I tend to agree with that article: short of political collapse, seizing territory by mass invasion is likely no longer possible. So do we end up with a drone-swarm enforced divorce? Neither side able to subdue the other? Drones are tailor made for non-state actors to punch above their weight class. Balkanization with drones -- there's a terrifying concept.
The Ukrainian hit on Russian strategic air bases is a big deal. If Ukrainians could put that together in their basements and bomb shelters while under Russian attack, I'm quite sure American gangs or Mexican cartels or eco-terrorists or right-wing militias could do the same. (Maybe not the latter, since the FBI appears to have zillions of informants in their ranks.)
Civl war isn’t yet in the birth canal, but it’s in the womb accumulating gestational grievances. Let’s see whose contraception (rule of law, resilient institutions, strengthening of civil society) is up to the task. Meanwhile, as Mercier said in 1783, “Hatred grows more bitter and the state is divided into two classes: the greedy and insensitive, and the murmuring malcontents.”
Neither rule of law, resilient institutions, and civil society exist in any meaningful sense right now. People follow the rules only because it's they know no other way or because it's what gives them access to a meal ticket.
I'm as down as institutional credibility as anyone, but I think the majority of Americans still seek resilient and legitimate American institutions. Our theological / philosophical chasm may turn out to be unbridgeable, and thus such rebuilding institutions seen as legitimate by the entire populace will be illusory. But most of us still WANT that to be possible.
We haven't yet crossed Alasdair Macintyre's point of the majority "ceasing to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium". Rod Dreher? Yes. Me? Yes. You? I think so. Some subcultures? Yes. Christian homeschoolers? Yes. Urban blacks? Yes. Rural whites? Maybe. But among the broad middle classes? No.
Although as your title says, Max, it may not be here, but we can certainly see it.
I respectfully disagree; strained, yes, but not irrevocably broken. Reminds me of what my son told me after his first tour in Iraq: “In some places we’re holding our own, in others we’re not.” We do, of course, suffer from an inherent human tendency to catastrophize. Sure, this could be the acceleration of the “long defeat” — I don’t think so. I’ve seen plenty of variations of P(Doom) in uniform and as a gov exec. If you’re right, then to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I’ll be combing what’s left of my hair at Thermopylae, waiting with you for Xerxes 2.0.
One other thing I forgot to mention is that I think people on the right assume that because they have traditionally had much higher rates of gun ownership and military training, that the left would have no effective means of using violence on a non-state actor level. I do not think this is true any longer, at least not for the more ideological members of the left. I’ve cruised through enough leftist forums and discussions lately that are seeing firearms ownership as being a necessary step to protect against right wing tyranny to know that they are seeing it as a necessary step. Gun control has become a very quiet issue lately, outside of liberals who are stuck in the past. The more politically active leftists are not the same ones who supported the Brady Bill or AWB. Throw armed militias on each sides into the mixed and someone is going to fire the first shots sooner or later because they have deliberately made up their minds to, not just in the heat of the moment like 2020.
You're right, gun ownership has become more popular on the Left. Not a single leftist I've seen interviewed on the matter bought guns because of crime or self-defense, either. Their motivations are political, they think right-wingers are going to hunt them down. The unstated motivation is that leftists themselves are fixing to kill right-wingers when given permission by Democratic leadership to do so. The Left fashions itself as the less violent faction, but their rhetoric remains as hot as ever. The "angry White man" phenomenon is prominent on the Left as well, even more so these days, I think. Lots of guys with tremendous amounts of suppressed masculinity just waiting to explode.
I also don't hear about mass shootings much anymore. The media never really covered it unless it happened at school or was committed by a White man, but it also seems like they're just not causing the same amount of deaths that they did in the past. It's a good thing, clearly, but also an interesting phenomenon.
You bring up a good point, the levels of violence between the right and the left. Historically, the left has always been more violent because of the desire to bring change and the view that violence in pursuit of change is legitimate - the whole “it’s okay to punch Nazis” trope. That then begs the question of who is a Nazi and who isn’t, but it basically seems that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a Nazi.
I don’t think civil war is going to take the low level form everyone thinks it is. Immigration to our time is what slavery was to the antebellum south. The reason that slavery was such a critical issue to the South was because the entire economy was basically built around it. By the 1850s, there were plenty of slave owners whose wealth was tied up in their slaves, but they could not convert those slaves to other assets. In other words, they were stuck with their slaves even though they wanted to get out of the slave owning business and invest their money elsewhere. Other people in the south still embraced slavery because they saw it as a means of status, economic and political mobility, etc.
The anti-slavery side was highly ideological in nature, but also had their own economic reasons for wanting to abolish slavery.
Immigration is sort of in the same shape right now. You have too many people who have too much of a stake in it to be able to drop their support for it. It’s political, economic, and ideological. Like slavery, many people benefit far too much from it right now to fix it even if they could. Politicians see it as a source of votes and a political weapon. Businesses see it as a source of cheap labor - and I mean legal immigration from India as well. Ideologues see it as core to their thinking of wishing to destroy the country as we know it and reshape it into something else.
On the other side, you have people on the anti-immigration side who have a mirror image of those points. Right wing politicians see it as changing the voting makeup. The average person see it as driving them out of decent jobs and taking away opportunities for their children. And then there is the “great replacement” which speaks for itself.
So, like slavery, it is an impasse. Too many people have too much invested in it to reach a compromise now. Now, none of that matters until it becomes an issue of sovereignty. Sanctuary cities have long flirted with the idea of telling the federal government to go to hell, but those were never really challenged with a direct show of force. If the current administration efforts ARE met with a show of force by calling out the national guard or police forces (some of which are very well armed), citizen “volunteers,” etc, then we have a whole different ball game. It then comes down to who is willing the fire a first shot and does so.
Fort Sumter was a basic argument over sovereignty. If a federal installation was sitting in the harbor of a seceding state, it meant that the state was not really sovereign. It would be like China setting up a military base in Alcatraz. Whether or not federal troops can enforce federal law is going to be a turning point in immigration as well. People have spoken of secession in left leaning states for a long time, is this going to be the thing that finally pushes them towards it?
I hadn’t looked at the news in the last day or so, but when I woke up and saw the news about LA, it was an oh shit moment. I think we may be a lot closer than anyone thinks to civil war.
What you said there is probably one of the more profound comments anyone has posted here in the entire time this Substack has been up.
That said, I want to ask why you think this civil war won't be low-level. Just because the stakes are high doesn't mean the war has to be high-level also. It just means that violence is coming. The stakes were high in Northern Ireland, but it never became a full-blown civil war.
I took a little time to think about this. I think part of what would determine the intensity of conflict is simply going to be the resources accessible to each side (sides?) and whether or not each would rise to the level of being state actors asserting sovereignty, legitimacy, and a monopoly of violence. With Bloody Kansas, neither side was a state-level actor and sustained high levels of violence really weren’t possible. California, on the other hand, is physically and economically large enough to assert sovereignty and have the means of potentially backing up that claim, assuming the current crisis becomes an impasse. I don’t doubt for a second that this hasn’t been quietly discussed in some out of the way conference room in Sacramento. Likewise, assuming a leftist gets into the White House in 2029, then the opposite could well happen, maybe in Texas, another state large enough to be a state-level actor.
I was amused to see the talk during Trump 45 of blue state secession, secession always having been something more associated in the past with the right. I guess when people can’t stand to leave under the same roof with each other, it seems like the best solution. It is funny to see how many ideas that no one seriously floated when I was young are now making it into the mainstream discussion. I would say that Mr. Howe is likely to see that last prediction come true as well.
National Divorce is the only way to forestall conflict. Yet it's also unlikely to occur. The Left talks secession when they're out of power, but once in power, they'd never allow it. I'd point to how much crap South African Blacks and White leftists gave 55 Afrikaners for leaving the country. We're going to see the same reaction if the Right ever tried to pull secession again.
I WAS surprised when he didn’t send in the national guard to immediately straighten out the summer of Floyd Kent state style.
I will NOT be surprised if he doesn’t act again. In fact, if he doesn’t shut that crap down decisively this time, you won’t be able to convince me that the omission wasn’t a one of the requirements for him to be appointed again.
I’m not saying that situation in 1970 was ideal but it did unify the right. It was ugly but it has since become obvious that the counterculture left was all totally infiltrated Comintern mkultra (right in historical step with Mao’s cultural revolution) by that time, and it STILL IS.
I am a Hunter Thompson acolyte but the Nixon administration looks like the Nativity compared to the contemporary Imperial Vichy District of Columbia.
I was reminded of what David Betz pointed out in some of his many interviews- when we talk about civil war and people are dismissive, it’s because they have an incorrect understanding of the full spectrum of military conflict. A lot of this comes from the American experience of civil war in our history, which was way more organized and defined along near geographical boundaries than is the norm. Most civil wars don’t look like our historical civil war.
A low-grade civil war, which is probably the only kind that can happen in the US, is still a civil war even if it isn’t one that would jump out at someone- and it’s one of those things whose beginning might only be clearly seen in hindsight. If you’re unfortunate enough to be living through it, it’ll just be a perceptible increase in civil disorder and violence- which seems to make the case that we could have already had our “Fort Sumter” moment.
That's been a point I've made in the past - it may be years, maybe decades, before anyone realizes we've had a civil war in this country. Even in Mexico, where thousands are killed annually by the drug war, many Mexicans are still in denial that there's an ongoing civil war.
Hindsight provides clarity. 2020 for me seems even crazier now than it was at the time.
So far, armed citizens have not (yet) stepped in to stop most of these attacks. When they have, that news gets suppressed almost instantly. But as time goes by, and the number of attacks grows, more and more citizens WILL be armed, and will act. Civil war? No. Lethal civil action against bad people? Yep. This nation was founded on the idea of militias - armed citizenry. Our central governments at national and state level are generally against militias, and have worked to demonize and suppress the very ideas thereof. But the idea is still there, deep within the nervous system of the nation, like varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox virus) hiding in the central nervous system, ready to appear as shingles when the system is weakened. And make no mistake, the system at this time is weakened. The Feds may choose to use non-lethal means to counter violent protestors - armed citizens will not. If they feel their lives are at risk, they will shoot, and likely shoot to kill. (Center of mass shots generally do that. Armed citizens tend to practice center of mass shooting, and so it is likely that under stress, they will react as they have trained - with multiple shots to the center of mass of their targets.) Will the leftist main stream media attempt to suppress stories of citizens resorting to defensive violence to end offensive violence? Of course. But the word will slowly seep out anyway. And as it does, more citizens will begin to bear arms openly ("Constitutional carry"), per our Constitutional rights. This is real life, not Grand Theft Auto, so it won't happen suddenly. But it will happen. And as it does, more and more violent protestors will wind up dead - blood on the streets, as it were. Is that civil war, or is that effective militia vigilance? I don't know, but it's what it may well look like, if my rather foggy crystal ball is at all accurate.
I wonder how rates of violence will differ between states. Will the states with less legal restrictions to carrying be overall safer? That'd be my guess but it'll certainly be a data point.
Ukraine has made it clear we face a new type of warfare.
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/have-drones-made-traditional-warfare
I tend to agree with that article: short of political collapse, seizing territory by mass invasion is likely no longer possible. So do we end up with a drone-swarm enforced divorce? Neither side able to subdue the other? Drones are tailor made for non-state actors to punch above their weight class. Balkanization with drones -- there's a terrifying concept.
The Ukrainian hit on Russian strategic air bases is a big deal. If Ukrainians could put that together in their basements and bomb shelters while under Russian attack, I'm quite sure American gangs or Mexican cartels or eco-terrorists or right-wing militias could do the same. (Maybe not the latter, since the FBI appears to have zillions of informants in their ranks.)
Civl war isn’t yet in the birth canal, but it’s in the womb accumulating gestational grievances. Let’s see whose contraception (rule of law, resilient institutions, strengthening of civil society) is up to the task. Meanwhile, as Mercier said in 1783, “Hatred grows more bitter and the state is divided into two classes: the greedy and insensitive, and the murmuring malcontents.”
Neither rule of law, resilient institutions, and civil society exist in any meaningful sense right now. People follow the rules only because it's they know no other way or because it's what gives them access to a meal ticket.
I'm as down as institutional credibility as anyone, but I think the majority of Americans still seek resilient and legitimate American institutions. Our theological / philosophical chasm may turn out to be unbridgeable, and thus such rebuilding institutions seen as legitimate by the entire populace will be illusory. But most of us still WANT that to be possible.
We haven't yet crossed Alasdair Macintyre's point of the majority "ceasing to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium". Rod Dreher? Yes. Me? Yes. You? I think so. Some subcultures? Yes. Christian homeschoolers? Yes. Urban blacks? Yes. Rural whites? Maybe. But among the broad middle classes? No.
Although as your title says, Max, it may not be here, but we can certainly see it.
I respectfully disagree; strained, yes, but not irrevocably broken. Reminds me of what my son told me after his first tour in Iraq: “In some places we’re holding our own, in others we’re not.” We do, of course, suffer from an inherent human tendency to catastrophize. Sure, this could be the acceleration of the “long defeat” — I don’t think so. I’ve seen plenty of variations of P(Doom) in uniform and as a gov exec. If you’re right, then to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I’ll be combing what’s left of my hair at Thermopylae, waiting with you for Xerxes 2.0.
One other thing I forgot to mention is that I think people on the right assume that because they have traditionally had much higher rates of gun ownership and military training, that the left would have no effective means of using violence on a non-state actor level. I do not think this is true any longer, at least not for the more ideological members of the left. I’ve cruised through enough leftist forums and discussions lately that are seeing firearms ownership as being a necessary step to protect against right wing tyranny to know that they are seeing it as a necessary step. Gun control has become a very quiet issue lately, outside of liberals who are stuck in the past. The more politically active leftists are not the same ones who supported the Brady Bill or AWB. Throw armed militias on each sides into the mixed and someone is going to fire the first shots sooner or later because they have deliberately made up their minds to, not just in the heat of the moment like 2020.
You're right, gun ownership has become more popular on the Left. Not a single leftist I've seen interviewed on the matter bought guns because of crime or self-defense, either. Their motivations are political, they think right-wingers are going to hunt them down. The unstated motivation is that leftists themselves are fixing to kill right-wingers when given permission by Democratic leadership to do so. The Left fashions itself as the less violent faction, but their rhetoric remains as hot as ever. The "angry White man" phenomenon is prominent on the Left as well, even more so these days, I think. Lots of guys with tremendous amounts of suppressed masculinity just waiting to explode.
I also don't hear about mass shootings much anymore. The media never really covered it unless it happened at school or was committed by a White man, but it also seems like they're just not causing the same amount of deaths that they did in the past. It's a good thing, clearly, but also an interesting phenomenon.
You bring up a good point, the levels of violence between the right and the left. Historically, the left has always been more violent because of the desire to bring change and the view that violence in pursuit of change is legitimate - the whole “it’s okay to punch Nazis” trope. That then begs the question of who is a Nazi and who isn’t, but it basically seems that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a Nazi.
I don’t think civil war is going to take the low level form everyone thinks it is. Immigration to our time is what slavery was to the antebellum south. The reason that slavery was such a critical issue to the South was because the entire economy was basically built around it. By the 1850s, there were plenty of slave owners whose wealth was tied up in their slaves, but they could not convert those slaves to other assets. In other words, they were stuck with their slaves even though they wanted to get out of the slave owning business and invest their money elsewhere. Other people in the south still embraced slavery because they saw it as a means of status, economic and political mobility, etc.
The anti-slavery side was highly ideological in nature, but also had their own economic reasons for wanting to abolish slavery.
Immigration is sort of in the same shape right now. You have too many people who have too much of a stake in it to be able to drop their support for it. It’s political, economic, and ideological. Like slavery, many people benefit far too much from it right now to fix it even if they could. Politicians see it as a source of votes and a political weapon. Businesses see it as a source of cheap labor - and I mean legal immigration from India as well. Ideologues see it as core to their thinking of wishing to destroy the country as we know it and reshape it into something else.
On the other side, you have people on the anti-immigration side who have a mirror image of those points. Right wing politicians see it as changing the voting makeup. The average person see it as driving them out of decent jobs and taking away opportunities for their children. And then there is the “great replacement” which speaks for itself.
So, like slavery, it is an impasse. Too many people have too much invested in it to reach a compromise now. Now, none of that matters until it becomes an issue of sovereignty. Sanctuary cities have long flirted with the idea of telling the federal government to go to hell, but those were never really challenged with a direct show of force. If the current administration efforts ARE met with a show of force by calling out the national guard or police forces (some of which are very well armed), citizen “volunteers,” etc, then we have a whole different ball game. It then comes down to who is willing the fire a first shot and does so.
Fort Sumter was a basic argument over sovereignty. If a federal installation was sitting in the harbor of a seceding state, it meant that the state was not really sovereign. It would be like China setting up a military base in Alcatraz. Whether or not federal troops can enforce federal law is going to be a turning point in immigration as well. People have spoken of secession in left leaning states for a long time, is this going to be the thing that finally pushes them towards it?
I hadn’t looked at the news in the last day or so, but when I woke up and saw the news about LA, it was an oh shit moment. I think we may be a lot closer than anyone thinks to civil war.
What you said there is probably one of the more profound comments anyone has posted here in the entire time this Substack has been up.
That said, I want to ask why you think this civil war won't be low-level. Just because the stakes are high doesn't mean the war has to be high-level also. It just means that violence is coming. The stakes were high in Northern Ireland, but it never became a full-blown civil war.
I took a little time to think about this. I think part of what would determine the intensity of conflict is simply going to be the resources accessible to each side (sides?) and whether or not each would rise to the level of being state actors asserting sovereignty, legitimacy, and a monopoly of violence. With Bloody Kansas, neither side was a state-level actor and sustained high levels of violence really weren’t possible. California, on the other hand, is physically and economically large enough to assert sovereignty and have the means of potentially backing up that claim, assuming the current crisis becomes an impasse. I don’t doubt for a second that this hasn’t been quietly discussed in some out of the way conference room in Sacramento. Likewise, assuming a leftist gets into the White House in 2029, then the opposite could well happen, maybe in Texas, another state large enough to be a state-level actor.
Neil "Fourth Turning" Howe once said that every prediction he made has come to pass, with one left to go: secession.
I was amused to see the talk during Trump 45 of blue state secession, secession always having been something more associated in the past with the right. I guess when people can’t stand to leave under the same roof with each other, it seems like the best solution. It is funny to see how many ideas that no one seriously floated when I was young are now making it into the mainstream discussion. I would say that Mr. Howe is likely to see that last prediction come true as well.
National Divorce is the only way to forestall conflict. Yet it's also unlikely to occur. The Left talks secession when they're out of power, but once in power, they'd never allow it. I'd point to how much crap South African Blacks and White leftists gave 55 Afrikaners for leaving the country. We're going to see the same reaction if the Right ever tried to pull secession again.
I WAS surprised when he didn’t send in the national guard to immediately straighten out the summer of Floyd Kent state style.
I will NOT be surprised if he doesn’t act again. In fact, if he doesn’t shut that crap down decisively this time, you won’t be able to convince me that the omission wasn’t a one of the requirements for him to be appointed again.
I’m not saying that situation in 1970 was ideal but it did unify the right. It was ugly but it has since become obvious that the counterculture left was all totally infiltrated Comintern mkultra (right in historical step with Mao’s cultural revolution) by that time, and it STILL IS.
I am a Hunter Thompson acolyte but the Nixon administration looks like the Nativity compared to the contemporary Imperial Vichy District of Columbia.
I was reminded of what David Betz pointed out in some of his many interviews- when we talk about civil war and people are dismissive, it’s because they have an incorrect understanding of the full spectrum of military conflict. A lot of this comes from the American experience of civil war in our history, which was way more organized and defined along near geographical boundaries than is the norm. Most civil wars don’t look like our historical civil war.
A low-grade civil war, which is probably the only kind that can happen in the US, is still a civil war even if it isn’t one that would jump out at someone- and it’s one of those things whose beginning might only be clearly seen in hindsight. If you’re unfortunate enough to be living through it, it’ll just be a perceptible increase in civil disorder and violence- which seems to make the case that we could have already had our “Fort Sumter” moment.
That's been a point I've made in the past - it may be years, maybe decades, before anyone realizes we've had a civil war in this country. Even in Mexico, where thousands are killed annually by the drug war, many Mexicans are still in denial that there's an ongoing civil war.
Hindsight provides clarity. 2020 for me seems even crazier now than it was at the time.
So far, armed citizens have not (yet) stepped in to stop most of these attacks. When they have, that news gets suppressed almost instantly. But as time goes by, and the number of attacks grows, more and more citizens WILL be armed, and will act. Civil war? No. Lethal civil action against bad people? Yep. This nation was founded on the idea of militias - armed citizenry. Our central governments at national and state level are generally against militias, and have worked to demonize and suppress the very ideas thereof. But the idea is still there, deep within the nervous system of the nation, like varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox virus) hiding in the central nervous system, ready to appear as shingles when the system is weakened. And make no mistake, the system at this time is weakened. The Feds may choose to use non-lethal means to counter violent protestors - armed citizens will not. If they feel their lives are at risk, they will shoot, and likely shoot to kill. (Center of mass shots generally do that. Armed citizens tend to practice center of mass shooting, and so it is likely that under stress, they will react as they have trained - with multiple shots to the center of mass of their targets.) Will the leftist main stream media attempt to suppress stories of citizens resorting to defensive violence to end offensive violence? Of course. But the word will slowly seep out anyway. And as it does, more citizens will begin to bear arms openly ("Constitutional carry"), per our Constitutional rights. This is real life, not Grand Theft Auto, so it won't happen suddenly. But it will happen. And as it does, more and more violent protestors will wind up dead - blood on the streets, as it were. Is that civil war, or is that effective militia vigilance? I don't know, but it's what it may well look like, if my rather foggy crystal ball is at all accurate.
I wonder how rates of violence will differ between states. Will the states with less legal restrictions to carrying be overall safer? That'd be my guess but it'll certainly be a data point.
When I was in Brazil, I heard someone brag about how gun ownership is restricted to the point only the cops and criminals have guns.
Brazil has one of the highest rates of violence, including gun violence, in the world. So there's that.