Trump recently double-downed on the words of award-winner Pastor Robert Jeffress that any potential electoral defeat would be tantamount to a coup, and would lead to civil war. People are performatively upset, but everyone kind of knows nothing will come of it. Nothing ever really happens anymore. Trump is a barely sentient screed machine and we just live in a period where no one takes anything the President says seriously, merely humoring his word diarrhea and poster’s brain until all this bullshit can be over.
Civil war talk, at this point, is armchair revolutionary masturbation. Every person genuinely concerned about a civil war in America is either deluded, extremely online or just flatout cosplaying. We’re living in a period of simulation, where war is something we watch happen, not participate in. Death is abstract, a mass shooting here, a civilian massacre there. Troops are always coming home from some faraway conflict, or they go on for so long, babies born in the first year can now join in.
Dumbasses want a civil war to happen because they think it’ll happen on TV and not to them. Because they think it’ll be fun, or like a Hunger Games movie where conventionally attractive heroes battle cartoonishly evil super-dictators. Take a hard look at Syria or the twenty years of Africa and say civil war is totes amazeballs.
Conflicts like civil wars break out in periods of enormous stress or social collapse, not hand-wringing op-eds about the Joker movie or bathroom sickos. America has a terminal case of blowing literally everything out of proportion, everything needs an absolute response. Our online brains need to exaggerate and amplify all events to sustain the holy engagement algorithm, because what else do we fucking have?
All the conditions are present for a civil war in America, according to very credible sources: vapes getting banned, Ellen chilling with George W Bush, Post Malone Crocs. This is an affluent (enough) society with far too many comfortable moderates or disengaged observers. I say “affluent enough”. There is enormous poverty and suffering in America, but not at the scale that the system can’t either ignore it or mitigate it with mindless entertainment or myths about social mobility. Problems in America are invisible, mainly because most experience life through a rose-colored media lens where hardship happens to someone else, but the hardship is always mitigated through random viral fame or the benevolence of the wealthy.
Another stock market crash is long overdue. The combination of imploding Silicon Valley VC funding, climate crisis, and student debt is a shaky building waiting to fall. We are all on borrowed time. Combine this with something like an oil crisis or viral outbreak and we’ve got the perfect storm for America to simply fall apart. With Trump’s incredible incompetence and a bureaucracy unwilling to genuinely deny him his stupid impulses, the worst case scenario is another big recession, not total economic collapse. Millions would lose work, but capitalism would quickly work to monetize the rot, and sweep any structural reforms under the rug. The suffering would just be absorbed into the mass of internalized humiliation Americans have endured for decades.
Too much food, electricity still runs, Marvel movies are still coming out. All the creature comforts enjoyed by neoliberal capitalism at the expense of everyone else is keeping a very tight lid on anything truly radical. Since the health of a society is weirdly determined by how many corporate mascots are on shelves, things are simply too good for enough people who have their hands on the levers of power. It’s not gonna happen, so put your anime-skin Trump 2020 muskets away, folks.
Liberal industrial democracies simply do not crumble like that without extreme external disruption, such as a CIA coup in an already fragile society. America is only fragile psychologically, and only in the working class who enjoy no political power whatsoever. The managerial dinner party crowd are firmly in control, and Trump is a gateway to massive tax cuts, not an existential threat. If anyone says “BUT WHAT ABOUT RUSSIA IN 2016”, immediately hoist their underwear over their head and shove them in a locker. Fucking Facebook ads aimed at boomers are not what topples societies, it only breaks the brains of people too invested in media as politics when their imaginary supremacy of liberalism is disrupted.
But let’s say it did. Let’s pretend all the scenarios I laid out came to pass, and American society legitimately was on the brink.
If America did have a civil war, it would be the *stupidest* possible version of it. That is all we can hope for now: the most ridiculous and ineffective versions of things, with everyone pretending the system works just fine. The revolutionaries are soggy middle-aged dentists in tri-corner hats complaining about the deficit, or pale, emaciated shut-ins jacking off onto figurines. The simulacrum of conflict would be enough.
The battle lines would be along banal cultural resentment: lawn dads with $1500 of tacticool garbage versus hedge fund Democrats in gated communities. Everyone would pose with their flags and guns on social media, hashtag, let’s get the hearts going in the livestream, then go right the fuck back inside to watch TV. It would be a war of influencers and social media posturing. The Instagram #CivilWar.
Radicalized white dudes, hearing the magic Trump words, would stroll into shopping malls, schools, Coolio concerts and mow down random people every week. The stochastic guerilla fighter, whose only enemy is anyone in their sights. That’s the future of an American Second Civil War: a stone-faced nihilist dressed wearing clown paint robotically emptying magazines into living flesh.
There would be insurgencies across the board: #StillWithHer terrorists bombing Panera Breads, the DSA ShitPoster’s Brigade under Chairman Sanders, the Pepe SS dressed up like Nazi frogs. The US military would turn into an Uber-service, protecting any fancy lad using an app that loses $17 billion per day. Congress would just be an empty building, overrun by rabid raccoons and alligators. The White House would be a combo hotel, casino, and strip club. The dollar would be printed in big rolls like toilet paper. Everyone would be streaming all of the time.
Nothing would be solved, thousands would starve, and there’d be game shows about who gets to have an hour of electricity or annilingus from their fav e-girl or e-boy. The Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard would become a fortress, Wall Street the new capital of America 2. Everyone would claim to be “rebels”.
Whatever I come up with, the reality would be infinitely stupider than that. It wouldn’t even be as faux-serious as Captain America: Civil War. Definitely as overly long with an incomprehensible plot and paper-thin characters. The conflict would be Civil War 2, an exhausting, tedious reboot in our endless cycle of cultural recurrence.
Snooty academics will collect our social media posts, presenting them like the treasured historical documents they are:
My Dearest Waifu,
Honking off has been much harder since we parted. My regiment is largely no-fap and I am consistently derided for my acts of self love. Your electronic embrace emojis over the livestream has sustained me on these lonely nights at my post.
I miss your down-stuffed fluff next to mine, the touch of your fabric lips, and those giant purple eyes that say “You’re the best gamer”. Someday, the God Emperor Daddy will declare victory, such a huge victory, amazing, no one’s talking about this, and I may return to your pillowy arms and bangin’ fat tiddies. We shall binge the newest season of Richard and Mortimer, together.
And shall I not return, cry not. Or cry a lot, your face is a static 2D image. Sell my bitcoin rig, the one with the flame spoiler, to @FartingAtheist for a bottle of Master Brain pills. If I fall, bury me in my favorite piss bottle to own the libs.
Remember, I shall always cum-encrust you first… in my heart.
Love Always,
xXxD@rthG0kuxXx
[USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST]
[REASON: no weebs gtfo this board]
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.