| There are mutterings. And they are coming from multiple vectors. Perhaps you should have your political hearing tested? If you have ever tried to buy ammunition for popular cartridge sizes, you could just do the math. Americans have been predicting and preparing for civil disturbances for decades. For a long time, you had to turn over rocks and poke at the mud underneath to find the people doing it, but now you're likely to have met at least one personally. They will not tell you they are doing it. Firstly, they don't want to be perceived as a kooky crackpot. Secondly, they don't want you showing up to mooch when things go bad. Thirdly, they don't want you to be the one to rat them out to whomever they believe to be their adversary. It's a lot like figuring out which of your acquaintances is (or are) the closeted homosexual(s). Ironically, a lot of the increasingly paranoid and increasingly isolationist doomsayers are voting to elect the very people that will bring on the crisis that they fear. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have people leveraging the new ubiquity of videocameras to reflect even more sunlight into the dark corners of government. They post videos of government employees behaving badly or unlawfully, and file public records requests and lawsuits at every opportunity. The left-libertarians and the right-libertarians are natural allies against a centrist-authoritarian government, but I wish you good luck getting them to even give each other a polite hello. And as an American familiar with Churchill quotes, I remain hopeful that we are finally running out of wrong things to try. |
Or look outside of whatever cultural bubble he's in?
I knew I'd only have to wait a few hours to come across something like "mutterings". While this is about the aftermath of the ever more likely coming collapse, it's akin: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/06/22/learning-to-love-clowar...
"Yet increasingly, I have to wonder how much of a win Cloward-Piven would be for them. As things stand, those that have helped guide the decline such as Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and their accomplices such as the disgusting Lois Lerner, will never see the inside of a courtroom. Once a true collapse hits, the color of legal legitimacy that both gives them authority and makes them for the moment untouchable is washed away. With the old order’s restraints gone, whose to say those that midwifed the collapse shouldn’t swing listlessly against the backdrop of a crow-filled sky?"
There's a lot more where that comes from, from people who e.g. know Obama launched his political career in the home of a domestic terrorist who estimated that, after his '60s era revolution succeeded, a full 1/10 of the population would be so resistant to reeducation that they'd have to be killed outright. 25 million then, obviously quite a few more now.
And I'd guess most of the US residents reading this should really pay attention to the following, especially per the misattributed to Trotsky quote, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested to you"
One of the things that's on the table if the US devolves into a second civil war is the relatively simple expedient of killing Blue cities: http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/01/shock-the-system/
Or as Dean Ing put it in his 1981 novel Systemic Shock (http://www.amazon.com/Systemic-Shock-Dean-Ing/dp/0812500385), about an attack on the US by forces significantly less capable than the Soviet Union:
"The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.
The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it."
Take out enough of the really big transformers, for which there aren't many spares on hand, deprive big Blue cities of power for a few weeks, and the situation will be ... significantly changed.
I'm not looking forward to any of the above, if for no other reason than that I depend on civilization providing a reliable supply of pharmaceuticals to stay alive in the face of a chronic medical condition (and any time now that'll be true of my parents, right now it's looking like that's now going to be true for my father), but I do believe in keeping my eyes open.