People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image).
It would be rad for me too. I don’t wish harm to Americans of course, but I think it’s about time they start throwing hands instead of whining on the internet 24/7 about how much they hate eachother.
Seen from the outside and ignoring all the innocent people suffering, I would love one thing about the USA splitting up, it would be the perfect example of how shitty things can get when people don’t realize they live in conservative locations that depend on the goodwill of more progressive locations. Split the USA like on OP’s map and just watch as the red part devolves into a third world country.
Seems to be a distinct possibility. Posturing prior to the election, rattling sabers, they’re spoiling for a full-on shootin’ war contingent on losing the election, in my opinion.
edit: I dare say, it might even be strategically advantageous for them to intentionally try lose, claim it was rigged, and use that to go live with the 4th riech.
The US is the next empire to fall. I am a US citizen and i am taking steps to GTFO if needed. I have an e-residency and ID card from another nation and am working up to the investment for full citizenship.
I mean, the issue is that most of the rest of the so called free World (and in my opinion correctly so), especially Europe, depends on the US for defence, specially weapon production. Despite France constantly whining about it, insisting on strategic autonomy, as far as I am aware, when it comes to ammo production and air power, we very much depend on the US for production and designs (the design when it comes to aircraft)
The United States military should scale way back, but the European military would have to increase because of what you mentioned with designs for specialty weapons.
We have reasonable designs for almost all weapon categories, except maybe for airplanes, with the latest being the Eurofighter which is by now a bit dated. Regarding Tanks, the German Leopard is as far as I am aware a fine piece of engineering as well as the belgian FN-SCAR. However we lack the ammo capabilities (especially when it comes to artillery shells) to ever have hope of winning a protracted war (or simply keeping Ukraine alive). (also, quick side note, France also spends a great deal of money maintaining their own nuclear arsenal and weapons delivery system, which kinda makes the UK seem a bit puny with their dependence of the US for weapon delivery)
If the American empire falls, it’s not going to reduce weapons production or arms sales. Decline into fascism requires more guns and bullets, as they get turned against domestic targets, while guns and oil are among the US’s best sources of external currency.
This reminds me of Auroville, a village in India that’s supposed to be an Utopia of socialism and new humanist living. But when you look beyond the marketing and the veneer of spirituality, it’s just a bunch of people living in poverty and giving their money to a group of leeches.
Eh. Something clearly needs to be done, and the concerns aren’t being addressed (and haven’t been for awhile). Congress and the senate haven’t done anything aside from attempt to impeach hunter Biden (from who knows what) or show off his dick.
Doubtful it’s any kind of civil war, but Texas (and other states) is being hit hard by the number of immigrants, and if the federal government can’t (or won’t?) do anything to curb it, makes sense that they will do something on their own.
I never understood why Republicans hate immigrants. Low educated labor that is highly religious. And if crimes are committed, these people can fuel the incarceration complex America has as well.
These are all reasons why they actually enjoy immigration. As a hot-button topic, this has paid out endlessly and will continue to because there’s no way immigration will be solved peacefully. So they get the fearmongering and political outrage out of it, in addition to cheap labor, and bogeymen to pin rape/violence on as well. They’re the perfect target for them to hate, and they love to hate. Nothing gets an old Republican fired up like illegal Mexicans coming here with their guns and drugs and taking our jobs and sending all the money back home and raping our daughters (“well not my daughter, but y’know” 🤠 ) and bringing caravans more of em in their wake
Same. Tons of hard working people that do a lot behind the scenes. But South Park probably got it right with ‘they took errr jerbs!’ Jobs they wouldn’t do themselves anyway.
Republican voters hate immigrants. It’s a target the GOP can point at while knowing the flow of cheap labor will continue from increasing desperation all while they “heroically fight at the border”.
but Texas (and other states) is being hit hard by the number of immigrants, and if the federal government can’t (or won’t?) do anything to curb it, makes sense that they will do something on their own.
That’s the thing though, they aren’t. Things aren’t worse than they were, this is a manufactured crisis because Republicans need some kind of tangible policy to lie about to their voters for the upcoming election. Just like the immigrant caravan which disappeared as suddenly as it appeared (as in it never existed) the previous election.
I don’t think this is an accurate view of the current border situation, but it’s a view that one might have consuming media from a different kind of media bubble than the Fox News kind.
There really is a situation with migrants who cross the river illegally and immediately turn themselves in and claim asylum. This isn’t a new situation, but the numbers have gotten worse over the last year.
The migrant caravans, plural, really did and do exist. What tends to happen is they gather into thousands strong mass marches in and around Tapachula, after crossing from Guatemala to Mexico. So these big marches start towards the US in southern Mexico, but they tend to break up and thin out over the 1800 mile journey to Texas.
If anyone could organize a mass foot march over the whole distance, that would be an extremely impressive feat of logistics. But that hasn’t happened yet.
Conclusions: this border situation is not completely made up. Many right wing conspiracies going around have some kind of kernel of truth to then.
And some mainstream media outlets (I have this experience with NPR in particular) have started to seemingly impose total blackouts on not just the conspiracy ideas, but also on the little nuggets of true news that get them started.
Just like in Europe, to say there is no problem with migration is false, but to present it as an existential problem for the country or even the state is ridiculous. Starting a civil war over ‘nuggets’ of truth seems pretty dang evil.
Yup! Thank you. It’s not as big as it’s being made out to be (obviously people trying to get political points), but it’s still an issue that does need to be addressed, and it is disproportionately effecting some more than others. No one is going to start at civil war over something like this.
Yeah, no. This is still an entirely manufactured crisis. Even if what you’re claiming is really happening, it’s still being framed as a problem, which it’s not.
Our colonialist pearl-clutching over the southern border has got to stop. It’s fucked up that you’re perpetuating this brand of fascism.
I see this a lot, “the liberal media doesn’t want you to know!” or “why isn’t anyone talking about this!” meanwhile everyone including the lefty sources are indeed talking about it.
The problem is, only one party wants to do anything to actually ease the crisis. Republicans are a half step away from suggesting land mines at the border because trying to escape to the land of the free for a better life is illegal, and that apparently should mean death for you.
To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.
Like even if this thing with states acting up doesn’t work out the people they are speaking too are definitely gonna still be riled up.
It seems obvious to me that they are probably planning something for the upcoming election since they would try and make sure that another “election steal” wouldn’t happen again.
The only way that I see this not turning into a civil war is for government to somehow change the conversation drastically so that people aren’t asking these questions.
Because if people begin asking these questions then people planning to do stuff are gonna be even more anxious and try and do the thing earlier.
I’m not sure how they would change the conversation though because all the republican population is going to just ignore them and still think we are heading towards a civil war making it just more likely to happen.
Highly unlikely this is what the civil war would be like. It’s not a state v state thing necessarily although that might be a small part of it. In the first civil war, the south unified and its people largely supported the war, except their slaves. It’s unlikely something like that will happen again. It’s not impossible but unlikely.
What is much more likely is rural v city. Even in red states, cities are blue and will often vote for blue policies. Rural areas are where things get dicey. They’ve been largely left behind by the surge in industry and general expansion of the capitalist economy we currently have (they’ve had a lot of businesses (including grocery stores) close because more people are leaving, and their rural towns are frequently having their hospitals close leaving large swaths of areas where the nearest hospital is an hour away). As such, they’ve got a grudge against the cities. What’s likely to happen is rural counties and their local governments trying to cut off their food supply, starving the cities to win the battle. There’s tons more possibilities, but this one I think is the one that’s got the highest likelihood.
Another possibility that is scary, but is highly dependent on the party of the people in power, is the government using their power to actually strike the cities, like in Syria where Assad bombed and used chemical weapons on his own people. Syria is actually a pretty good example of what more modern civil wars are like, or can be like. Governments v rebels and militias, and cities v rural (although there’s much less rural land in Syria).
If you’re interested, the podcast It Could Happen Here has a great first season where they go over possible disasters including a civil war and a pandemic (it was actually made in 2019 so before covid). It’s really helpful and can teach a lot, especially for an outsider from across the pond. It also does a lot better job giving an explanation and actual sources.
Hope this helps since it didn’t seem like you were getting a real answer.
I had to stop listening to ICHH it gave me way too much anxiety and was just too stressed back when i listened in 2020. I’ve since taken up to instead listen to BTB and cool people who did cool stuff off the same network. Monsters that are usually dead and people who kick ass make me feel better.
Another thing the world ought to know is that the folks who are identified by “red” and “right” in America are in the minority.
Significantly so.
However our voting system uses geography / land as a modifier so while there are less of them they occupy a larger land mass and have an outsized vote strength because of that.
When total votes in a state can be split 45-55 but the delegates go 90-10 there is a problem
Another fun thing about that is that most folks who identify “red” or “right” actually aren’t paying enough attention to know that. Go ask them, they think people like them make up 70% or more of the country. If they do try to activate their little civil war they are going to find themselves very quickly surrounded by folks who do not like them at all, as their expected 200-million strong army ends up actually only being 1.5 million people spread out over 30,000+ square miles. Watching the realization dawn on them might actually even be fun if it weren’t a herald of Troubles for America.
The geographical separation of slave states by an actual border allowed the first Civil War to take place on a stage perfectly suited for traditional warfare. North/South division and the formal joining of the Confederacy by state governments kept it all straightforward. Point South and tell the generals “Go.”
The disunited states has gone post-truth. When two sides vying for power don’t agree on the nature of reality, ie immigration vs invasion, I don’t see how there can be any agreement or good faith negotiation. So how can the result be anything but war? Whoever invented the notion of alternative facts has a lot to answer for.
It’s not even a new civil war. The last civil war only ended technically. In reality it went cold and has still been being waged all this time. It turned from a war of the rural South against the industrialised north. To a war on the industrialized from the rural.
It’s not a totally unreasonable impression, but no, this will not turn into a second civil war. The Guard units of each state can be called up for federal duty. The National Guard is part of the US Department of Defense and thus ultimately answers to the DoD and the US president as commander in chief. The US military has multiple components, including regular services (eg the full time Army), reserve components (eg US Army Reserve) and National Guard components. The latter two are part-time military with one weekend per month training duty plus an annual training. Guards members and Reservists hold regular full time jobs.
The Guard units are deployable by the governors of their respective states, and so can be used in emergency situations like natural disasters. They have also been deployed against what have been perceived as riots that threaten lives and properties of the individual states.
However, they are subject to activation by order of the US president and they fall under the national command authority. Guard personnel take the same oath to the constitution as other military personnel, and cannot legally refuse federal activation. Guards personnel would be subject to courts martial and face potentially extreme penalties including being discharged from service under criminal conditions, being stripped of rank and benefits, and jail time in federal prison. This would be what we call a career limiting rule.
So, if push comes to shove, Biden can activate the NG and order them to stand down or to implement policies to maintain order. Thinking the NG units and in particular their commanders would disobey a presidential order because they just love their state governor and hate the president so much is getting into Turner Diaries levels of right wing apocalyptic fantasy.
The forming of the Confederacy wasn’t “legal” either.
We can handwave away concerns about mounting threats of violence by citing regulation and law, but none of that actually addresses the underlying issue that if these people want to start shit, they will find an avenue.
And let’s also not sit here, in 2024, and assume the institutions, norms, checks, and intended safeguards in our system will always work when they need to. We’ve seen far, far too many breakdowns and failures in our system over the last decade to believe otherwise.
That’s what frustrates me so much about the framing of the situation we’re in right now: most people - and the vast majority of major media organizations - are fully intent on presenting this as “normal”, but it’s very fucking clearly not. It’s assumed by so many that the rules will simply be followed… and then they turn around and cover Trump, whose whole bit is to not follow the rules because he doesn’t feel like it and wants to stay in power forever. It’s like being unconcerned about standing 3 feet away from an uncaged, unleashed siberian tiger because someone once told you at one point that it had been “trained”.
You have to understand that the US military today is a very different organization than it was in the 1860s. I know - I served and majored in military history for my first undergraduate degree, and studied the civil war in particular. I also come from a military family with a father, grandfather, and uncle who served as officers until retirement age.
Far right domestic terrorism is a real and developing threat coming from both former military personnel and from civilians. The election of a far right government that shreds the constitution is also a major threat to American democracy. But if the shit does come down, it’s not going to be because some Guardsmen decide that they’d follow DeSantis over Biden.
Military justice is no joke. Falling on the wrong side of it can end people. The military is also very integrated and has political as well as ethnic diversity. I’m not saying you couldn’t find an Army colonel who wouldn’t want to engage in an armed rebellion, but the country today is very, very different than it was mid-19th century, and so is the military.
Please do note that I do see the rise of American fascism as a real threat. It’s just not going to manifest because state Guard orgs decide to disobey orders.
Since you studied the Civil War, I got a book from my grandfather before he passed, Don’t Know Much about The Civil War, by Kenneth C. Davis, and was wondering if you’ve read of heard of this book and if it would be a good resource or not to read about the Civil War? Or if you can recommend another book or author that is great for learning about the Civil War, I’d appreciate any helpful insights as I’m curious to learn more about the Civil War, thank you.
Thank you for sharing this insight! It’s frustrating to hear everyone everywhere speculate about how easily the active military would turn, not considering…well, everything you wrote.
Yeah, ex-military of course is part of the brainwashed; nowhere else in the civilian world (outside of mercenary work) is warfare conducting knowledge of direct use.
Add that our Government has not always done even the bare minimum for our vets, and you got a recipe for the radicalization of the “disenfranchised warriors” (quotation because I don’t consider oathbreakers worthy of any title).
They’re gonna fall and listen to the honeyed words of Fascism in a different, harder way than your average civilian. That’s a call to something they amongst the rest of their group are genuinely and tangibly valuable for–until they aren’t.
Please do note that I do see the rise of American fascism as a real threat. It’s just not going to manifest because state Guard orgs decide to disobey orders.
Same, and I do still worry for the death tolls. That “theirs” (the civilians, who can be said to not know better) would be orders of magnitude higher than any on the military’s side doesn’t mean I’d like to see deaths on either side.
I hope you are right. I am sure there are some Guardsmen who see themselves as Texas soldiers over US, and I am concerned that the number is growing. After all, someone voted in these state politicians who are laying deadly traps intending to kill brown people.
Robert E Lee famously didn’t want to fight the North but didn’t think of himself as a traitor for doing so, because his loyalty was to his state first, to the US second. And that was a common mindset at the time.
I think it’s possible that there will be resentment, but those with rank would be risking everything for zero gain. It would be determined by the people who wear the birds and the stars, and although there have certainly been high ranking officers who have engaged in conduct we might consider treasonous, it’s simply not going to be a common enough occurrence.
A Handmaid’s Tale scenario, where the US goes down the path of a Christian theocracy, is a possibility that concerns me,
it’s simply not going to be a common enough occurrence.
Again, I hope so. I do not have strong confidence in this statement.
If you look across the entire US political spectrum and distribution of different beliefs, you are going to find very similar distribution within the military, if not edging slightly more right/Republican compared to the general US population. It takes one high-ish ranking officer engaging in rebellion for any like-minded lower ranking person to see that as permission and justification to do the same.
You also have to factor in the fact that the military today is not a bunch of guys with rifles. It is carrier battle groups, fighter jets, sophisticated artillery systems, and other platforms that require massive supply chains to deploy and maintain. That’s just what modern warfare is. US aircraft carriers alone are crewed by 5000+ people.
Raytheon, Northrop, and Lockheed are not going to side with Ohio against the US government. The question is about civil war, not about a single military unit going rogue until the members are arrested or killed. Keeping planes in the air and tanks running requires a lot more than Ohio can do. The Feds spend about a trillion dollars per year on the military, and some Confederate missile battery is going to be in trouble once they run low on things to shoot and when their vehicles start to break down.
I’m not a fan of the military industrial complex, to say the least, but it’s an absolutely necessary part of warfare today.
For sure. Any rebellious splinter faction would be low tech guerillas for a while. Now would they eventually open up to weapons from Russia or China? Interesting. I am sure Putin would jump on the opportunity. I think Xi would be a little more sensible and not openly cross the US.
The difficulty with that scenario is that the US is bound by two oceans and has a navy more powerful in some estimates than the rest of the navies in the world combined. Ukraine can be supplied because they’re contiguous with Western Europe. North Korea could be supplied by China, as could Vietnam. To supply the neo-confederates, Russia or China would have to cross an ocean and get past the US Navy, as well as the navies of other allied countries. Then they’d have to bring in the systems via either Mexico or Canada, both of which would be allied with the US.
I think you could imagine a scenario where they smuggle in small arms, but not artillery or other modern weapons systems.
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