The next American Civil War
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Humberto
Margin (martian) margin
I think it does, at least in getting the message to their own 'rank and file'.
1. He answered back. Dismissing it as a few eccentrics, or being determined to perhaps not lend any 'legitimacy' by just dismissing it is a terrible idea. It's never worked.
2. There has to be a straight up choice. Authoritarian monster or basic social principles. You can't back down from that and play it on 'their terms'. Which seems contradictory, but - we've actually had 5-6 years of Trump by now. We know what a vain pathetic louse he is.
So getting the house in order, for a start. In other words, consistency, decency.
1. He answered back. Dismissing it as a few eccentrics, or being determined to perhaps not lend any 'legitimacy' by just dismissing it is a terrible idea. It's never worked.
2. There has to be a straight up choice. Authoritarian monster or basic social principles. You can't back down from that and play it on 'their terms'. Which seems contradictory, but - we've actually had 5-6 years of Trump by now. We know what a vain pathetic louse he is.
So getting the house in order, for a start. In other words, consistency, decency.
BigMoaner
What A Load of Old Bollocks
what part of hte republican party are against trump? surely that wing is the last hope for republicanism in america. or has he captured say the minds of east or west coast republican intellectuals? say your average highly educated, vaguely liberal republican? they might be thin on the ground but surely they are an interesting battle ground? the idea that the nearly the entirety of the republican vote would vote for him actually makes me feel literally queesy (sp). its interesting but the right wingers i know in the UK, save a few lost loon bags, all pretty much hate trump too. is that side of the right wing got a large chunk in america too?
BigMoaner
What A Load of Old Bollocks
i honestly feel sad for america. having that compulsive liar at the fore. i know it sounds so niave and old fashioned, but decency, principles, values, kindness is waht america needs, and obvisiouly it'd be pref if that was a dem, but it's not out of the realms of possiblity that a republican could drag things back to the centre.
BigMoaner
What A Load of Old Bollocks
i know this is goign to sound proper hall mark cards sappy and utter horseshit, but i was struck by that footage of the (war monger) G.W bush giving a sweet to michelle obama. they looked at each other like they'd been friends for life (and he is very much friends with the Obamas). it was a moment that for me actually transcended the hate and bile and bullshit that was coming out of the mouth of trump at the time. i thought can't people follow that example just a little when they are leading a nation. we are so divided and its getting scary.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
Not sure that the USA has ever had decency, principles, values and kindness for everyone.
Certainly not the marginalised peoples of America. And not those around the world who have been affected by its constant adventures abroad, clandestine or otherwise. Democrats or Republicans, that's unlikely to change.
Humberto
Margin (martian) margin
I wouldn't have that. George Dubya was a terrible President.
I'm not into keeping it polite because it was only millions of ....?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Yeh you will if you post shit like that without saying why it's relevant or worth watching
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
It would perhaps have been better if youd'd been struck by gwb's presiding over gerrymandering and voter suppression. But no a spot of inauguration footage trumps his record as Texas governor and president
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
They have a voting reform bill, but it would need Senate reform (ie. remove the fillibuster) to pass it.Fair play, wondered if I would get away with that…[/lazycopypasta]
I would agree and worry that this is a plausible course that events could go; unless Biden has got a workgroup taking measures to counter all the anti-voting measures that the GOP is taking and it's very hush-hush, 'cos I haven't heard or read about it.
For the People Act - Wikipedia
Democrats hands are tied almost everywhere by the fillibuster, and their own internal division prevents them from removing it. Complete disfunction in the face of looming fascism. Cunts.
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Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
Obama wasn't a great president either. He had two major flaws. One is that he was, at heart, a corporatist. He talked a lot of "I feel your pain" lip service, but he really felt corporation's pain. Secondly, where he was willing to champion the downtrodden, he kept expecting to reach out to the Republicans to get on board with it, and they weren't going to let him have a win, no matter who suffered as a consequence. At times, I think he used Republican intractability as a shield when he didn't really want to do something. Then, he'd just blame the Republicans. It makes sense that the Obamas and the Bushes would get along.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
It could make a difference if the dems get out there and sell that narrative. They need to repeat it and repeat it until it becomes the more dominant idea. Then, the natural political flow will be behind them, rather than the dems having to work against the political tide. They need to get people pissed off, rather than complacent.
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Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
A certain level of corruption is expected. It becomes a problem when that's the only reason the government exists.
Opinion | Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?
It’s hard to imagine. But so is democracy’s salvation.
Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?
Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has interviewed many people who’ve lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn’t see it coming. “They’re all surprised,” she said. “Even when, to somebody who studies it, it’s obvious years beforehand.”
This is worth keeping in mind if your impulse is to dismiss the idea that America could fall into civil war again. Even now, despite my constant horror at this country’s punch-drunk disintegration, I find the idea of a total meltdown hard to wrap my mind around. But to some of those, like Walter, who study civil war, an American crackup has come to seem, if not obvious, then far from unlikely, especially since Jan. 6.
Two books out this month warn that this country is closer to civil war than most Americans understand. In “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” Walter writes, “I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.” The Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Marche is more stark in his book, “The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future.” “The United States is coming to an end,” Marche writes. “The question is how.”
In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar who studies violent conflict, recently urged the Canadian government to prepare for an American implosion. “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” he wrote. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” As John Harris writes in Politico, “Serious people now invoke ‘Civil War’ not as metaphor but as literal precedent.”
Of course, not all serious people. The Harvard political scientist Josh Kertzer wrote on Twitter that he knows many civil war scholars, and “very few of them think the United States is on the precipice of a civil war.” Yet even some who push back on civil war talk tend to acknowledge what a perilous place America is in. In The Atlantic, Fintan O’Toole, writing about Marche’s book, warns that prophecies of civil war can be self-fulfilling; during the long conflict in Ireland, he says, each side was driven by fear that the other was mobilizing. It’s one thing, he writes, “to acknowledge the real possibility that the U.S. could break apart and could do so violently. It is quite another to frame that possibility as an inevitability.”
I agree with O’Toole that it’s absurd to treat civil war as a foregone conclusion, but that it now seems distinctly possible is still pretty bad. The fact that speculation about civil war has moved from the crankish fringes into the mainstream is itself a sign of civic crisis, an indication of how broken our country is.
The sort of civil war that Walter and Marche worry about wouldn’t involve red and blue armies facing off on some battlefield. If it happens, it will be more of a guerrilla insurgency. As Walter told me, she, like Marche, relies on an academic definition of “major armed conflict” as one that causes at least 1,000 deaths per year. A “minor armed conflict” is one that kills at least 25 people a year. By this definition, as Marche argues, “America is already in a state of civil strife.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, extremists, most of them right-wing, killed 54 people in 2018 and 45 people in 2019. (They killed 17 people in 2020, a figure that was low due to the absence of extremist mass shootings, possibly because of the pandemic.)
Walter argues that civil wars have predictable patterns, and she spends more than half her book laying out how those patterns have played out in other countries. They are most common in what she and other scholars call “anocracies,” countries that are “neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between.” Warning signs include the rise of intense political polarization based on identity rather than ideology, especially polarization between two factions of roughly equal size, each of which fears being crushed by the other.
Instigators of civil violence, she writes, tend to be previously dominant groups who see their status slipping away. “The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country ‘is or ought to be theirs,’” she writes. This is one reason, although there are violent actors on the left, neither she nor Marche believe the left will start a civil war. As Marche writes, “Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization.”
It’s no secret that many on the right are both fantasizing about and planning civil war. Some of those who swarmed the Capitol a year ago wore black sweatshirts emblazoned with “MAGA Civil War.” The Boogaloo Bois, a surreal, violent, meme-obsessed anti-government movement, get their name from a joke about a Civil War sequel. Republicans increasingly throw around the idea of armed conflict. In August, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed,” and suggested he was willing, though reluctant, to take up arms.
Citing the men who plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Walter writes that modern civil wars “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.”
There are parts of Walter’s argument that I’m not quite convinced by. Consider, for example, America’s status as an anocracy. I don’t dispute the political science measures she relies on to show the alarming extent of America’s democratic backsliding. But I think she underplays the difference between countries moving from authoritarianism toward democracy, and those going the other way. You can see why a country like Yugoslavia would explode when the autocratic system holding it together disappeared; new freedoms and democratic competition allow for the emergence of what Walter describes as “ethnic entrepreneurs.”
It’s not clear, however, that the move from democracy toward authoritarianism would be destabilizing in the same way. As Walter acknowledges, “The decline of liberal democracies is a new phenomenon, and none have fallen into all-out civil war — yet.” To me, the threat of America calcifying into a Hungarian-style right-wing autocracy under a Republican president seems more imminent than mass civil violence. Her theory depends on an irredentist right-wing faction rebelling against its loss of power. But increasingly, the right is rigging our sclerotic system so that it can maintain power whether the voters want it to or not.
If outright civil war still isn’t likely, though, it seems to me more likely than a return to the sort of democratic stability many Americans grew up with.
Marche’s book presents five scenarios for how this country could come undone, each extrapolated from current movements and trends. A few of them don’t strike me as wholly plausible. For example, given the history of federal confrontations with the far right at Waco, Ruby Ridge and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, I suspect an American president determined to break up a sovereign citizen encampment would send the F.B.I., not an Army general relying on counterinsurgency doctrine.
Yet most of Marche’s narratives seem more imaginable than a future in which Jan. 6 turns out to be the peak of right-wing insurrection, and America ends up basically OK. “It’s so easy to pretend it’s all going to work out,” he writes. I don’t find it easy.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
Opinion | Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?
It’s hard to imagine. But so is democracy’s salvation.www.nytimes.com
Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?
Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has interviewed many people who’ve lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn’t see it coming. “They’re all surprised,” she said. “Even when, to somebody who studies it, it’s obvious years beforehand.”
This is worth keeping in mind if your impulse is to dismiss the idea that America could fall into civil war again. Even now, despite my constant horror at this country’s punch-drunk disintegration, I find the idea of a total meltdown hard to wrap my mind around. But to some of those, like Walter, who study civil war, an American crackup has come to seem, if not obvious, then far from unlikely, especially since Jan. 6.
Two books out this month warn that this country is closer to civil war than most Americans understand. In “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” Walter writes, “I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.” The Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Marche is more stark in his book, “The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future.” “The United States is coming to an end,” Marche writes. “The question is how.”
In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar who studies violent conflict, recently urged the Canadian government to prepare for an American implosion. “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” he wrote. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” As John Harris writes in Politico, “Serious people now invoke ‘Civil War’ not as metaphor but as literal precedent.”
Of course, not all serious people. The Harvard political scientist Josh Kertzer wrote on Twitter that he knows many civil war scholars, and “very few of them think the United States is on the precipice of a civil war.” Yet even some who push back on civil war talk tend to acknowledge what a perilous place America is in. In The Atlantic, Fintan O’Toole, writing about Marche’s book, warns that prophecies of civil war can be self-fulfilling; during the long conflict in Ireland, he says, each side was driven by fear that the other was mobilizing. It’s one thing, he writes, “to acknowledge the real possibility that the U.S. could break apart and could do so violently. It is quite another to frame that possibility as an inevitability.”
I agree with O’Toole that it’s absurd to treat civil war as a foregone conclusion, but that it now seems distinctly possible is still pretty bad. The fact that speculation about civil war has moved from the crankish fringes into the mainstream is itself a sign of civic crisis, an indication of how broken our country is.
The sort of civil war that Walter and Marche worry about wouldn’t involve red and blue armies facing off on some battlefield. If it happens, it will be more of a guerrilla insurgency. As Walter told me, she, like Marche, relies on an academic definition of “major armed conflict” as one that causes at least 1,000 deaths per year. A “minor armed conflict” is one that kills at least 25 people a year. By this definition, as Marche argues, “America is already in a state of civil strife.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, extremists, most of them right-wing, killed 54 people in 2018 and 45 people in 2019. (They killed 17 people in 2020, a figure that was low due to the absence of extremist mass shootings, possibly because of the pandemic.)
Walter argues that civil wars have predictable patterns, and she spends more than half her book laying out how those patterns have played out in other countries. They are most common in what she and other scholars call “anocracies,” countries that are “neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between.” Warning signs include the rise of intense political polarization based on identity rather than ideology, especially polarization between two factions of roughly equal size, each of which fears being crushed by the other.
Instigators of civil violence, she writes, tend to be previously dominant groups who see their status slipping away. “The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country ‘is or ought to be theirs,’” she writes. This is one reason, although there are violent actors on the left, neither she nor Marche believe the left will start a civil war. As Marche writes, “Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization.”
It’s no secret that many on the right are both fantasizing about and planning civil war. Some of those who swarmed the Capitol a year ago wore black sweatshirts emblazoned with “MAGA Civil War.” The Boogaloo Bois, a surreal, violent, meme-obsessed anti-government movement, get their name from a joke about a Civil War sequel. Republicans increasingly throw around the idea of armed conflict. In August, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed,” and suggested he was willing, though reluctant, to take up arms.
Citing the men who plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Walter writes that modern civil wars “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.”
There are parts of Walter’s argument that I’m not quite convinced by. Consider, for example, America’s status as an anocracy. I don’t dispute the political science measures she relies on to show the alarming extent of America’s democratic backsliding. But I think she underplays the difference between countries moving from authoritarianism toward democracy, and those going the other way. You can see why a country like Yugoslavia would explode when the autocratic system holding it together disappeared; new freedoms and democratic competition allow for the emergence of what Walter describes as “ethnic entrepreneurs.”
It’s not clear, however, that the move from democracy toward authoritarianism would be destabilizing in the same way. As Walter acknowledges, “The decline of liberal democracies is a new phenomenon, and none have fallen into all-out civil war — yet.” To me, the threat of America calcifying into a Hungarian-style right-wing autocracy under a Republican president seems more imminent than mass civil violence. Her theory depends on an irredentist right-wing faction rebelling against its loss of power. But increasingly, the right is rigging our sclerotic system so that it can maintain power whether the voters want it to or not.
If outright civil war still isn’t likely, though, it seems to me more likely than a return to the sort of democratic stability many Americans grew up with.
Marche’s book presents five scenarios for how this country could come undone, each extrapolated from current movements and trends. A few of them don’t strike me as wholly plausible. For example, given the history of federal confrontations with the far right at Waco, Ruby Ridge and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, I suspect an American president determined to break up a sovereign citizen encampment would send the F.B.I., not an Army general relying on counterinsurgency doctrine.
Yet most of Marche’s narratives seem more imaginable than a future in which Jan. 6 turns out to be the peak of right-wing insurrection, and America ends up basically OK. “It’s so easy to pretend it’s all going to work out,” he writes. I don’t find it easy.
The army and National Guard would support the elected government, the civil war would be short.
They didn't last time (despite all the oaths they took), well not all of them.
Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
They'd support the legitimate government. . . who decides which government is legitimate, though?
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
That might (and to some extent was) be exactly the bone of contention though, who is the legitimately elected President?
8ball
Merr xmas...
Which government is the elected government?
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
I don't know if you are aware, but in the UK the oath taken by the forces is to the Queen, not the country or the government.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
So that’s why they’re all cunts
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