Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
February 14th, 2022
The United States is a textbook case of a country headed for civil war. The reasons are foundational. They are well outside the realm of horserace politics but are to be found in the increasingly decrepit structures of the country. The United States has lost faith in its institutions and in itself. Only twenty percent of people believe that the electoral system is fair, and roughly a third of Democrats and Republicans believe that violence is justified if their side loses an election. These are the conditions that make a country ripe for civil conflict.
America as it exists now is a complex, cascading system. The increasing appetite for violence and the declining faith in institutions are the fruit of a series of crises. Hyper-partisanship has rendered the US government nearly incapable of basic functions like guaranteeing its debt and appointing diplomats. The administrative state has been left in crippling disrepair. Meanwhile, inequality is at unprecedented levels, levels which historically have led, in every case, to violence or regime change. Climate change is starting to create interior refugees. The US government will almost certainly not have the capacity to deal with these crises. In its decline, it becomes less and less capable of addressing the drivers of its decline.
And it's going to get worse. By 2040, when America becomes a majority minority country, fifty percent of the country will control 85% of the Senate. Already the Supreme Court is controlled by members who were selected by Presidents who did not win the popular majority. Their judgments will not be accepted as legitimate representations of the people by anyone who doesn't agree with them. America may already qualify as an anocracy, in a state between democracy and autocracy. Historically that in-between state creates the most risk of the decline into civil war.
Quite simply, the US Constitution no longer functions. It was a work of great genius, but it was the genius of another age. Thomas Jefferson said that a Constitution should be renewed every 19 years because, in his words, "the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead." What the US now possesses is a contract with the dead.
The expert class I spoke to for the Next Civil War put the odds of a civil war occurring in the next ten years at 67%. That's near enough, to me.
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