We're Gonna Fight
I've been saying this since 2017 and it keeps getting clearer.
I became concerned about what right wing extremists were going to do shortly after the 2008 election. When Chet Uber contacted me in early 2009 I agreed to help him get Project VIGILANT moving, with the notion that I’d focus on the obvious problems brewing on the right. PV was promptly hijacked by Islamophobes and I lost interest after being told we were to ignore murderous right wing groups and instead focus on Earth Liberation Front.
By 2012 I understood that law enforcement corruption was a deadly peril for this country and again in 2015 I heard from Chet. “What are you doing about Russia?” Whatever other criticism that can be aimed at Chet, nobody can say he isn’t consistently early and right about trouble. It took me a bit to digest what was out there, but I was all in by mid-2016.
I’m not sure precisely how long after Trump’s inauguration I first said We’re Gonna Fight, but we’ve steadily taken two steps forward, one step back, then wobbled in a drunken circle, before resuming our trek towards an undeniable, kinetic civil war.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you’ve already been slapped awake by the 21st century American zeitgeist you can probably just skim this. Just know that at some point in the future I’m planning on punching/kneeing anyone who says “But nobody could have predicted”, so I’m trying to make that hazard easily understood well in advance.
We Are Gonna Fight.
I don’t chronicle every little milestone I see, but the news today put me in the mood to look, and I found this report from Right Wing Watch. If you got past the ACN you better just read this one, it’s not long and it IS that important.
The Republicans haven’t legitimately won the presidency since 1988 and Roger Stone has had something to do with every irregularity. I’m fairly sure Roger Stone’s Power10 Botnet never got the attention it deserved. There’s a full recording of the information operation that led to the January 6th Capitol Siege on my Figshare and Mike Flynn’s crew features heavily. Again, it’s never received the attention I feel such problems deserve.
The problem is obvious and growing, but the plan seems to be pretending things are normal until the system magically rights itself.
If you still need to convince yourself that we are indeed sliding towards domestic conflict, you need to read Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start. Briefly, the U.S. is in a state of anocracy - the transition between democracy and dictatorship, and we’re factionalized to the point of not mixing. Anocracy is akin to playing in traffic - doesn’t matter which direction you’re headed, it’s not a good place to be.
The only way out of this situation is doubling down on democratic participation. The GOP have accepted that they are a permanent minority based on racial and sectarian divisions, their relentless focus on disenfranchising anyone who isn’t a white Christian male make this quite obvious.
What To Expect:
Our first civil war is a national birth defect, a historical source of misconceptions. Defined nation states? Uniformed armies? Nobody else does it like this.
21st Century America has multiple aggrieved ethnic and sectarian groups facing a weakened and discredited central power. Everybody else sees what we are facing, the Europeans are looking at us now the way we all looked at the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The ultimate nature of their ending was unknown but that it was coming was inevitable.
The best hope for democracy seems to be the much more numerous Independents siding with Democrats and rational Republicans pushing the MAGA crazies into a corner. The GOP is as dead as the Whigs were in 1856, but our media environment combined with their massive cash advantage is permitting them to pretend otherwise.
As a companion to How Civil Wars Start, I highly recommend David H. Ucko’s The Insurgent’s Dilemma for a view into how it might be conducted. Ucko has studied the nature of insurgencies and describes three primary categories.
Localized
Infiltrative
Ideational
While not as incorrect as what the term “civil war” evokes, our ideas of counter-insurgency are shaped by the Global War on Terror, and also tend to be off base. Too much of the thinking in this area is rooted in decolonization and the bipolar Cold War era struggles with nation state sponsors. Vicksburg isn’t so useful for us to remember, nor is Vietnam, nor any of the first twenty years of this century.
I will just briefly state that we’ve got this Infiltrational/Ideational insurgency and I think we’re going to end up with para-states. Those red rural areas are going to be a bit beyond the firm grasp of the national capitol, and that won’t be the worst thing, because their policy disconnect from reality is going to grind them down over the long haul.
That is, of course, assuming the masses turn out in force to vote no against Trump and his minions, leaving no question as to the will of the people.
Old age and commercial focus are two of the big reasons my activities have changed so much, but there’s also the realization that as a first responder my role has played through to its natural end. There’s nothing I can do now than legions of frisky Millennials and Zoomers can’t do better, so I’m staying out from under foot. You are going to have to decide how badly we really need reality based decision making at the national level, and then take the steps needed to make that happen.
Conclusion:
I don’t like being right about this, but I think the die was cast on January 6th of 2021. The parallels to the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch were readily apparent and it appears that Texas is now to serve the role the Nazis planned for Munich in that move. We’re doing all the wrong things, How Civil Wars Start tells us so in exacting detail. The Insurgent’s Dilemma provides a view into how things will unfold.
Imperial implosions are always grim, messy affairs. I think even if the rule of law prevails, Peter Zeihan is right about the end of Pax Americana protecting globalism. If the U.S. is to succeed in this future, we will do so by going hand in hand with Mexico, which will take over China’s workshop role. The revival of the labor movement is already visible, that’s part of why there’s so much sniveling about communism from the far right, it’s not just the artificial perception that the Democrats are in bed with the Chinese Community Party. Demographics are on the side of objective reality in this matter, but reality has never been much of an impediment for our disloyal right wing fringe.
Next month will be the fifteen year anniversary of me realizing there was trouble brewing and starting to do something about it. That effort has cost me my family, my career, and my health. A country with the rule of law intact is a better outcome for me, but my willingness to personally DO anything about that any more is greatly diminished. I’ve done my time, someone else is welcome to walk point for a change.