by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I keep getting a lot of pings on this Website from people living in the Usual Suspects of the “Lost Cause” — South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas to name a few. They seem really excited about my dystopian hellscape scenarios about a Second American Civil War.
But I suspect a lot of the interest in such a second American Civil War comes from the recent soft coup by 17 states at SCOTUS. I don’t think people really appricate how ingrained the concept of “the South shall rise again” is in the lives of the average Southerner. So, for a lot of good old boys, even the hint of a new CSA is just too much for their poor old minds to comprehend.
With that in mind, let’s think about how we get from where we are to where we would need to be for an actual civil war to happen.
One reason why I think that this is sort of the end of the beginning of a long-term drive towards a civil war is there just isn’t any armed force big enough to challenge the U.S. Military. The Proud Boys are a small, angry disorganized group of assholes. They might blow shit up or murder someone in cold blood, but they aren’t even really even a militia. So, Cooter in Mobile can lust after Yankee blood all he wants to, but as of right now, such bloodlust is extremely misguided.
It would make a lot more sense for Red States to drive Blue States out of the Union, THEN use the U.S. Military on THEM rather than Red States leave and have the U.S. Military crush them. That’s a prime example of what a ding-dong Trump is — if he was anywhere near the political genus that Maggie Haberman would have us believe, Trump would have done a Reichstag Fire falseflag around Election, taken “total control” driven Blue States to revolt then crushed them via the Insurrection Act.
As it stands, he’s pretty much just ranted on Twitter. In other words — he’s done jackshit. It’s truly ironic it’s specifically because Trump, as a person, is so bad at his job as an autocrat that the United States may have dodged an actual fighting civil war because Trump just can’t get his act together.
So, in a sense, all the good old boy boners about a civil war NOW makes no sense. But the passions that Trump’s soft coup attempt has unleashed gives a lot Neo-Confederates a lot of expectations about what might happen — that aren’t based in reality. They FEEL like a new civil war is about to happen, but only in the abstract. It makes them feel good to think, in the abstract, that they can leave the Union and murder as many liberals as possible in the process.
The Good Old Boys’ best bet right now for what they want sooner rather than later would be Trump finally losing his fucking mind and starting to rant on Twitter about how Red States MUST leave the Union immediately. Or, put another way, Trump would have to go transactional on Twitter in some way.
For the time being, however, it seems that Trump may cause a lot of mischief on his way out, but unless we have a “political 9/11” in the next few weeks, it’s going to be closer to 2024-2025 before the conditions are right for a Second Civil War.
