Not exactly. But it’s in the ballpark.
I mentioned the other day that this militarization of big blue cities has the distinct whiff of civil war. The news that Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina are sending the National Guard to DC really brings home the point.
Joan Walsh has written a good piece about this for The Nation that’s worth reading. An excerpt:
I think a lot about writer Jeff Sharlet’s conception of a “slow civil war” unraveling the United States, especially since the January 6 insurrection. On Bluesky he wrote: “I’m gonna say armed troops from red states descending on a blue city is just a few inches—or maybe one exchange of gunfire—short of a civil war’s opening stages.”
Anjali Dayal, an international politics professor at Fordham University, took issue with Sharlet’s post—at least the way she read it: “I respect Jeff’s work but we should be careful about what we forecast & how inevitable we make it seem. We are not close to a civil war, but I worry we are perilously close to a mass casualty event because of the undisciplined nature of irregular security forces & an extremely armed civil society.”
In an e-mail to me, Sharlet made clear that he essentially agrees with Dayal. Civil war is not “an inevitability,” he said, adding, “I agree that ‘mass casualty event’ is the next big risk, and that the ‘grey and the blue’ is not a risk, but I’d argue that the simmer that we see, our years of lead, are a 21st century American slow civil war.”
It’s clear: The addition of 1,000 red-state National Guard troops to the 800 already in DC, all untrained in urban policing, raises the odds of a “mass casualty event,” at minimum. We used to say people who described Trumpism as “fascism” were exaggerating, though now even mainstream media regularly uses the F-word. Right now, we should be wary of talking blithely about “civil war.” But these moves on the capital by Trump and his red-state cronies seem like an acceleration of danger to democracy, meant to familiarize Americans with the sight of federal forces patrolling blue American cities, as Trump has already said is coming.
Read the whole thing. The militarization of cities that happen to be led by the political enemies of the president is a unique circumstance and I can’t predict how this might unfold. But it is certainly an escalation of the “partisan polarization” we’ve been experiencing (to say the least.) And coming from the team that brought us January 6th I think we should be seeing a bit more alarm from everyone than we are.
As Brian Beutler noted (in my earlier post) yes, this is all surreal and it’s hard to wrap our minds around it but the truth is that everyone who goes through some kind of authoritarian takeover feels that way. We need to stay awake and aware to what’s happening.
I try not to rely too much on the fact that these people are all dumb as posts but it is one of the true advantages we have. That’s no guarantee, of course — just because they’re stupid it doesn’t mean they aren’t ruthless and aggressive. But, come on. They worship a narcissistic moron who is barely hanging on to any cognitive abilities. That has to count for something.