How Will America Finish Collapsing?
Image Credit: Freedom in the World
Only One Side Has the Guns, a Plot to Overthrow Democracy, and a Hardening Commitment to Violence
by umair haque
There’s a new commenter about American collapse. A CIA advisor named Barbara Walter. Her thesis goes something like this. Societies can decay from democracy into “anocracy,” meaning a failed democracy that has broken down along lines of often long-standing, old ethnic divisions. That is a precursor for civil war — like it was in, say, the Balkans. Armed factions contest power, and the most brutal one wins.
I think that Ms Walter is performing a valuable service, by drawing attention to the obvious issue of American collapse. Simply educating Americans about different ways that societies implode is incredibly necessary right about now. I also think, though, that her thesis isn’t quite correct — at least in America’s case.
There’s a pretty simple reason for that. Only one side has guns, and wants to use them. In case you think I exaggerate, let me give you an example. Not far from where I am right about now, a little affluent liberal town just outside DC is another one — Luray, Virginia. Now, Virginia’s become something of a metaphor for American collapse. It was neither Red nor Blue for quite some time — and recently, riding a wave of Big Lies, Virginia’s white population, driven into a hysteria of fear and rage, elected mini-Trump Glenn Youngkin.
He had no platform whatsoever. He simply rode to power by terrifying Virginians — they’re coming for your kids! They’re coming for your land! I alone can protect you! Who’s they, by the way? It’s nobody, in fact — Youngkin invented a series of scapegoats, with a little help from “advisors.” Scapegoats like “critical race theory,” which isn’t taught in Virginia’s schools and never has been.
It was an easy target because there were school boards in Virginia that took wokeness too far, but I won’t get into that here. So Virginia was left in the position that much of America is: the white conservative population was driven into a frenzy of rage and fear, which is an old theme in American history, the moral panic. In this case, the enemies were “wokeness” and “socialism” and all the rest of it. In Florida, for example, a bill’s being raised that makes making white people feel “discomfort” by teaching basic facts about American history like, yes, there really were slaves…just teaching that…illegal. LOL.
Now. Let’s come back to Luray, Virginia. Virginians might have been whipped into a frenzy of fear and rage. But even that wasn’t enough to make them totally lose their minds. The first thing Youngkin did on his first day in office was to repeal mask mandates in schools — and school districts, full of crying, scared parents, revolted. They refused to do it, and instead have challenged it in court. The scaremongering only works so much. People still care about their kids.
Well, at least some of them. Because you might have seen the video I’m about to discuss. A mom came to a school board meeting — not to discuss the issue of mask wearing for kids in any sane and thoughtful way. In the middle of the meeting, driven into the very frenzy of rage and fear that I’ve been discussing, she ranted that she’d show up with guns “locked and loaded” if they tried to make her kids wear masks.
Would you have ever guessed from just looking at this woman? She looks like a soccer mom. And yet there she is, threatening to shoot up a school.
Sure, she walked back those comments after being shamed by like a million people on Twitter. But it’s not exactly the kind of thing you casually say. “Hey, I’m going to shoot up the school!” Can you imagine what would happen if I — a brown dude who wears leather jackets — said that? I’d be in Guantanamo Bay, and you’d never hear from me again, because I’d be choking on waterboarding. Still, charges were brought against her, as well they should have been.
Do you see my point yet?