It’s increasingly looking like President Trump’s legal challenges are sputtering out, and that next month we’ll have an arguably senile old C-lister inaugurated as the (figurehead) President. But that’s not what’s really significant about all this – the number one takeaway from this 2020 event is that we no longer have an honest and effective election system in this country. The Presidential election process has descended into banana-republic territory, and at this point it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it – given that it would take action by the very people who allowed it to be broken and, indeed, who benefit from it being broken.
So what options remain for our tottering Republic? As I see them, there are three: Submission, secession or civil war. Let’s look at them one by one.
Submission.
This is, sadly, the most likely option. I’m not saying it’s the best option, mind you; just the most likely one. A great deal of the electorate is not engaged much in the process, while a strong plurality was in favor of the “whatever it takes” approach to removing President Trump and doesn’t give much of a damn that it took electoral fraud to do it.
The implications of that are serious. No matter the outcome of any election, anywhere in the country, both sides will presume that any outcome they don’t like was due to fraud, and in many cases they’ll be correct. The Left in particular has now taken the mask off. They have shown that they will do whatever it takes to gain power and retain power. That’s not a recipe for maintaining the liberty of the people.
But if the ordinary people of the nation accept this, then the United States as we know it will gradually devolve into an authoritarian state. End result: The U.S. ends not with a bang but a whimper.
Secession.
Let’s assume for a moment that we’re not talking about an 1861, South Carolina-style secession, but rather the “peaceful divorce” option already being floated in Texas and other places. Take a look at the map of states that supported the Texas-initiated lawsuit that was just struck down a week ago today; most of the states are contiguous, excepting our own soon-to-be home state of Alaska. A peaceful divorce of some sort would leave a nation on the northeast coast, one around the upper Midwest (call it Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan) and the West Coast.
The free states would have good ports at Galveston, Corpus Christi, Mobile and Savannah on the golf and east coasts, and Anchorage on the Pacific. (I may have missed a few, or maybe a few dozen ports there, but you get the point.) The free states would also have most of the continent’s agricultural land, energy production and a lot of the manufacturing capacity. The not-so-free states in the East would have… well… the legacy media, a fair amount of the old academia institutions, and the peripatetic victim classes. The West Coast states would be set up a little better with some agricultural lands – assuming the new national governments allowed farming – and some industry, along with several good Pacific ports.
But how would the military be divided up? Would there be any mutual defense pacts? The new Blue nations would almost certainly devote little or nothing to defense; how long before China looks with envy at the undefended West Coast? There are a million things that would have to be worked out. Even so, I see this as probably the best way out of the current predicament, even as it is not a very likely one. The down side is a global power vacuum, as the superpower that once stood astride North America like a Colossus would be gone for good. End result: Two, three or more nations where one once stood, the sum of those parts being rather less than the whole had once been.
Civil War.
This is by far the worst, and fortunately least likely, option.
Any such conflict would be, unlike the 1861-1865 war, a true civil war. It would not be uniformed armies maneuvering in open country and fighting conventional battles; it would be much more like the various third world conflicts of the last century. It would be a conflict involving atrocity piled upon atrocity; it would be fought on the streets of the cities, and spilled out into the countryside and the small towns.
This event would see the rise of local warlords; a partial or complete collapse of conventional authority would likely result. Some percentage of the military would go to each side, likely – depending on actions of commanders – taking some military equipment and vehicles along with them. The cities would be cut off, and as starvation set in, the urban cohorts would head into the country, assuming there was food there, but having no idea how to obtain or produce that food for themselves, and running into armed landowners when they try to appropriate that food.
And no matter which faction managed to wrest out some local victories, the United States, in this option, ends with a bang, not a whimper.
The Odds?
I’m engaging in pure guesswork here, but my estimate of the odds of each of the above scenarios, right now, are as follows:
- Submission – 75%
- Secession – 20%
- Civil War – 5%
I’m probably pegging the odds of civil war a little too high. My first gut reaction is to place that probability at 1% or less, but I’ve spent the last week watching reactions, and I have to say in my almost-sixty years I’ve never seen such a reaction to an election. The primary reason I place the odds this high is that it’s arguably already started, with the Profa thugs of the Democratic Party’s brown-shirt enforcement wing already rioting in the streets.
The main reason I don’t put the odds higher is that Profa has shown themselves to be rather egg-like; externally they have a hard shell, but when confronted and the shell cracked, they are pretty squishy and runny inside. Things could well spiral out of control even so, and while I still think it’s unlikely to devolve to that point, I wouldn’t rule out some kind of preference cascade leading to the unthinkable becoming thinkable, and one thing that could lead to that is the ordinary citizenry realizing that their municipal governments aren’t going to do anything about the brown-shirts, and taking matters into their own hands.
So. Thoughts?
