also have other things to think about than their depression.
The ones with stuff like schizophrenia mostly do in fact need their medication, but that’s a much smaller group.
A lot of other medications that people take which they should indeed take are nonetheless not crucial. They’re to reduce certain risks–so for instance, my wife takes blood thinners because since her heart operation there is risk of a blood clot causing a stroke or something. But if she stopped taking them it’s not like she’d instantly have a stroke–there would just be a higher possibility that at some time in the future she might have one. I’m happy for her to keep on reducing that risk factor, but absence of medicine would not suddenly kill her. Other medications reduce pain or discomfort–not necessarily by being painkillers, but by making something work better. So if people can’t get those medications, their joints will ache more, or their something-or-other will act up. But it’s not like they’ll die en masse. I’m not saying no medications people take are life-saving . . . but that’s not the majority.
The people with type I diabetes will be toast. That’s that, not much way around it. The people with type II will be . . . probably more healthy on average because it’ll be so hard to get sugar-heavy food. In fact, a whole lot of problems currently being medicated will reduce or go away because the lifestyle that creates those health problems will be unavailable.
There are definitely things that could kill masses of people. I don’t buy the idea of mass die-offs because of medication. The medical system overall never had anything like as big an impact on public health as things like sanitation and sewer systems and poverty. All of which, admittedly, would get worse in the kind of scenario we’re envisioning. But it wouldn’t be about people not being able to get their prescriptions.
Willy
All true Grim. But I still disagree with the accelerationists. It’s a fantasy that systems encouraged to collapse always become utopian phoenixes. We’d need successful templates to follow. I think accelerationists would get outwitted and outplayed by power thinkers and the system get drawn out for another generation, after which it becomes another plutocratic sociopath’s problem.
After our current mob started realizing that neoliberalism’s “but there’s nothing better” schtick was a scam, the plutocrats went to culture war and cult of personality strategies. What’s next, zombies with AI strapped to their heads?
But then they say there are also plutocrat accelerationists. Maybe we’ll know the end is nigh when they all escape into hiding.
You mention Romans. I think of the Roman mob essentially opening up the Aurelian walls for invasion. Where the highly competent Hannibal army had been stymied by republic patriotism, a far lesser barbarian horde was allowed to succeed. Maybe the hopeless Roman mob preferred to roll the dice to gain better management. They had nothing to lose and knew it’d be the patrician villas that’d get sacked. Some historians say this actually did actually happen and Rome was kept maintained for another century. By barbarians. It was only after Justinian tried taking it back that his invasions ruined the place.
Nate Wilcox
DailyKoser Dave Neiwart sat down with Rick Perlstein to discuss right wing radicals and this election.
I stopped following Neiwert when he went all-in on Russiagate but he does know his local nazis pretty well.
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-28-election-story-nobody-talks-about-neiwert-qa/
Willy
I’ve tried telling these yahoos, if you want your darkies, brownies, and yellows to stay at home, then deal with climate change and corporate greed. Encouraging your house darkies, brownies, and yellows to arm themselves will only prolong your situation.
Then I realized that maybe, this is what they want. Most normals don’t want that last bit, they’d rather have safe and sane solutions that lets them keep their families and stuff. They need to be better informed.
I still think RussiaX3 was quite real, but a vastly overblown diversion away from the folly of another corporate Dem administration in league with climate change and corporate greed. RussiaX3 have their own agendas and are just trying to take advantage of a handy thing.
GrimJim
One thing that I keep seeing is how a lot of people seem to think that the Elite are all on the same team, running the same playbook, working toward the same goals, like some sort of Illuminati.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Elite are just as fractured as the Commons, more so in many ways, as they at heart view everything as a zero sum game.
There are factions within factions, allies turn on each other, its all like Dallas and Dynasty and Orwell writ large.
So while the PTB will always seek to keep the Game going, there must always be winners, and so there must always be losers.
And as they’re at the end of what can readily be looted from the Commons and the governments, they are starting to turn on each other.
And that’s why I think the Collapse is going to come sooner than later, and quite suddenly. One faction will pull some shenanigans to win a big pot, and unknowingly break the Game.
Then, Game Over.
After all, he with the most toys when he dies, wins, right? What happens to everyone else afterward does not matter.
The COVID Recession lasted 2 months, topped out at 15% unemployment, and a 19% drop in GDP.
The Great Recession is lasted 18 months, topped out at 10% unemployment, and a drop of 5% in GDP.
The Reagan Recession lasted 16 months, topped out at 11% unemployment, and merely a 3% drop in GDP.
The Great Depression lasted 3 years and 7 months, topped out at 25% unemployment, and a drop of 27% in GDP.
If we hit Great Depression numbers today the riots in the streets would make anything in historical memory seem like a parade by comparison.
And when the PPT misses, and the whole shebang is taken out by that Black Swan Shenanigans? We’re looking at complete collapse.
Willy
The elites play by loosely based unspoken rules, a cross between frat boys and the mafia. It’s rare for somebody to ‘be made’, who isn’t already one of them – old money. Friends close, enemies closer. Narcissism over humanism. And keep your mouth shut and never rat on your friends.
Remember, they like the rest of us are social animals, albeit alphas. Think back to when kids started coalescing into social units, back in high school, and keep going in that direction. In my day it was never the brainy geeks who knew it who ruled the class. Nor the humanistic designated leaders who had everybody’s best interests at heart. It was the ruthless (and often rich) jock bullies and their pretty mean girls. They may have had their petty gossips and bickerings amongst their own, but they’d ally against challengers and were highly exclusive against outsiders.
I might add in that elites know they’re wealth and power addicts. I’ve never been inside with them, but do know from observation that they’d much rather support their own addictions than ‘do the right thing’ for others. Consider corporate boards and conservative think tanks.