The United States and Civil War ideation
Ideas of collapse are in high fashion
The only thing more marked in the US right now than the failure of the Biden administration to respond to the severity of circumstances it was elected to address, is the new certainty on the part of the middle class that things cannot go on as they are, and civil war is coming.
(I use ‘middle class’ in the traditional sense of the word, rather than the US sense that represents more of an optimistic rebranding of possessing the first shreds of material security.)
Where Trump brought with him his own dystopic fears, release from Trump has not removed the fears, but rather intensified them with the dread that he will inevitably return. That nominally sensible people seem so sure of the repeat-election of Donald Trump - up against the technically-sane psychopaths the Democrats are likely to put forward to replace an ageing Joe Biden - says something about how well-understood the calibre and lack of popular appeal of those Democrats, the likelihood of the Democrats to refuse that broad understanding, and in turn the likelihood of the electorate to refuse that Democrat.
Even if all this is proven unfounded and another regime Democrat like Joe Biden can defeat Donald Trump or someone similar again, the views are still irrefutable evidence of a total lack of faith. That it might not work out like this is almost less important than the fact that so many are so sure that it will or could.
Despite their apparent lack of awareness to the fact, 2020 saw Joe Biden and the Democrats given a Get Out Of Jail card. Significant voter turnout was mobilised for them, on a basis of real change, and in swing-state cities such as Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. In return for this campaigning energy, Biden inherited and committed to a broad and popular left-wing policy platform of infrastructure investment and jobs that has since been shafted by prominent Democrats, firmly in corporate pay, even in states - including West Virginia - whose voters approved of these very policies. Biden and his team took so quickly to being free, to the complacent adults-back-in-charge fiction, that they forgot they had been in jail, forgot whose work on which streets got them out of it, and how easily jail might welcome them back.
There is, to be sure, a prevailing sense of doom. Trump Doom moved into Covid Doom, which to an extent now abates, and so there returns the threat of Trump Doom.
At each point – of course facilitated by the frantic pace and pitch of industrial media – there exists the creation of doom and the need for doom. This is not to deny the severity of the issues themselves, but it is to suggest there is a certain breakdown in the social capacity to deal with them. Perhaps the breakdown is even a wilful one; less a failure to cope than the refusal to go on coping.
Paramount in the state of doom is the perceived threat of civil war. Whatever the actual chances of this, civil war ideation is at-large across the US. In the last months I heard it discussed by people from Michigan, California, New York, Washington DC, and Utah. It now seems a regular conversation among those with any basic awareness of US politics.
What a civil war here might look like is hard to say. There is obvious, go-to envisioning of Democrats and Republicans, though who truly would go to war for either decrepit party? “The Republicans have more guns” was how one ex-US resident recently decamped to London summarised it for me, a comment that should be taken as unnervingly practical.
The young, activist base on the Democratic left is rightly disenchanted that their energy and campaigning hours were so badly betrayed by a Biden administration, and a Democratic party machine, that nobody in their right mind would go into battle for. But for all that Democrat centrists and their allies in the right-wing media have often depicted it as such - with scare tactics and false-equivalences about ANTIFA and the like - this movement is hardly a warring cadre. It was no accident that Bernie Sanders called explicitly for a “political revolution”.
Likewise, however, in the Republican Party there is broad disenchantment. Donald Trump was once a protest vote against a corporate party machine of John Kasich and Jeb Bushes, rather than for a party that – much like the Democrats – a prominent minority was entirely disenchanted with, and a silent majority unmoved by. The Republican system of primaries gave its voters their candidate, where the Democratic internal system denied them theirs in Bernie Sanders.
Now, particularly given his forthright position in favour of vaccines, Trump is perceived to have sold-out the movement he birthed, and in some respects to have gone mainstream. So, if Trump too is now perceived to be mainstream, and if such a question isn’t too implicitly contradictory, who becomes the Civil War candidate?
Geographically speaking, there is of course the visual representations of two USAs: blue-voting seaboards and a red-voting middle who could take up arms against one another. But this is an illusion that masks a pure blue Austin in the middle of red Texas and a very red Hamilton county in deep blue New York State. The US is not nearly so rational as to be a story of seaboards and interior.
The concept of a Civil War is also differently interpreted. The idea that today’s USA is anywhere near cohesive enough to have a war with the comparatively simple, nineteenth-century structure of the Union and Confederacy is a non-starter. The idea that a Civil War threat is not necessarily real because of the might of the US federal military is also a non-starter, dispelled by the potential for guerrilla warfare waged with the millions of small munitions that litter the country. In this respect, the civil war would look more like a resistance or liberation struggle than the notion of battalions lined-up, or obvious sites to call-in airstrikes against, and it would leave ample opportunity to inflict pain on the forces of the US state.
That it would be hard to define exactly what or who people in the most economically and militarily powerful country on earth were being liberated from, or resisting, might make such a civil war totally nonsensical, but no easier to manage. There is also a compelling and very US logic to this idea of - in the end - going to war to overthrow yourself.
Postmodern though it is, perhaps the new US Civil War has already begun, and is of the cold variety; it is one fought through random acts of violence, poverty, hunger, opioid death, communication frenzy, breathtaking political stagnation, and the steady nervous breakdown that as a result of all this engulfs what remains of US bourgeoisie. Perhaps this is simply what civil war looks like in a modern industrialised state such as the US, where that which has been appropriated through state policy (principally wealth), is not even being demanded back by those who are angriest, and where those who still have some handle on the nature of what’s wrong are simply exhausted.
For all that the angry and (erroneously) self-styled libertarians are off-putting in their antisocial refusal of vaccines, their sociopathic acceptance of a child’s school life repurposed to accommodate weak gun laws, their indulgence or outright support of racial hierarchies, the one and possibly only thing that they do have going for them is an endorsement of a deep need of, and willingness to pursue, a total and radical change in the state of affairs.
There is plenty here that should be disqualifying, but the same gravity of fault can be levelled against political mainstreams that – as exemplified by Biden’s thoroughgoing pursuit of a rotten-through status quo – refuse forthright to pursue total and radical (or even any small) change in a time that quite obviously urgently demands it.
It therefore becomes negligent not to ask the following question:
Is it of greater value to speak with, and attempt to influence, those whose views I abhor but who share an urgency of change; or to speak with and attempt to influence those whose purported views – faith in democracy, a liberal culture worth the name – I share but who, judged on their behaviour, are manifestly committed to refusing change? Unless you are in the practice of self-denial, you must – regrettably – pick one. Unless you are in the practice of wasting your time, at some point it might well be the former.
The decision is inseparable from the recent history of the 2015-20 period, with Sanders in the US and Corbyn in the UK, and which witnessed concerted efforts from youth to reach into a middle-aged political centre with strong, right-wing leanings.
For all that they were of course depicted as radical, both the Sanders and Corbyn currents were politically moderate phenomena, at-pains to speak into the values and a language of the political centre: social democracy under a capitalist economy, tweaked into something fairer, upheld by democracy, and with the expensive moral abominations of the military establishment clipped.
Mainstream political culture on both sides of the Atlantic made clear that it would make no peace with these movements, instead leaving them to look elsewhere for the change that is still wanting, even if political establishments – now back with a semblance of power – have once more turned deaf to that fact.
As the civil war ideation of the US demonstrates, and despite this swelling complacency among political elites, there are worsening realities - way outside of Washington and Westminster, now closer aligned than ever - that refuse to be indefinitely ignored.
I think this COULD happen... People are speaking that way because any national communication and any sense of broader "US'ian" community have completely been dismantled, and the subsequent parts radicalized by media and politics. It has been on purpose, and it has been intentional, and it looks like it will get worse. But one thing not mentioned is vulnerability to outside influence. With everyone running around being an idiot, foreign powers could easily take advantage and tip everyone over the edge. The incentivized demise of the public sector and the democratic state through late capitalism has nearly brought the state to its knees - exactly where they want it - but they won't stop until it actually collapses.