Good post, but I wonder just what is this “left” that is being mentioned? The old school pro-civil rights, pro-free speech, pro-labor, pro-union, concerned about **economic** class, even pro-socialist (generally not communist), or more general, the broadly based collective welfare of the New Deal and New Deal adjacent was crushed during a deliberate campaign lasting decades. Its final supporters in the Democratic Party were ejected by the Clintons’ Democratic Leadership Council.
What is called the left in the United States, particularly in the Democratic Party, is of the subverted, Neoliberal, pro-corporate, pro-wealth, pro-totalitarian kind using Identity Politics and Wokism to weaken, divide, and control and allied with the American security/deep state.
It is NOT the left or the liberalism of fifty or sixty years ago. It just says that it is and the state media propagandizes that it is.
Which is a shame because we need a liberal and leftist party, not the tamed, subservient lapdogs that is a tool of the establishment. Hell, we could even use an actual conservative party as without Trump and his supporters, it is an insane ideologue, blinding supporting policies that make the poor poorer, the rich richer, and corruption to increase.
I agree that it’s time for Civil War. But what are the factions? I don’t think it’s red state vs blue or state vs fed. Seems more like White people vs everyone else.
There’s currently a recruiting crisis in the military. It’s looking like the feds are going to bring in many non-White foreigners. If this happens, we’ll be in a lot of trouble.
If a Civil War did break out, the side most likely to win would be the side that controls the military. Perhaps we need to join the military and seize back control.
"a country with such so much self-hatred simply won’t conjure up the will to resist. That’s what anarcho-tyranny is all about: breaking a people’s will to resist."
My difficulty with this, Max, is that in the event of an actual invasion, the ruling class will get creamed. Let's say the Chinese decided to enforce their sphere of influence in Asia and take Taiwan. They destroy 2 Pacific fleet carrier groups, destroy Okinawa conventionally, nuke Guam, Long Beach, and S.F. and invade California. (No, I don't think it's wholly realistic, but it's an invasion example.) Governor Newsome will lose his hair gel, his assets, and likely his head. Our elites are historically and ideologically foolish but not stupid where their own interests are concerned. So what gives? Why promote a system that so obviously weakens the very social fabric you depend on for your continued uber-prosperity? I honestly don't get it. Or are they also blinded by "it can't happen here"?
Belte's comment is key to understanding the problem: "I don’t think people would come to blows over past arguments over banal topics like tax policy" I spend so much time talking about this with people who just won't get it.
It's the difference between means and ends. Tax policy is a question of means: we all agree that both inequality and inefficiency are bad, so how to we balance economic justice and productivity? However, what if someone comes along who says, "you know, I actually think inequality is a good thing and I want there to be lots more dirt poor people." Now you have a question of ends, a theological question: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/all-human-conflict-is-ultimately-theological/ Enlightenment, Lockean democracy, premised as it is on procedural justice and value-neutrality, is VERY ill-suited to theological (value-laden) questions. We're banging on a screw with a hammer, and if you do that long enough and hard enough, you will dent or break the hammer. That's what postliberalism is about: people trying to find a better tool than a hammer.
That's a valid point. People have come to believe democracy is supposed to result in specific results, but democracy is a process, not an outcome. The Left believes democracy is supposed to lead to more leftism, which is why they suddenly become authoritarian when democracy threatens to lead the country rightward. Also, as you pointed out, democracy can work only if both sides agree on a set of priors, which we obviously don't.
The answer to fixing democracy is to first and foremost limit voting rights. Obviously, nobody would agree to that, meaning we're heading for authoritarianism and civil war. Only in the aftermath can we decide that mass democracy was always a bad idea and forge a new political consensus.
We're already existing in something of a cold civil war between the states and federal government. When CA first decided to not enforce federal drug law and then sanctuary cities sprung up and other states joined in. When states were honestly talking about resisting DJT use of federal power to quell riots and states like TX sued the federal government over boarder enforcement you had the cold civil war.
Having said that, if their is a potential for a hot civil war or even the states wrestling power away from the federal government, I believe it is here that you would see the sparks and propellent that sets our course. With lawfare and talk of court packing we've seen further erosion of norms and standards by which we behave. Norms of both the common person as well as the institutions of state, federal, judicial and military interactions. I believe we'll have a better picture of the way forward by next summer, when I fully expect the results of the election to begin to yield fruits.
If Harris is elected we'll see more efforts to attack speech. I suspect the ultimate aim of mass immigration, bombing factories throughout the country, rail attacks and releasing viruses is to justify martial law is to be able to push more draconian controls upon the people. I fully expect FL, TX and a few other states to resist this because of what has occurred over the last few years. That will set the stage for whatever conflict occurs.
If DJT is elected I suspect the left to go into overdrive. The MSM to attack normal middle Americans and DJT on all fronts. If he attempts to deport in large numbers this will cause conflict with some states despite the fact that many of their own citizens, on the left, want to end mass migration. If he doesn't do anything about deportation than I expect a conflict to heat up between the far right and the far left. That will then again lead to martial law which the establishment wants and we end up in a similar situation but potentially with red states going along with it and this time blue states like CA, IL resisting. That will set the stage for whatever conflict occurs.
So as you can tell if you've read this far, I'm mostly expecting things to continue to spiral toward chaos and violence. Not because I want it to be so but because that's what it looks like will happen. The Cathedral of elites want what they want. While some have started to break away that actually facilitates the risk of hot conflict rather than abating it.
Lately, I've been studying the "Paulista War," the last civil war fought by Brazil in 1932. Brazil, like the U.S., is a federal presidential republic and a union of states. The State of Sao Paulo rebelled against the presidency of Getúlio Vargas, whom they felt was behaving unconstitutionally. The Brazilian federal government responded with military force and, within a few months, put down the Sao Paulo rebellion. The war was fought conventionally. If a similar conflict occurred in the U.S., it'd be like the State of New York rebelling against the federal government. Imagine us blockading New York City like the Brazilians blockaded Sao Paulo.
Some sort of conflict has to occur. There's just no other way the fever is going to break. There's a reason why wars happen, because there's just no way to resolve the impasse otherwise.
Regarding your discussion of federalism and states nullification...
"The only way the federal government can be weakened with as little bloodshed as possible"... is by going broke, Max. Which it will. Federalism is coming back because the financial cost of forcing dissident states to comply will become too high. Empires are expensive, a problem they solve with regular injections of loot from the barbarians outside. We don't have anyone to loot, so we're going to go broke defending our empire.
Some states will, I suspect sooner rather than later, will opt out. It's already starting, as
Eusebius says. Regardless of who wins this fall, I predict there will be governors in open refusal to enforce major federal laws (de-facto secession) by 2028. And the feds will be tolerating it because their too busy and broke with foreign entanglements to stop it.
I agree it's possible in theory, but this is where we have to defer to history - as Howe says, there's never been an instance of a country this old separating peacefully. Never. Keep in mind, there are plenty of Democrats living in Red states. The Red secessionist movement could end up dealing with an insurgency.
I'd argue that thinking the Regime's bluff can be called will only make civil war even more likely. Wars often result when one side thinks the other side won't do anything in response.
I agree with you on an insurgency, but I think it would be smaller.
Nullification of federal law will be gradual, as the feds become politically and eventually financially bankrupt -- slowly and then suddenly). There will be a lot of state-level red/blue self-deportation. We're already seeing it: gay people declaring Florida "unsafe"; parents fleeing California over fears their kids will be taken away over trans lunacy. It's performative now on both sides (actual risk in either case is pretty low), but if you had a state that openly flaunted federal immigration and civil rights law, rounded up illegals and forcibly bussed them out, there would be a lot of liberals (particularly minorities) who actually would feel unsafe and migrate quickly to other states. Similarly, a blue state that effectively criminalized non-LGBT-friendly churches (Canada and UK are doing this now) and turned a blind eye when they were vandalized (who could imagine such a thing?) there really would be a conservative Christian exodus for safety.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic though. An actual insurgency doesn't take many people. And some of those who stayed would do so out of conviction that they were fighting evil. A few hundred guerillas could effectively besiege my hometown of Sacramento, closing trucking over I-80 and US-50 and dynamiting the Sierra railroad tracks. A place like S.F. would be even easier. So perhaps I'm being too optimistic. Imagining the techniques of Ukraine applied to this kind of civil conflict in America is terrifying. Good thing there aren't many Americans who think the "other side" is evil incarnate. :-)
One thing Neil Howe said that I agree with is that if you asked anyone after the Civil War whether they wished it never happened, they would have responded in the negative. It was painful but necessary. In light of that, I hate to say this, but it seems like the better alternative to the totalitarian scenario the regime has in mind for us plebes, and the sooner it starts, the better chance we have of coming out the other side.
I had to sort of scoff when he said that. I'm sure many who fought for the Confederacy would've disagreed. Many descendants of Confederates today also feel differently. In some ways, the war was unnecessary because the South was allowed to leave the union.
That said, the U.S. did build something nice for itself in the long-term aftermath of the war. Unfortunately, we're squandering it in less than half the time it took to put it together. I'd say a civil war is more justifiable now than it was in 1861, because what's at stake today is our entire civilization, whether we have a home at all, whether we're allowed to be a people at all.
Piping up to say I agree and frankly, had the south been allow to leave peacefully we might not be fighting now. The divisions today seem very familiar.
While I realize that it's usual for folks my age to become convinced that everything is going to hell, I fear that maybe this time us old-ish codgers are right. Even without all the economic strains, we are dependent on too many "systems" and institutions that are working poorly at best. Won't take much for this interconnected mess to unravel.
America , and by extension most of the western world, is Rome sometime around Caracalla’s day. Due to multiculturalism (notice how it ends in “ism,” therefore marking it as an ideology), the advantages of American citizenship have steadily diminished to where it is becoming a burden, and not a privilege, to be an American citizen. This is especially true if you are a white Christian male. Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to everyone, thereby negating any real value in it. There was no incentive to pick up a sword and fight to protect Rome, and therefore become a citizen, because it had already been given to you.
In America, things are obviously a little different, but since the privileges of American citizenship have been extended to all, there is no incentive to strengthen the system, as you don’t need to in order to still retain the privileges it grants. There’s no give something to get something, and people can be easily influenced to adopt various positions that work against cohesion of the system. DEI is the prime example, and it allows short circuiting of the usual routes of gaining privileged access to our systems of wealth creation.
That said, wealth creation is running out of steam. America was not blessed by God, but was blessed with a continent occupied by militarily inept natives and a massive amount of untapped natural resources. Our economic thinking, and thinking in general, reflects this. The American psyche developed with the idea in mind that limits don’t exist. It’s been a blessing and a curse, but now it becomes a fatal weakness as we do not see the need to alter systems that have become broken. We assume there will always be a way out of a crisis.
The role of centralized authority is greatly diminished as well. For all the talk of the “surveillance state” and “federal takeovers,” it is very much an illusion. While it can be a drag these days to be tied to the American economy and government structure, the central government lacks effective means of guiding anything in the nation these days. Political authority is gone and the nation is too large and too fragmented to have enforcement of authority on any kind of national scale. Sure, the federal government can still make your life miserable on an individual level, but it has lost the ability to guide events. The out of control debt and political candidates openly espousing communist principles shows this to be true.
But the end to largesse in the form of residual wealth from economic activity in the previous century is coming to an end. The reason in part that prices are going out of sight is because there is no more “more” left. The idiotic covid relief sure didn’t help anything, but we were going in that direction anyway. It just sped things up. Of course, younger people who will not have a chance to benefit from what their parents and grandparents could will have to face the reality that it is all gone. Where do you go from there? At a minimum, they are going to care far less about trying to preserve any sort of social fabric.
Our civil war, which seems more and more likely (even though any sane person would never want to see that happen) is going to be one born of frustration. It will be the George Floyd riots on a national scale, war lacking a positive (in the sense of fighting towards a goal) ideology. It will instead be civil war for its own sake, somewhat like Yugoslavia. Ethnic fragmentation will partly drive it, too. When a system just runs out of steam, it gets ugly.
It would be really nice if we were not going in the direction of political chaos, but I’m not sure anyone could put a stop to it. When Kamala steps into the Oval Office as president (Trump will never be allowed to be president again), it might be the last time a person will be president over a united America. She sure as hell has no idea how to grapple with the slow motion train wreck we have going on now.
Too many on the Right think it's AD 476. I've always said it's more like 50 BC What's coming over the hill isn't the barbarians but Caesar's army. I think your Caracella case is pretty good though and I may have to revise my view.
No country should have an open border. The Biden administration is insane. Trudeau in Canada isn’t much better, importing millions of Indians. We now have a severe housing crisis. The migrants brought money and bid up prices to insane levels.
It was John Carter on Substack who coined the phrase “They have to go home or you’ll never own a home” to encapsulate how dire the Canadian housing situation is right now. It’s very simple it seems. Lower the demand and the prices will naturally decrease. There would then be no need to build like maniacs to keep up with the millions of new people demanding housing.
Great comments from a wide range of angles. Thank you for putting these in a follow up article. One of the aspects I love about Substack is the open comments sections that tend to be high quality and insightful. So often, before, it would feel like you would be the only one concerned or even knowledgeable about the actual situation. Now suddenly you realize that many other astute observers (perhaps millions) are seeing the same things and trying to parse the next steps of this escalating madness.
Still, I feel like it is almost akin to a fever dream and that only something dramatic will allow the space necessary for the solutions proposed. I don’t have much hope for the normies. I hold to the “Pareto Principle” (80/20) for breakthroughs in culture and insight as well. 80% of the consequential change or insight will come from 20% of the population, but even of those 20% there will be a majority who use their powers for their own cynical self advancement rather than to improve society or general consciousness. It’s up to we few, we happy few to create the dialogue and generate the memes that will transform society for the better.
I see some interpolation among 1984, Brave New World, the Spanish Civil War and The Hunger Games type of societal control as instructive for our current and likely future condition. It’s either that or Chinese style social credit-based authoritarianism, which I guess is really not all that different from a 1984/Hunger Games scenario when you think about it.
Good post, but I wonder just what is this “left” that is being mentioned? The old school pro-civil rights, pro-free speech, pro-labor, pro-union, concerned about **economic** class, even pro-socialist (generally not communist), or more general, the broadly based collective welfare of the New Deal and New Deal adjacent was crushed during a deliberate campaign lasting decades. Its final supporters in the Democratic Party were ejected by the Clintons’ Democratic Leadership Council.
What is called the left in the United States, particularly in the Democratic Party, is of the subverted, Neoliberal, pro-corporate, pro-wealth, pro-totalitarian kind using Identity Politics and Wokism to weaken, divide, and control and allied with the American security/deep state.
It is NOT the left or the liberalism of fifty or sixty years ago. It just says that it is and the state media propagandizes that it is.
Which is a shame because we need a liberal and leftist party, not the tamed, subservient lapdogs that is a tool of the establishment. Hell, we could even use an actual conservative party as without Trump and his supporters, it is an insane ideologue, blinding supporting policies that make the poor poorer, the rich richer, and corruption to increase.
I agree that it’s time for Civil War. But what are the factions? I don’t think it’s red state vs blue or state vs fed. Seems more like White people vs everyone else.
There’s currently a recruiting crisis in the military. It’s looking like the feds are going to bring in many non-White foreigners. If this happens, we’ll be in a lot of trouble.
If a Civil War did break out, the side most likely to win would be the side that controls the military. Perhaps we need to join the military and seize back control.
"a country with such so much self-hatred simply won’t conjure up the will to resist. That’s what anarcho-tyranny is all about: breaking a people’s will to resist."
My difficulty with this, Max, is that in the event of an actual invasion, the ruling class will get creamed. Let's say the Chinese decided to enforce their sphere of influence in Asia and take Taiwan. They destroy 2 Pacific fleet carrier groups, destroy Okinawa conventionally, nuke Guam, Long Beach, and S.F. and invade California. (No, I don't think it's wholly realistic, but it's an invasion example.) Governor Newsome will lose his hair gel, his assets, and likely his head. Our elites are historically and ideologically foolish but not stupid where their own interests are concerned. So what gives? Why promote a system that so obviously weakens the very social fabric you depend on for your continued uber-prosperity? I honestly don't get it. Or are they also blinded by "it can't happen here"?
Belte's comment is key to understanding the problem: "I don’t think people would come to blows over past arguments over banal topics like tax policy" I spend so much time talking about this with people who just won't get it.
It's the difference between means and ends. Tax policy is a question of means: we all agree that both inequality and inefficiency are bad, so how to we balance economic justice and productivity? However, what if someone comes along who says, "you know, I actually think inequality is a good thing and I want there to be lots more dirt poor people." Now you have a question of ends, a theological question: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/all-human-conflict-is-ultimately-theological/ Enlightenment, Lockean democracy, premised as it is on procedural justice and value-neutrality, is VERY ill-suited to theological (value-laden) questions. We're banging on a screw with a hammer, and if you do that long enough and hard enough, you will dent or break the hammer. That's what postliberalism is about: people trying to find a better tool than a hammer.
That's a valid point. People have come to believe democracy is supposed to result in specific results, but democracy is a process, not an outcome. The Left believes democracy is supposed to lead to more leftism, which is why they suddenly become authoritarian when democracy threatens to lead the country rightward. Also, as you pointed out, democracy can work only if both sides agree on a set of priors, which we obviously don't.
The answer to fixing democracy is to first and foremost limit voting rights. Obviously, nobody would agree to that, meaning we're heading for authoritarianism and civil war. Only in the aftermath can we decide that mass democracy was always a bad idea and forge a new political consensus.
We're already existing in something of a cold civil war between the states and federal government. When CA first decided to not enforce federal drug law and then sanctuary cities sprung up and other states joined in. When states were honestly talking about resisting DJT use of federal power to quell riots and states like TX sued the federal government over boarder enforcement you had the cold civil war.
Having said that, if their is a potential for a hot civil war or even the states wrestling power away from the federal government, I believe it is here that you would see the sparks and propellent that sets our course. With lawfare and talk of court packing we've seen further erosion of norms and standards by which we behave. Norms of both the common person as well as the institutions of state, federal, judicial and military interactions. I believe we'll have a better picture of the way forward by next summer, when I fully expect the results of the election to begin to yield fruits.
If Harris is elected we'll see more efforts to attack speech. I suspect the ultimate aim of mass immigration, bombing factories throughout the country, rail attacks and releasing viruses is to justify martial law is to be able to push more draconian controls upon the people. I fully expect FL, TX and a few other states to resist this because of what has occurred over the last few years. That will set the stage for whatever conflict occurs.
If DJT is elected I suspect the left to go into overdrive. The MSM to attack normal middle Americans and DJT on all fronts. If he attempts to deport in large numbers this will cause conflict with some states despite the fact that many of their own citizens, on the left, want to end mass migration. If he doesn't do anything about deportation than I expect a conflict to heat up between the far right and the far left. That will then again lead to martial law which the establishment wants and we end up in a similar situation but potentially with red states going along with it and this time blue states like CA, IL resisting. That will set the stage for whatever conflict occurs.
So as you can tell if you've read this far, I'm mostly expecting things to continue to spiral toward chaos and violence. Not because I want it to be so but because that's what it looks like will happen. The Cathedral of elites want what they want. While some have started to break away that actually facilitates the risk of hot conflict rather than abating it.
Lately, I've been studying the "Paulista War," the last civil war fought by Brazil in 1932. Brazil, like the U.S., is a federal presidential republic and a union of states. The State of Sao Paulo rebelled against the presidency of Getúlio Vargas, whom they felt was behaving unconstitutionally. The Brazilian federal government responded with military force and, within a few months, put down the Sao Paulo rebellion. The war was fought conventionally. If a similar conflict occurred in the U.S., it'd be like the State of New York rebelling against the federal government. Imagine us blockading New York City like the Brazilians blockaded Sao Paulo.
Some sort of conflict has to occur. There's just no other way the fever is going to break. There's a reason why wars happen, because there's just no way to resolve the impasse otherwise.
Regarding your discussion of federalism and states nullification...
"The only way the federal government can be weakened with as little bloodshed as possible"... is by going broke, Max. Which it will. Federalism is coming back because the financial cost of forcing dissident states to comply will become too high. Empires are expensive, a problem they solve with regular injections of loot from the barbarians outside. We don't have anyone to loot, so we're going to go broke defending our empire.
Some states will, I suspect sooner rather than later, will opt out. It's already starting, as
Eusebius says. Regardless of who wins this fall, I predict there will be governors in open refusal to enforce major federal laws (de-facto secession) by 2028. And the feds will be tolerating it because their too busy and broke with foreign entanglements to stop it.
I agree it's possible in theory, but this is where we have to defer to history - as Howe says, there's never been an instance of a country this old separating peacefully. Never. Keep in mind, there are plenty of Democrats living in Red states. The Red secessionist movement could end up dealing with an insurgency.
I'd argue that thinking the Regime's bluff can be called will only make civil war even more likely. Wars often result when one side thinks the other side won't do anything in response.
I agree with you on an insurgency, but I think it would be smaller.
Nullification of federal law will be gradual, as the feds become politically and eventually financially bankrupt -- slowly and then suddenly). There will be a lot of state-level red/blue self-deportation. We're already seeing it: gay people declaring Florida "unsafe"; parents fleeing California over fears their kids will be taken away over trans lunacy. It's performative now on both sides (actual risk in either case is pretty low), but if you had a state that openly flaunted federal immigration and civil rights law, rounded up illegals and forcibly bussed them out, there would be a lot of liberals (particularly minorities) who actually would feel unsafe and migrate quickly to other states. Similarly, a blue state that effectively criminalized non-LGBT-friendly churches (Canada and UK are doing this now) and turned a blind eye when they were vandalized (who could imagine such a thing?) there really would be a conservative Christian exodus for safety.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic though. An actual insurgency doesn't take many people. And some of those who stayed would do so out of conviction that they were fighting evil. A few hundred guerillas could effectively besiege my hometown of Sacramento, closing trucking over I-80 and US-50 and dynamiting the Sierra railroad tracks. A place like S.F. would be even easier. So perhaps I'm being too optimistic. Imagining the techniques of Ukraine applied to this kind of civil conflict in America is terrifying. Good thing there aren't many Americans who think the "other side" is evil incarnate. :-)
One thing Neil Howe said that I agree with is that if you asked anyone after the Civil War whether they wished it never happened, they would have responded in the negative. It was painful but necessary. In light of that, I hate to say this, but it seems like the better alternative to the totalitarian scenario the regime has in mind for us plebes, and the sooner it starts, the better chance we have of coming out the other side.
I had to sort of scoff when he said that. I'm sure many who fought for the Confederacy would've disagreed. Many descendants of Confederates today also feel differently. In some ways, the war was unnecessary because the South was allowed to leave the union.
That said, the U.S. did build something nice for itself in the long-term aftermath of the war. Unfortunately, we're squandering it in less than half the time it took to put it together. I'd say a civil war is more justifiable now than it was in 1861, because what's at stake today is our entire civilization, whether we have a home at all, whether we're allowed to be a people at all.
Piping up to say I agree and frankly, had the south been allow to leave peacefully we might not be fighting now. The divisions today seem very familiar.
I agree. Other than total surrender of who we are as a people and what we stand for…
While I realize that it's usual for folks my age to become convinced that everything is going to hell, I fear that maybe this time us old-ish codgers are right. Even without all the economic strains, we are dependent on too many "systems" and institutions that are working poorly at best. Won't take much for this interconnected mess to unravel.
America , and by extension most of the western world, is Rome sometime around Caracalla’s day. Due to multiculturalism (notice how it ends in “ism,” therefore marking it as an ideology), the advantages of American citizenship have steadily diminished to where it is becoming a burden, and not a privilege, to be an American citizen. This is especially true if you are a white Christian male. Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to everyone, thereby negating any real value in it. There was no incentive to pick up a sword and fight to protect Rome, and therefore become a citizen, because it had already been given to you.
In America, things are obviously a little different, but since the privileges of American citizenship have been extended to all, there is no incentive to strengthen the system, as you don’t need to in order to still retain the privileges it grants. There’s no give something to get something, and people can be easily influenced to adopt various positions that work against cohesion of the system. DEI is the prime example, and it allows short circuiting of the usual routes of gaining privileged access to our systems of wealth creation.
That said, wealth creation is running out of steam. America was not blessed by God, but was blessed with a continent occupied by militarily inept natives and a massive amount of untapped natural resources. Our economic thinking, and thinking in general, reflects this. The American psyche developed with the idea in mind that limits don’t exist. It’s been a blessing and a curse, but now it becomes a fatal weakness as we do not see the need to alter systems that have become broken. We assume there will always be a way out of a crisis.
The role of centralized authority is greatly diminished as well. For all the talk of the “surveillance state” and “federal takeovers,” it is very much an illusion. While it can be a drag these days to be tied to the American economy and government structure, the central government lacks effective means of guiding anything in the nation these days. Political authority is gone and the nation is too large and too fragmented to have enforcement of authority on any kind of national scale. Sure, the federal government can still make your life miserable on an individual level, but it has lost the ability to guide events. The out of control debt and political candidates openly espousing communist principles shows this to be true.
But the end to largesse in the form of residual wealth from economic activity in the previous century is coming to an end. The reason in part that prices are going out of sight is because there is no more “more” left. The idiotic covid relief sure didn’t help anything, but we were going in that direction anyway. It just sped things up. Of course, younger people who will not have a chance to benefit from what their parents and grandparents could will have to face the reality that it is all gone. Where do you go from there? At a minimum, they are going to care far less about trying to preserve any sort of social fabric.
Our civil war, which seems more and more likely (even though any sane person would never want to see that happen) is going to be one born of frustration. It will be the George Floyd riots on a national scale, war lacking a positive (in the sense of fighting towards a goal) ideology. It will instead be civil war for its own sake, somewhat like Yugoslavia. Ethnic fragmentation will partly drive it, too. When a system just runs out of steam, it gets ugly.
It would be really nice if we were not going in the direction of political chaos, but I’m not sure anyone could put a stop to it. When Kamala steps into the Oval Office as president (Trump will never be allowed to be president again), it might be the last time a person will be president over a united America. She sure as hell has no idea how to grapple with the slow motion train wreck we have going on now.
Too many on the Right think it's AD 476. I've always said it's more like 50 BC What's coming over the hill isn't the barbarians but Caesar's army. I think your Caracella case is pretty good though and I may have to revise my view.
No country should have an open border. The Biden administration is insane. Trudeau in Canada isn’t much better, importing millions of Indians. We now have a severe housing crisis. The migrants brought money and bid up prices to insane levels.
It was John Carter on Substack who coined the phrase “They have to go home or you’ll never own a home” to encapsulate how dire the Canadian housing situation is right now. It’s very simple it seems. Lower the demand and the prices will naturally decrease. There would then be no need to build like maniacs to keep up with the millions of new people demanding housing.
Great comments from a wide range of angles. Thank you for putting these in a follow up article. One of the aspects I love about Substack is the open comments sections that tend to be high quality and insightful. So often, before, it would feel like you would be the only one concerned or even knowledgeable about the actual situation. Now suddenly you realize that many other astute observers (perhaps millions) are seeing the same things and trying to parse the next steps of this escalating madness.
Still, I feel like it is almost akin to a fever dream and that only something dramatic will allow the space necessary for the solutions proposed. I don’t have much hope for the normies. I hold to the “Pareto Principle” (80/20) for breakthroughs in culture and insight as well. 80% of the consequential change or insight will come from 20% of the population, but even of those 20% there will be a majority who use their powers for their own cynical self advancement rather than to improve society or general consciousness. It’s up to we few, we happy few to create the dialogue and generate the memes that will transform society for the better.
Great prose. Thank you.
I see some interpolation among 1984, Brave New World, the Spanish Civil War and The Hunger Games type of societal control as instructive for our current and likely future condition. It’s either that or Chinese style social credit-based authoritarianism, which I guess is really not all that different from a 1984/Hunger Games scenario when you think about it.
I’m good with the accelerant. Let’s get it on