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Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.
We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.
The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.
What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.
For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.
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War (sigh) has changed.
Motorization. Improvised explosives. Handheld automatic weapons. Radio. A small number of motivated individuals can deal a lot more damage today than they could during the March to the Sea.
Personally, I think a hypothetical U.S. balkanization would look more like the Troubles than the American Civil War. It’d be high-variance: some regions would see a bombing every week, and others would be left untouched up until the point a militia rolled into town. Even the best-off, though, would suffer compared to the globalist, interconnected society we have today.
Not everyone would see the outcomes FC described. But enough of them would, and then they’d take up arms and gouge back. And your children would never expect to have it as good as we did.
Right, this I think is mostly a reasonable prediction. Perhaps I’m wrong but I think that @FCfromSSC pushed a valid point a little too hard and made it look silly.
On a lighter note, your post reminds me of a scene from Black Books:
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I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics. There would be a significant amount of short term suffering, yes, but not as much as you are proposing and I don’t think the long-term effects would be so bad. Look at Spain, which had a reasonably modern Civil War and was basically okay.
Then it seems to me that you lack the necessary imagination and perspective.
The best estimate I've seen is that BLM killed ~8.5k black people, in addition to thousands more non-black people, in roughly four years. No one involved intended for that to happen, but it happened all the same. Most of the people involved will not be aiming to become Congolese warlords. I'm skeptical that their intentions will prevent the formation of lasting conditions where Congolese warlordism is an adaptive behavior.
From observation, violence > chaos > poverty > more violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, especially when the good people die or leave until those who remain are some form of bad person.
I am not arguing that American civil war means inevitable and eternal hell on earth. I am arguing that if you are contemplating a potential war, you are probably underweighting the likelihood and severity of the bad consequences, and you are probably not thinking about what it means if those bad consequences arrive for you, personally.
Perhaps I misread you but it seemed like you were arguing exactly that:
Thus some level of shock and bemusement. In The Black Swan Taleb describes his experience in the Lebanese Civil War and it wasn’t like that. Most people adapt to most things.
Only if you use a very non-standard definition of ‘kill’. BLM killed perhaps 30 people: the CHAZ murders, that poor old man who got his head cracked open. Maybe the 2 people who Rittenhouse shot.
But ‘assisted in the death of, via second order effects on murder rates’ is a rather different phenomenon.
Message received, and I will think about it carefully.
I don't know if I agree with that. If law and order collapses as a result of civil war, it's not going to be much comfort to me that technically the mob burning down my house is a second order effect.
That’s not what @FCfromSSC was talking about though. He was (in my perhaps incorrect reading) folding in murders that resulted from a reduced police presence over the next few years as ‘BLM deaths’. In some cases this is appropriate - if you are arguing about whether Black Lives Matter cares about saving Black Lives, the fact that it indirectly resulted in many black deaths is relevant. But I don’t think the use here was appropriate - it seems more like Pascal’s mugging where I say that lowering the minimum wage will cause 10,000 bankruptcies and 300 related suicides and therefore that anyone proposing tax cuts is a Stalinesque mass murderer.
(If there really were thousands of BLM mob murders then of course I apologise).
It seems pretty clear to me that the reduced police presence over the next few years was a direct result of BLM, given that reducing police presence was an explicit goal of the movement. The increase in murders was an easily-predictable result of the reduced police presence. I am not claiming that BLM rioters directly killed 8.5k black people in the course of rioting. I'm claiming that they were bad at predicting the results of their actions, and their actions led very predictably to a lot of black people being murdered. Civil war would be much, much, much, much worse than BLM in this regard, not least because it is not obvious that it could be stopped once it got going. The direct violence would kill quite a few people, but it is easy to predict that the breakdown in social structure could easily kill a whole lot more, and in turn create lots of incentives for more ideological direct violence.
Lowering the minimum wage changes a whole lot of things, and it's hard to predict all the effects. Maybe it causes 10,000 bankruptcies. Maybe it also lets 1,000 businesses hire 10 additional workers each. How do these things balance out? Crippling the policing system is not like that; the effects are immediate and severe. Likewise for the economy. Likewise for the power grid, water treatment, food distribution, banking, the legal system generally...
I'm not sure why communication is failing here, so let me try again in simpler terms:
People like the idea of political violence because it seems like a straightforward solution to their perceived problems. They do not understand that while you may get to decide to start the violence, once it's started the other side has to agree to let it stop. They do not understand the fragile nature of our society, and how bad things can get on short notice if certain bedrock assumptions like "my job will pay me on time" and "there is food in the fridge and more in the grocery store" and "the lights turn on when I hit the switch" and "the police will come if I call them" no longer obtain. These assumptions are not derived from immutable features of the universe. The police can go away. The power can go out. The trucks might not show up to stock the grocery store. These things can happen. People can make them happen, if they believe it to be to their advantage, and a great way to convince them of that is to make them feel that they and their families are in danger if Something Drastic Is Not Done.
I did not and do not argue that all of this will happen. My argument is that it is much more likely to happen than people who talk about Civil War generally appreciate, and further that it is much more likely to happen to the talkers than they appreciate. It is, believe me, very easy to fantasize about your side putting the boot to the hated outgroup. It seems to me that such people, myself included, would be well-advised to spend a few cycles contemplating what it would be like to get the boot, rather than merely give it.
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