Civil War II is over (if you want it)

I think everyone missed what happened.

Throughout 2020, there was a general understanding that the US was headed for some sort of constitutional crisis. It has been building for years, especially since 2015, and it was ready to pop.

Half the nation refused to accept the 2016 Presidential election result, believing it was rigged by the Russians or something like that.

The ruling class refused to accept Trump and spent four years undermining him in any way they could.

This culminated in the run-up to the 2020 election, where Big Pharma paused vaccine testing in case it gave Trump an advantage, health authorities demanded lockdowns to destroy the Trump economy, various elite factions aided and defended Antifa/BLM riots to make Trump look bad and Big Tech covered up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by censoring anyone who mentioned it, including myself.

All year, the world expected things to come to a head, and they did.

On January 6th, 2021, Trump and some of his supporters flirted with the idea of taking action. In the end Trump backed down like he always does and his less restrained supporters did little more than wander around the Capitol unarmed and in fancy dress, waving flags and stealing a couple of lecterns which they abandoned when they found them too heavy to carry far. I think a laptop also got pinched and some windows were broken.

One protester was shot dead by a trigger-happy guard who’d been in trouble before and the rest were locked up for a year or so without trial.

Anyone questioning these events anywhere too prominent gets silenced. Here is safe.

Since then, there’s been much trembling about when things might kick off. Would vaxx mandates be the fuse? Would the Afghanistan pullout cause the US authorities to finally lose all respect? Would inflation be the straw on the camel’s back? Surely, we all agreed, Civil War II was just around the corner.

Perhaps not.

Having thought it over, it’s more likely that January 6th was the big kick-off. As some predicted, it was a bit of a fizzer. How much did you expect from Boomercons? Respectfully, fighting is a young man’s game. If they were any rougher, they’d have done a hip. And look at the geriatric pollies and hysterical girl-pollies shitting their pants as they ran away with bags over their heads. 1970s union hard-case Democrats would have hung around eagerly to crack a few skulls.

The reason things have petered out is that the two sides have hobbled to a stalemate.

As Malcolm Kyeyune points out, Team Blue cannot do any more than they have already done. They threw everything at 2020. Corporations, media, tech platforms, NGOs and government authorities worked in lockstep to achieve the best possible result. And they got it: they were declared winners of the election.

However, they only control Blue areas. They can keep Team Red out of the presidency from now on but they cannot inflict their mask or vaxx mandates (or whatever comes next) on unwilling states and regions. Even if on the books, these edicts will not be enforced.

Team Red may never regain control of the centre again, but they maintain their dominance of the periphery plus some nuisance-level representation in the Imperial Capital via mid-term elections, which Americans tell me are harder to rig.

Neither team accepts the legitimacy of lost presidential elections anymore but neither of them can do anything about it.

Team Blue has gained about as much power as it can. If it took a step further – say, using force against Florida or Texas – the outcome would likely be catastrophic. They have discovered the line and probably won’t cross it.

If Team Red attempts to reassert its values outside its regions of influence, the result will likely be the same.

Thus, stalemate.

No one’s satisfied but no one can make the whole country how they’d like it to be.

As for the rest of the Empire, it makes little difference. What happens in Australia or Japan doesn’t matter.

So there you have it: the constitutional crisis we all feared has come and gone with minimal loss of life. The result is a new America: less free, less democratic, less liberal. It is less purely capitalist, with big business now closely aligned to the regime as demonstrated with their DIY sanctions against Russia without being asked.

The new America is a surveillance state, largely to ensure that Team Red stays in its lane. Common criminals are left unbothered.

The Constitution, long disrespected, now hangs by the Supreme Court’s toilet as they weigh up anything but the law in making their judgements.

There’s still no name for this new America. It needs one because the change that took place is as great as that which followed Civil War I.

Some are using the term Custodial State or Global American Empire (GAE). Certainly it is no longer your grandpa’s Liberal Democracy.

Others say Chimerica.

This is not the first time Chinese thought has had a big impact on American development, but last time around it was much more positive.

How apt that the Chinese and American ruling classes have grown less distinguishable even as their supposed rivalry heats up. The CCP needed American-style capitalism to compete materially while US elites needed Chinese techno-fascism in order to crush dissent.

What, now, could set things off in either country? The situation seems settled. We may remain in this holding pattern for decades until some demographic, technological or economic factor pushes events towards whatever comes next. That’s further ahead than I can see.