If America Feels Like a Warzone, That’s Because…It Is

If You Ever Wondered What You’d Do When the Nazis Showed Up, You’re Doing It

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Take a hard look at the numbers above. Shocking, no? Yet somehow unsurprising. How do we make sense of what’s happening in, and to, America? The eruption of ultraviolence as an everyday affair? Two massacres happened in 24 hoursthis weekend. It’s Tuesday. They’re already being forgotten. That’s…profoundly abnormal. There’s something wrong with that, isn’t there?

So how do we make sense of all this?

Imagine I told you that there was a country where all the following was true. Massacres, sectarian ones, carried out by militants, were becoming commonplace. They had political motivations — to cleanse the promised, the homeland, of the impure, the invaders, the subhumans. The President had led a bloody coup against the seat of government, which had — through sheer chance, almost — failed, marching an army of said militants down the streets of the Capitol. His party was focused on annihilating people politically — taking away the rights of whole social groups, and goaded, encouraged, and incited militants to take matters into their own hands.

You’d say something like — at least if you were into social science — “that country’s in a state of low level civil conflict.” And then, reflecting, you might add: “and things are escalating, fast.”

In other words: if America feels like a warzone today, that’s because…it is.

Now. All this is hard for Americans to think about well. I don’t mean that in the way of an insult. It just is, for a whole lot of reasons. Americans are taught that America’s exceptional, that it’s above the rules of politics and economics and society, beyond history’s lessons. Furthermore, there’s the long shadow of the civil war — which makes people think that “civil conflict” means armies raging against one another. So seeing through those warped lenses, it’s become hard for Americans to really understand what’s happening to their society.

It is now in a low-level civil conflict. One which is escalating rapidly.

When figures like me say things like that — and we don’t like to, because, sigh, it provokes every kind of fanatic and lunatic under the sun — there’s another misinterpretation which springs to mind. “Sides can’t settle their differences peacefully, so they’ve take to violence instead.” That’s not really what civil conflicts are. Maybe in rare cases, sure — but what’s far more common is this.

One side revels in violence. It doesn’t “use” violence as some kind of means. Violence is the end in itself. Think about the kinds of fanatics that like to behead people on video — or maybe strangle them to death in subways. Am I making an unfair comparison? Umm... Normal people don’t do things like this. What happens in most civil conflicts is that one side is violent, and the other one isn’t.

This is what’s happening in America. It’s not “two sides unable to resolve their differences.” That’s a completely, almost pathetically, inaccurate description. The accurate one is: one side does not want democracy to exist. Not just as in “voting,” but as in a set of values, that people enact. It does not want equality. Truth. Justice. Freedom, right down to the basic ones of expression, association, speech, privacy, movement, intimacy. And it isn’t just “using” violence to make those politics real — those politics are fundamentally about replacing each and every one of those democratic values with violence.

Does that make sense? Let me put it even more clearly. The violence is the point. When societies begin to grow consumed by civil conflict, it’s usually because one side grows openly annihilationist. Think of genocides from Asia to Africa to Europe and beyond. That side begins to openly say that there are those among us who don’t deserve to exist.

And then its levels work in tandem. From the top, demagogues begin the job of political annihilation — they remove personhood from hated outgroups, one right at a time. Sorry, you can’t leave the state. Can’t read those books, or write them. Nope, you can’t associate with that kind of nonperson. This is dehumanization.

With a wink wink and a nudge nudge, the demagogues imply: it’d sure be a shame if someone just finished this job. This job of annihilation. Sure would be a shame if someone just got down to business and did the dirty work once and for all. From the bottom-up, militants hear the message. They organize themselves into paramilitaries — the Army of the Pure, the Soldiers of Faith, the Sons of Truth — and…

Then the violence begins.

Think about what’s happened in America over the last few years. Doesn’t that describe it almost perfectly? And yet what I’m detailing for you is a textbook way that societies collapse.

I talk about “social collapse” a lot. Some people think I mean it as some kind of sci-fi hyperbole. I don’t. I mean it in a technical, formal way. Economic collapse: America’s once-vaunted middle class doesn’t really exist anymore. Downward mobility’s now the norm. Etcetera. There are many facets of social collapse, many forms of it. The one we’re discussing here? It’s social collapse from the democratic politics of peace…to civil conflict.

In that way, we aren’t overusing the term collapse. We’re talking about it almost literally. A democracy implodes into a thing of conflict, brutality. How does that happen?

Let’s go back to the top-down and bottom-up groups working in tandem. The demagogues preach hate. Those subhumans mustn’t exist! They’re corrupting us! They’re taking our jobs, women, families, land! We’ve got to annihilate them politically!! And then hate becomes violence.

Isn’t that what’s happened in America over the last few years? Think about how much hate is now normalized in America. It’s perfectly normal for Members of Congress — the fanatical ones — to get up there and send death threats to their colleagues. They walk it back as a joke. But the lunatics have gotten the message. Hate has been legitimized by the GOP — and I don’t just mean that normatively, I mean it politically: think of how so many bills have been filed and passed against everyone from women to the LGBTQ to kids to teachers that it can only be described as a blitzkrieg.

This is a process of sociopolitical collapse. Norms shatter — hey, it’s not OK to just…hate people. To smear them as groomers and pedophiles and child molesters and so forth. Then politics shatters, too, and becomes consumed by hate, and legislation is purely about that.

Now think of the GOP. It has no agenda — none — whatsoever for America. Beyond hate. No economic plan. No plan for insfrastructure. Climate change? LOL. Nothing to resuscitate the middle class. Nothing on inflation, stagnation, falling real incomes. It offers nothing. Nothing but hate.

That’s not a jeremiad — a moral condemnation. It’s an observation, one which should chill you. How do societies plunge into civil conflict? When do you know a society’s in a civil conflict? When one side offers nothing — nothing — but hate. Over and over again. In more and more vitriolic, open, abusive, crazy forms, every single day.