Civil war and/or secession
Bearing in mind my longstanding dictum that there is simply no way of knowing how it will all shake out, that the one sure thing is that such things hardly ever go exactly like anyone thinks beforetimes that they will, Simplicius takes a stab at a little prognostication.
On Secession and Civil War
Will there be breakup by 2030?I often mention my long-held forecast that I predict the United States will either devolve into civil war or secession by the year 2030. Hearing this, many have asked me to expound at length about my thoughts on this, why and how I see it unfolding. So I’ve decided to finally treat the topic in a more in depth manner than the usual comment reply allows.
Particularly in today’s cultural climate, when they conjure up ‘civil war’, many people are subconsciously referring to some sort of Rwandan Genocide-style conflict between the two opposing sides of Liberals and Conservatives, where the actual civilians have taken up arms and are battling it out in the streets. This notion of a ‘civil war’ is driven by endless memes posted by both sides which depict things like armed antifa leftists against conservative militiamen rifling it out in some dystopian suburban battlefield, perhaps akin to Seattle’s CHAZ ‘Autonomous Zone’.
The Rwandan-style one has the least chance of happening because it presupposes some sort of de-centralized, stochastic ‘free-for-all’ where people just happen to take up arms against the fellow man. Sure, there will be sporadic armed conflicts occurring regionally, owing to the growing racial and political divides in the country. But there exists no real formalized mechanism by which the two sides can even cohere into some semblance of organized, opposing armies with a central command, staff structures, etc. This is mostly a juvenile consideration, at least for any time in the semi-near future, of which we’re speaking. One could perhaps envision such a scenario much farther down the line than is possible to predict: some sort of weird, lawless, dystopian post-apocalyptic Mad-Max-style future in the year 2100, or something like that. But for our purposes, this is unrealistic and unworthy of serious deliberation.
There is a third option some people refer to when invoking civil war: that of ‘people vs. the government’. I’ll treat this one briefly on its own, because there are a few important considerations here.
Firstly, this idea has gained traction as numerous American politicians have wielded this cudgel as a threat against upstart Americans who might like their chances in an uprising. Biden himself has remarked on at least two or three different occasions that ‘Americans need F-15s not AR15s to fight against the government’, implying that U.S. citizens can never defeat the government unless they’re armed with high level strategic weaponry, as opposed to mere small arms.
In short, the government and its ‘mighty military force’ wouldn’t last in a true prolonged conflict against the population of the U.S. Of course, it all depends how many people would be on the revolting side in this hypothetical scenario. But let’s not forget that the U.S. has an estimated 400 million guns, and 393 million of those are in civilian hands. There are reportedly something like 70-100+ million gun owners. The U.S. military has about 800k total ground troops. Even with all the planes and tanks in the world, can 800,000 go against 100,000,000? You could argue they couldn’t even defeat the Vietcong’s less than 1 million, much less 100m. Not to mention that most Americans are far heavier armed than the typical Vietcong and their bolt-action rifles.
But like I said, those are just slightly absurd hypotheticals to put some things in perspective; in reality, this is not the type of scenario I expect to occur. It’s simply a quick two cents thrown into the debate to refute the typical leftist canard that the U.S. military is invincible, when in fact they entirely rely on the civilian sector to even function.
Lots, lots more to this one—which, despite my opening admonishment regarding the ultimate futility of assuming that we can make any predictions here with any realistic expectation of accuracy, I nonetheless consider to be well worth a read. One more thing I feel I ought to address:
Professor Barbara Walter explains she’s studied civil wars for thirty years and has spent the last few of them working for a CIA taskforce which uses such metrics to prognosticate ‘where the next civil war will occur’ in the globe.
Professor Walter explains, when turned against the U.S. itself, these same proprietary calculations reveal that the U.S. is at the edge of what the CIA would deem the cusp of the “RISK” to “HIGH RISK” categories. Normally, a country at ‘high risk’ would be placed on a special CIA watchlist, as upheaval there would be considered imminent.
Walter, the Post said, concludes that the US has passed through stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” and may now be in “open conflict”, beginning with the Capitol riot.
Citing analytics used by the Center for Systemic Peace, Walter also says the US has become an “anocracy” – “somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state”.
Walter’s second point is indisputably true. The first, though? Meh, not so much; the notion that we may be in a state of “open conflict” is seriously undercut by A) the simple fact that what she blithely refers to as a “riot” was no such thing; and B) excepting the ever-escalating incidents of mostly black-on-black violence in the nation’s urban jungles, all most Normals need to do to disprove the idea that we’ve arrived at “open conflict” is to just take a look around. Any conflict we might be in is certainly not “open,” and for the vast majority of us, there sure doesn’t seem to be very much of it to be seen.
That said, Simplicius sounds a cautionary note here:
These findings, however, are already more than a year old, and the country has likely slipped even further into the danger zone.
Fair enough, no argument. Even so, the danger zone isn’t quite the actual thing; they’re very different animules—as I suspect we’ll soon be finding out, to our great chagrin and injury.
As I said, there’s much more to this deep-dive examination of every facet of this issue, so do read it all.
(Via WRSA)
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