Saw this thread, and it really hit a chord with me, as these similar fears tend to constantly weigh on me (for various reasons- being trans, ethnic Chinese, commie, etc).
I think we all (leftists, but also just most minorities) know, shit is bad and will get worse, it’s just a question of how bad it will get. People mention it offhand without usually going further into the details, and similarly in other spaces - non-leftist ones as well, for instance Asian diasporic and LGBT spaces in my experience, these fears come up, but ultimately we keep the bulk of our concerns to ourselves. What are our expectations here, for the west? Not just for the US, but the Anglosphere and Europe?
The Syrian civil war is a really good example I think, because in a US civil war you will still have an existing rump government like you had with Assad and areas that are superficially peaceful and unaffected, meanwhile religious fundamentalists and all sorts of other militias will be duking it out with the government and each other in the disputed areas. And it might all ulitmately settle to an uneasy truce with the country nominally the same state, but chunks of it not controlled or occupied by foreign troops to protect strategic assets.
Is it too much to hope that the result could effectively be a great purging of reactionary settler elements (the bulk of these fundies and militias)? Fingers crossed… though I suspect it’ll more likely/definitely be those elements being embraced lovingly by the lib state just as they always are when shit comes down to it.
One could hope that might happen. But I imagine if faced between bombing a Christian Dominionist militia that executes non-whites and LGBT people and any BIPOC/queer friendly civil defence organisation that springs up to prevent that, the rump government would probably choose the latter.
Yeah that is exactly what I think will happen here. We’re perfectly set up for it.
Many areas already have little government presence outside of the local sheriffs department. There are heavily armed ultra religious freaks everywhere, a group that heavily overlaps either the aforementioned sheriffs.
Add onto that our crumbling infrastructure. A few attacks on some important pieces of infrastructure and it’s not hard to imagine the federal government struggling to maintain control.
It’ll be lots of terrorist attacks and militias fighting each other and the remaining state trading control of territory.
Robert Fedvans has only done one thing I really liked, and it’s the original 10 episode series of “It Could Happen Here,” before he made it a long running more news-y show.