Chapter 11: California Uber Alles vs. Back-to-Back Civil War Champs

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11

All war is a fog. The best-laid battle plans fall apart instantly upon first contact with the enemy, and it is then barely-controlled chaos, with the day usually belonging to the side that can control the chaos best. An old meme compares statements about American grand military strategy from a Red Army general, a Wehrmacht field marshal, and an American general. Complains the Russian: "The Americans do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligations to follow their doctrine." Concurs the German: "The American Army practices chaos on a daily basis." The American boldly replies, "If we don't know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions!" This is especially going to be the nature of America's next civil war, rendering the best guesses tentative at best.

Nonetheless, certain basic outlines and contours of the coming conflict can already be predicted given current material conditions. I can't predict every battlefield, tell you the identity of the next General Sherman or Colonel Chamberlain. But I can tell you what class analysis says about what different political actors will do in response to the election of the next Marxist-Lincolnist President.

The counter-revolution will be like that old Dead Kennedys chestnut, "California Uber Alles." In the song, California's once and future governor Jerry Brown boasts about combining middle class hippie nonsense with middle class fascism. It will be rotten and decaying money telling you what moral purity is, how morally pure it is, and how morally pure you too must be, and what it will do to the "problematics" who can't and won't comply. The counter-revolution will be televised, and right back after these commercials. The counter-revolution will be Californians setting their forests on fire with gender reveal parties and polluting your air for months on end, but voting to put catalytic converters in their cars because they're just better people than you. The counter-revolution will be housing as a right for chickens, but not humans. The counter-revolution will be white liberals getting rich selling you Snoop Dogg's lifestyle while black kids go to jail for that same lifestyle.

The counter-revolution of the rich will not especially look like the Confederacy on the surface, indeed will be implacably opposed on the surface, but will perfectly mirror its ideological superstructure. I doubt most Southern states will have much to do with it. I doubt there will be state constitutional conventions to consider the matter of secession, as those are clearly illegal as a matter of settled law ever since the fall of the Confederacy. Instead, I suspect that, given the increasingly contentious nature of American elections, the Democrat candidate will lose but claim victory, as Trump did on his way out the door. Perhaps the Democrat will have won again in the legally meaningless popular vote, but have lost in the legally determinative electoral college. Maybe there will be allegations of impropriety; they don't have to be real to be politically potent.

Enough "thinkpieces" in the New York Times and CIA Post will crop up like weeds after the rain, explaining that whatever the truth of the muddled matter, the Democrat deserves to be President. In the supercharged atmosphere of a pending civil war, the various middle class extremist political formations of left and right will see the election of the Democrat as a life-and-death issue against the next Marxist-Lincolnist President, and formulate an intra-class truce on the basis of identity politics and ethnostates. Every revisionist and anarchist group panicked into arming itself for the Democrat will be able to justify it on some nebulous promise of Native, Chicano, and/or "New Afrikan" sovereignty, and every fascist group will be able to justify it on the basis of getting to put the "No Blacks Allowed" signs back up back home. The corporations will tell them anything and likely be planning to pit them against each other after the war, but any suggestion of that out loud will be "problematic" somehow.

It's important to note that these chickenshits will not delegitimize the incoming Republican President directly because of their anti-imperialist platform. The bulk of the Confederacy's defenders among the European aristocracy pretended that, if the war were about slavery, of course they'd support the Union. But as it was really about states' rights, and "Southern nationhood," they were bound as good liberals to support it. Poking these liberal fake news peddlers in the eye was the main motivation Lincoln had to send John Adams' grandson to the International Workingmen's Association in London to give Karl Marx a reply upon his reelection, as he deliberately ignored their liberal shitrags.

Instead, fake liberal reasons of a piece with "states' rights" will be given, but as our world is more liberal and less nazbol than Lincoln's, these fake liberal reasons will be painfully woke instead of painfully racist. Something "problematic" will be discovered in the Republican's record. They will pretend they support every effort in theory to end American imperialism, but it's just not practical at this time because we have to defend Israel from what's left of Palestine, because ISIS will take over the Middle East if we don't, because the dumb brown poors won't know how to freedom correctly if we leave, literally whatever Dubya-tier bullshit they can think up. And it may even be literally Dubya-tier bullshit too, given that just about every Dubya administration official still working is now a Democrat operative. Something of a piece with "but if we leave Afghanistan, the Taliban will oppress the women there! Anti-imperialists are all a bunch of problematic women haters!" is likely in our futures.

And I'm calling it now, it will fool plenty of anarchists, revisionists, and other middle class socialists on the synthetic left into turning against us. They aren't really comrades, so their sudden but inevitable betrayal shouldn't come as a shock, but a lot of people currently labor under the misunderstanding that they are. But the great middle classening of the Democrat Party fleeing Trump to stop Bernie will only intensify. The middle class socialists are already rejoining them because Biden chose Crime Dem McGrift as his VP; the middle class fascists that voted for Dubya have already signed up through the blasphemously-named Lincoln Project; the alt-right is beginning its migration to the Dems with Richard Spencer ridin' with Biden. Tagging along with Spencer after they've had an election or two to think about it will be Patriot Front, Atomwaffen SS, the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys, and other openly fascist formations that the liberals will turn a blind eye to as if they were the Right Sector in Ukraine.

I can predict the ideological lines by which revisionists and Richard Spencer will all join hands. It will look a bit like when Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam held a joint event with the American Nazi Party (Vice, "When Malcolm X Met the Nazis," April 15, 2015, ). Doing it to get good press for both organizations, they mutually charmed one another with identity politics. You just keep your black supremacy over there, and we'll keep our white supremacy over here, and we'll all get ethnostates like it's Oprah and get along. It's hilarious spin that will collapse if ever they manage to actually win the civil war (protip: they won't). It will be a major source of friction as the liberal rich have to pull off the four-dimensional chess of telling several different ethnicities at once that they will get to be on top of the new capitalist dispensation without the others getting suspicious.

This is the form it must take because the middle class socialist left has the only rationale for overthrowing the American government that is remotely acceptable in polite society: the Settlers "People's Republic of Turtle Island" lines. Fascism and liberalism will hijack this rationale and use it to defend Wall Street, hiding capitalism behind the identity politics of oppressed nationalities.

The only whites to fall for it en masse will be the alt-right and the suburbs, offered their ethnostates and their continued employment, respectively. The white workers, paradoxically, will be the most immune from this identity politics because conservative constitutionalist ideology rejects it. Black and Hispanic workers, who voted more for Trump the second time than the first, will likewise also be immune to this identity politics. It will mostly appeal to the middle class.

Continue reading Part II