Experts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.
Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.
“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”
Civil War suggests there will be organized resistance. Not like organized protesters, like organized military, and there will not be. The democrats will cave, they were chosen to be weak. It’s a reign of terror, unending, presuming we squander the last chance to get rid of them in the succession before the fix is in beyond recovery with a candidate like newsom.
This is true, but there’s more to it than that.
Around the time I first joined Lemmy a user on here recommended a book to me titled “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.”
I’m oversimplifying the contents, but civil wars tend to be more common in countries that are in a status that is between autocracy and democracy. Overwhelming authoritarianism and overwhelming democracy are stabilizers that make it difficult for infighting that contests the leadership of the country.
There’s a lot of ways to interpret the current atmosphere and where we are on that scale. I don’t feel confident in my ability to judge it.
Capitulation by weak figures like Newsom is far and away the most likely.
There is a scenario where people demand action, and escalations keep coming to the point of widespread resistance and replacement of leadership for people who will disrupt the federal government. Work stoppages, tax strikes, and outright sabotage escalate into assassination and ambushes, while a debt crisis cripples the central government’s ability to respond.
There is no capacity for the states to resist the federal government in the current dynamic, but a debt crisis could degrade the capacity of the feds to the point that the balance of power shifts and the costs benefit ratio shifts with it. Nobody can predict when such a shift can happen.
Again, I don’t think it’s likely, even in the darkest timeline, but it’s possible.
The best course of action for us, I think, is to organize. Into innumerable groups that cooperate on a general forum on what we agree on, where we can cooperate publicly and privately as we see fit. Pledge to do something if a condition is met or not, organize into private groups, etc. The federation would be key so the government could not take down the entire whole with a pretext the first time there is a crime alleged. Or their own agent sends child porn to another agent and then they discover it and use it as cause to take down the whole.
So any protests we go to, do not just go march, sign people up into these groups, onto the general forum to join the groups. Obviously we need the actual development of that, but it could be done by the same people doing this fediverse it’s the same concept. This way the government and big business could not get their hooks into a limitless number of new instances that could be made when they corrupt existing ones.
But we actually agree with most of the right wing on a great many issues, it is only because we live in different realities, and listen to different influencers, that we are at odds on some of the most important issues. Like the Base Issue, that working people shouldn’t get screwed by the Rich without their consent. On such a site we could cooperate on such issues, and importantly could find and groom political candidates to take the candidacy from doomed to fail aristocratic sell outs dooming us to fascism, themselves supporting the oligarchy, seeing their reason for being as preventing popular reform and thereby allowing the fascists to run as reform.
Hopefully, if there is a civil war, it will mean a new government actually for and by the people. Democrats will not be leading it, but that doesn’t mean they won’t start it.
I would like to have Mark Kelly as our Washington, far as the military side of the conflict goes. He can be a Vice President to AOC after the dust has settled.
There are the National Guard and State Guards, which could do that.
Unfortunately they can be federalized as we’ve seen. Apparently it could be done already, but there was a law in like 2009 or so that gave the president more power to seize control of a national guard talked about in an Atlantic article about the imperial powers the presidency has accumulated over the centuries here around 2020 when we were staring down an open attempt to rig our elections.
Courts won’t stop them, not for long.
You’re thinking of this purely in legal terms, but the question is if the national guard will listen when they’re federalized or if they’ll refuse to follow orders.
An awful lotta people seem to think military personnel are robots, who automatically obey whoever is at the top. Honestly, it seems incredibly authoritarian minded to me, that such debaters don’t perceive soldiers to be people first, and job second.
Because literally all of US American history shows that soldiers will (with incredibly few very notable exceptions) always follow orders to commit atrocities.
Also, the federal military is directed to ignore illegal orders, if enough high ranking members split at a critical time, they could fracture into their own militia groups.
So far there has been nothing but following orders. I doubt that will change.
Idk, I think at most the democrats will challenge in court. They may win a few of the more transparent bad faith attempts to federalize, but not for long. And the lack of injunctions means they can just do another declaration under a different rationale, or do it in another city even if a federal judge declared in unlawful in one city. So every region is at the mercy of it’s federal judges. The farther you get through appeals courts to the supreme court, the more corrupt and beholden to the party they are too. Scotus thinks the republic is dead in all but name, and republicans are the unquestioned rulers from now on.
As far as obeying orders, most of the federalized national guard would be on street corners and the like. The questionable violent stuff they would do with coalitions of the willing, and they would find enough of them, whether it’s from the guard or law enforcement or even paramilitary groups in training like the proud boys that could be used to say beat protesters with clubs under the protection of the guard, not an incident without precedent.
Protesters need to think about defending themselves, as they have a legal right to do, but that’s another discussion.
It’s a bad faith tankie accelerationist, don’t engage.
Go back to ml. Buncha morons constantly blaming Democrats for things republicans do, and y’all creating alt accounts in different instances than ml to get around the instance blocks. Just shut the fuck up already with all the Russian propaganda, goddamn clowns.