Post-Election Implosion: Could Civil Unrest, Even War(s), Break Out in the USA?

Kevin Barrett

Rabi' al-Awwal 15, 1442 2020-11-01

Main Stories

by Kevin Barrett (Main Stories, Crescent International Vol. 49, No. 9, Rabi' al-Awwal, 1442)

The United States of America has experienced countless episodes of mass domestic violence, but only two all-out civil wars (in the 1770s and 1860s).[1] Today, many observers expect a post-election flare up of unrest that could conceivably erupt into another civil war—or even multiple civil wars.

The levels of polarization and fanaticism seen today have not been witnessed since 1860, when an unusually galvanizing election set the stage for what has been variously termed the American Civil War, the War Between the States, or (among Confederate sympathizers) the War of Northern Aggression. The parallels between the 1860 and 2020 elections are suggestive. In both cases, party realignment had destabilized the political system. In 1860, the Republican and Constitution Parties were new, while the dominant Democratic Party had split into two factions over the issue of slavery in the Western territories. Likewise, in 2020, voters will choose from political parties that have shifted positions: Donald Trump’s newly populist Republican Party has attracted much of what used to be the Democrats’ working class base, while the Democrats have shamelessly embraced their new identity as the party of the “moderate” billionaire oligarchs[2]—exactly what the Republican Party used to be!

Like the 1860 election, the 2020 election will poll a starkly divided nation worked up into a frenzy over race-related issues, facing a stark choice about the future direction of the country. In 1860, the key issue was whether new states in the Western territories should allow slavery. If slavery was banned in all new states, as Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln urged, the southern slave states would become an increasingly disempowered and untenable minority faction in the Union, eventually facing economic ruin as the tariff-loving industrial North grabbed an ever-greater share of the South’s wealth. When Lincoln won, southern leaders foresaw looming disaster, and felt compelled to secede from the Union in hopes of saving their economy and preserving their sovereignty.

In 2020, populist conservatives likewise feel existentially threatened—and might want to fight and/or secede if they lose. Just as the looming demolition of the slave system foretold an apocalyptic end to the antebellum South, today onrushing demographic change threatens white majority America. Alongside that demographic change, which promises to reduce whites to minority status by 2044, the destruction of working-class jobs through global outsourcing and automation threatens to impoverish much of what was once the (mostly white) American middle class. Meanwhile religious and family values are eroding, in part due to an all-out ideological assault by a media and academy dominated by secular-progressive elites, who according to the Jewish publication Mondoweiss, are disproportionately Jewish. Those increasingly radical elites embrace all varieties of victimization-based identity politics—starting with a pro-Zionist identity politics aimed at maintaining their privilege—while casting whites as monolithic villains whose efforts to defend their own interests are relentlessly demonized.

Today white identity advocates like Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor, and their fellow travelers in the pro-Trump camp, feel about the same way southerners did in 1860: If the election swings the wrong way, they will witness the annihilation of their country and way of life. Better to go down fighting, many say, than accept such an inglorious fate. Like the secessionists of 1860, today’s rebels may react to a Biden win by picking up their guns in support of Trump’s efforts to contest the results. Out of the resulting chaos might emerge a series of armed confrontations between various rural (pro-Trump) and urban (pro-Biden) areas, as well as a larger clash between red states and blue states that could conceivably escalate into a Civil War Redux. How the US military (split between pro- and anti-Trump factions) and local and state police (mostly pro-Trump) would react remains to be seen.

But Trump supporters are not the only ones who might react violently to an election loss. If Trump wins, or claims victory, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa protests from last summer will likely flare up into a series of regional brushfires, if not a nationwide inferno. The dominant liberal faction of the mainstream media (MSM) will echo Biden’s June 11 statement that the military should “escort Trump from the White House with dispatch.” Militias and Trump sympathizers in the military might mount an armed resistance against Trump’s forceful ejection from the White House. The violence could easily spiral out of control.

Skeptics may say: Sure, there is plenty of chatter about post-election violence. But is there any actual evidence supporting the notion that this election is different from any other, and that people are more likely to violently contest the outcome? The answer is: Yes, there is. A series of polls by YouGov shows that the number of Americans who believe violence is justified for their political party to achieve its goals has risen dramatically in just three years. In 2017, eight percent of Americans supported political violence on behalf of their party. In 2018 it was 12%, in 2019 over 15%, and by June 2020 it had doubled to 30%! The latest poll, taken in September 2020, found that 33% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans support partisan political violence.

Another factor driving potential post-election chaos is pent-up frustration over the COVID-19 lockdowns and the economic and social damage they have inflicted. Democrats have blamed Trump for all the COVID damage, with some success. Many Republicans, however, believe COVID was deliberately unleashed, and/or exaggerated, in order to overthrow Trump. (It is true that without COVID, Trump probably would have ridden the strong economy to an easy re-election; and it is also true that COVID is probably a deliberately-released biological weapon, though Trump was almost certainly not the main target.)

As Americans have had their lives upended and degraded by the pandemic and lockdowns, they have been divided into two camps, each scapegoating the other for the terrible situation.
History has shown how such mass scapegoating can devolve into mass bloodshed.[3] The underlying factors driving America’s current trajectory toward civil war—including demographic change, the decline of religion, the rise of identity politics and the culture of narcissism, and economic inequality and the impoverishment of the working and middle classes—are growing stronger every year. Polarization around the grotesquely divisive figure of Trump may serve as the catalyst that sets off a chain reaction of violence.

As conservative Christian pastor Chuck Baldwin writes, “Trump’s vulgarities, blasphemies, duplicities, thefts, immoralities, racism, narcissism, covetousness, self-deification, misogyny, unconstitutional conduct and mass murders disqualify him from being elected dog catcher, much less President of the United States.” But Trump’s Republican supporters, like Democrats who supported serial rapist Bill Clinton and his rape-enabling wife Hillary, or war criminal Barack Obama, or corrupt apparatchik and likely sex criminal Joe Biden, follow President Roosevelt’s reasoning about the vicious dictator Somoza: “He may be a son of a b*tch, but he’s our son of a b*tch.”

Though a great religion of the book, and the foundation of many civilizations including America’s, Christianity—with its “render unto that S.O.B. Caesar” acceptance of evil rulers—cannot solve America’s current problems. But Islam could. The Islamic leadership model is simple: The most pious and morally upright competent individual should rule, taking advice from those qualified to give it. Then everyone, including Christians, Jews, Sabians, and whoever does good and believes in God and the Last Judgment, can line up behind good leadership and form Hizb ul-Lah, the Party of God. After that, the petty distinctions of identity politics—race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, sect, and so on—appear trivial: The only real distinction between grades of people is their relative degree of piety and good works.

So, no well-informed Muslim will ever vote for “our son of a b*tch.” He or she will instead shun the psychopaths who infest the highest levels of American politics, finance, media, academia, and so on, preferring to work patiently, at the local community level if necessary, to abolish lesser-evilism and establish genuinely good leadership.