[matthewdgreen]

This is the kind of writing that seems hyperbolic until you actually think about what's at stake. I think if you give serious consideration to the global implications of a worst-case civic outcome in the United States -- the world's largest economic and nuclear power -- you realize that terrible outcomes are possible, and maybe even likely.

I mean it's not like the bad outcomes are theoretical here. We've grown up in a blessed time, but we have relatively recent examples of how civic dysfunction can lead to genocide and massive world wars. The risk this time is similar except that (1) political destabilization is visibly happening in many nations at once, and (2) the tools of warfare and genocide are orders-of-magnitude more powerful.