I wrote here about the possibility that the United States might come apart, not in another violent civil war but in a Brexit-like separation of the blue states from the red states. Five years ago I would not have entertained such a possibility. Today it seems like a viable alternative, and polls suggest that a lot of Americans are open to the possibility.
Over the last few days, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines have canceled more than 2,000 flights, which the Biden administration attributes to an otherwise-unobserved weather catastrophe across the Western states. Meanwhile, hundreds of container ships are floating in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, waiting to be unloaded as our supply infrastructure has broken down. Pete Buttigieg, allegedly our Secretary of Transportation, has during this time been on maternity paternity leave, or otherwise AWOL.
We may be seeing here the first cracks in the facade. Can the elites who think they rule America really dictate what happens? This Twitter thread by Anglo Respecter 40K–I am sure many people know who (s)he is, but I don’t–makes some provocative points. (Via The American Conservative.):
First off: a repeat of the first civil war is just something you can cross off the list. The US army – or whatever elements of it end up on different sides of some political divide – can't actually fight a war under those conditions. Why? Because US infrastructure.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
Are the power stations guarded? No, and it is impossible to guard them, because the power grid is a system of nodes where the system fails if a fairly small number of nodes fail simultaneously. And there are many, many nodes.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
You can't have a war on US soil without simply ruining the lines of supply and the physical infrastructure necessary to keep the current US war machine going. So an alliance of southern states just sending armored divisions to fight in Virginia is not going to happen.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
At that point, if the recalcitrant politicians have popular mandates to do what they do (and they almost certainly will, given current levels of polarization), any attempt at removing them by force is likely to trigger, over time, something similar to the Troubles.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
Cities often have multiple points of weakness where one failure reinforces other failures. Taking New York City's water supply is a matter of sabotaging a few pipes that run for hundreds of miles through rural country. Can you guard the entire length of those pipes? Lol, no.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
To underline just how much the US requires *consent* from the governed just to keep from falling apart, you only have to look at these various vaccine mandate strikes. Whoops, suddenly pilots refuse to work, and now nobody in the southwest gets to fly!
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
Note what the dems have done: they've said "we can just fire you chuds". Once their bluff was called, and they were asked to fire all the chuds, there weren't enough non-chuds left to staff a bunch of critical functions. Whoops! Do they have a plan B? No! There *is* no plan B!
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
In the near term, you can expect to see many more things similar to this vaccine mandate backlash. Don't focus on the vaccine itself here, keep your eye on the important thing: the US elite's power of *enforcing a writ* is actually fairly weak! That's the real story here.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
Finally, we have to address the elephant in the room: online rightwing radicals' belief in the total worthlessness, uselessness, and laziness of the american people. A "real" people would fight, these radicals claim, but the american is just too fat and too stupid to ever act.
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
There is much more at the link, most of which I don’t agree with. Again, this person’s perspective is neither conventionally right nor left, although definitely not my own. But I think the basic point made above is important: the elites’ control over the press, the academy, the entertainment industry, the bureaucracy, big business, etc., gives them much less power than they think. Because, at the end of the day, ordinary Americans will decide what happens in the real, physical world. I don’t think this will lead to another civil war, but if it did, the winner likely would not be the party that controls Twitter and Facebook.
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