John Wilder's New Civil War Weather Report

Each month, John at the Wilder, Wealthy & Wise blog releases a Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. His most recent dropped yesterday morning, so be sure to check it out. While he is not predicting that a Civil War will necessarily break out immediately, he believes that it is inevitable at this point because of:

1. Popular immiseration--i.e., economic impoverishment. John uses the specific example of how jobs that used to pay living wages no longer do so; and, in fact, such a lifestyle would now require two incomes and probably a college degree.
2. Lower birth rates, with his pointing out that when the age of marriage exceeds 28, a civil war is inevitable ... and the U.S. is at 30. I would note that marriage age is often tied to how long it takes for young people to become financially stable.
   
3. Too many elites. Not just college graduates, but also too many billionaires jockeying for power.
4. Widespread belief that the system is fraudulent. 
5. A failing economy.
6. Unpopular wars.
7. That there have been two attempts on Trump's life, illustrating how unstable is society. 

Much of the foregoing points come from Peter Turchin's historical analysis, summarized in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.

    The threat of civil war largely arises from dissatisfaction and unmet expectations. The masses (for lack of a better terms) are dissatisfied with their lives and feel hopeless and helpless; a large number of elites (or putative elites) are dissatisfied because there aren't enough positions of power for them all. Moreover, and I think this is a key point, as a country gets closer to civil war it becomes apparent that the elites do not care about the masses even as far as trying to ameliorate their immiseration. Rather, their power relies on perpetuating that immiseration on one hand, while promising a "remedy" on the other.

    For instance, Turchin points out in his book how mass immigration is often encouraged by the elites because it drives down wages, allowing the elites to take a larger share of the revenue generated by a business or industry. This occurred in the late 19th and early 20th Century and was the cause of the labor violence of that period. It was only in the face of political violence that the elites finally instituted reforms. But it should be noted that there were many decades between the beginning of the political violence (in the late 1800s) and when the elites started to institute reforms (primarily the 1920s and '30s).

    We have seen wage stagnation among men since the 1970s because of two surges in the size of the workforce. The first was the large scale entry of women into the workforce in the 1970s and early '80s. The second was the influx of immigrants thereafter, once the number of women entering the workforce had stabilized. The lack of political violence this time around can, I think, be explained by the ready available of escapism (e.g., entertainment), various forms of welfare to prevent widespread starvation, and the growing pervasiveness of the police state.

    At the same time as the expansion of the work force, there was an explosion in the number of putative elites graduating from college. Where to put them? Most of them went into the managerial/bureaucratic class. 

 VIDEO: "Is Bureaucracy Killing Civilization?"
Whatifalthist (51 min.)

     It is the bureaucracy that hems us in on all sides making any resolution short of a civil war nigh impossible. The recent raid of a couple's home to seize and kill their pet squirrel, P’nut, and a raccoon named Fred, is just one example of the smothering nature of the modern bureaucratic state. Hannah Arendt used the term "banality of evil" to refer to the bureaucratic nature of the Holocaust, but we have reached that point in the United States. 

    In writing about the incident involving P'nut, Vox Day commented that "If they’ll murder a harmless squirrel for no reason, do you really think they won’t kill you and your family if given even half the chance?" He later added, "And, of course, the just-following-procedure police officer, a literal Karen named Karen Pryzklek, ordered a raccoon put down due to an obviously unfounded suspicion that a squirrel defending itself might, in theory, have rabies, would just as readily follow an order from her superiors to napalm an entire neighborhood."

    But whether bureaucrats in a supposedly free country would willing follow blatantly illegal and deadly orders isn't really a matter open to speculation. We've already been through a period governed by the banality of evil, when bureaucrats rushed to lock Covid infected individuals up with elderly people causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths; locked down society such that elderly people died without being able to see their families, and interrupted the critical development of children; crashed economies; arrested people for leaving their homes; and, to varying degrees, mandated that whole populations take experimental "vaccines" without evidence of its effectiveness or safety. 

    There are no longer any effective checks on the bureaucracy within the system. The "power of the purse" is largely theoretical: none of the threats by Representatives to "shut down the government" have ever amounted to anything. And it is obvious that the bureaucracy operates independent of the President. And because the role of the courts is largely to decide individual disputes rather than set public policy, their impact on the bureaucracy is limited. We will never, for instance, see a court rule that the existence of a government agency is illegal. 

    But the period of relative calm may be coming to an end because popular immiseration may pass an inflection point where the anger can no longer be contained. Over at The Burning Platform, in a post entitled "Fourth Turning Election Igniting A Firestorm," the author points out:

    Anyone living in the real world knows inflation is at least twice as high as the reported government manipulated figures. They gaslight us about GDP growth, number of jobs added (850,000 overestimation last year), unemployment rate (% in labor market hugely underestimated), and every government statistic, in order to portray a false narrative of an economy doing well and raising all boats. The only boats being raised are the yachts of the .1%.

    In reality, economic distress is creating psychological trauma on young and old alike. Seniors on fixed incomes and the poor dependent upon welfare, sink further into poverty, as the cost of food, energy, rent, medicine, and most necessities reach all-time highs. No one earning the average income in this country can afford a home. Credit card debt and auto loan debt have reached unpayable levels, and an avalanche of defaults and re-possessions has commenced. Meanwhile, with stock markets and housing markets at all-time highs, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, so the plight of the bottom 90% is of no concern to their day-to-day luxurious existence.

And Ron Unz has pointed out:

    Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.

    Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: the richest 1 percent of America’s population now holds as much net wealth as the bottom 90–95 percent, and these trends may even be accelerating. A recent study revealed that during our supposed recovery of the last couple of years, 93 percent of the total increase in national income went to the top 1 percent, with an astonishing 37 percent being captured by just the wealthiest 0.01 percent of the population, 15,000 households in a nation of well over 300 million people.

    But as Turchin explains, popular immiseration, even when combined with civil unrest, does not equal a civil war. A civil war requires money, organization and leadership. That is, it requires a group of elites or putative elites intent on supporting a conflict in order for civil war to break out. Will this be through the counter-elite leaders of a populist movement being frustrated in their attempts to replace existing elites and turning to violence, or through existing elites turning to violence to prevent the loss of power to their lawful replacements? Time will tell.