The Realistic Threshold of Civil Unrest?

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What is the realistic threshold of Civil War or Marxist/Fascist Revolution in a western country?

I'm bringing this up because it's really bothering me how casually people are predicting such civil unrest brought on by an election as to cause either an overthrow of the government,a fascist crackdown on all prior dissent, or a civil war of political believer vs. believer. It's not just here - people are talking like this IRL sometimes and its really bothering me both with its inaccuracy and how dangerous and impractical it is to talk that way about things. Part of what tells me these people have no clue what they're talking about is that they'd look at films like Hostile or Serbian Film as pinnacle horror movies when in the case of civil war or properly Fascist or Communist authoritarian regime (at least 20th century forward) they're everyday monotony on a panoramic industrial scale.

For what little I've been able to learn with respect to societal breakdown in a country you seem to need at least a couple of the following:

1) A country with a history of autocratic rule coming under heavy penalty by a foreign power (eg. Weimar Republic).
2) People drifting from being relatively well off to living in squalor (not just I can't go on vacation or get a new car - literally starvation and people getting shipped of to debtors prisons by the droves).
3) A government drifting toward autocracy - not like feeling your vote doesn't matter, I mean something closer to protests being handled the way China handled Tienanmen Square.
4) An absolute dictatorship has held several groups of people under his or her boot in paralysis who absolutely hate each other based on religious or historical events and are chomping at the bit to eliminate them - then the reigns go slack when that dictator is removed.
5) Usually the people involved in a civil war, Fascist revolution, or Marxist revolution are already accustomed to living under a brutal autocrat of some sort - either in the form of a dictator, a despot, or a monarch of some type, to where their imagination of what's possible holds up their previous leader as an instinctive structure of how to proceed foward.

Also, I think this is opened to question and I'd like to see if anyone has any insight on this:

I look at the American Civil War and see the kind of war conditions involved as being of a variety that no longer exist. It might have been the first semi-modern war and doesn't quite sit with the way the War of Independence or any of the big European wars of the 18th and 19th centuries prior to that were fought but after WWI, WWII, what war turned to when it came to trenches, bomber planes, constant fear of snipers, the awareness that when you're in an active warzone and in the trenches you can literally die at any moment from threats seen or unseen and constantly assailed by incredibly loud sounds - the statistic I've seen is that north of 95% of people, possibly 98%, will crack within 60 days of those conditions.

My suggestion here - I think we have enough of a grasp on what kind of hell we'd be trading our present interstate political conveniences for. For that reason I really don't see how a civil war could be triggered by Democrat and Republic strongholds feuding over politics. I do worry that the school systems aren't helping kids understand history all that well, when you don't educate people well you erode reality, but that's perhaps a conversation for another time. As far as I can tell someone would have to do something as stupid as take land or voting rights away from the other political party or start rounding them up in gulags of some type for things to be bad enough to go that way.


Even though I get that this is a scary topic I also think it's an important one because really we should be looking for whatever ways we can to *prevent* any of that from happening rather than egging it on or suggesting that it will happen if one party or the other wins another election. To me the later seems really irresponsible and from reading what happened in Nazi Germany or for decades under the Russian Soviets - I see absolutely no entertainment value in casually talking about Communism or Fascism in the west.

Logically, there shouldn't be a war--but that is a typical Aspie mistake, assuming that important decisions are made using logic.

As I see it, there is a lot of anger over lost jobs, in both the cities and rural America. And they want revenge. And someone to blame--besides themselves.

FYI--I had to use the back button to recover this post.

TY.

I'm no longer a mod however and haven't been since at least 2008. I've asked Alex repeatedly to have that green sticker removed and he's given a nod of approval several times to my request to have it removed. As far as I can tell unfortunately it's permanent.

My suggestion if you're running into regular forum glitches would be go to WP.Net discussion and post in a thread that's tracking the issue or start a new thread if need be.

The left doesn't believe in or own guns so them starting a civil war with sticks and glass will only get them killed in mass. They don't seem to realize this which is scary.

The fact they can riot all the time shows we don't live in a total dictatorship or the army just mow them down and the street and send the survivals to prison on some harsh island.

Seriously though I'd say since the republicans won the odds of a civil war are decreasing

Every culture also has a strong percentage of sociopaths and psychopaths sprinkled throughout - one of the many ways nature rolls the dice in all directions to cover her bases. When people like Hitler or Stalin came to power there were plenty of people, who knows where they were hiding, who stepped up to the plate and made their leader's game their own game. Similarly when things broke down in Bosnia people spoke of people they'd always thought of as normal turning out to be the local mafia bosses when the world changed enough around them.

Here's hoping we can keep the world's hardest floating like ice cubes in a glass of water. The world's a much better place when we don't have to find out who they are.

I believe the South thought the North was weak before the Civil War got started.

I think what you are failing to understand is that black americans do perceive themselves to have met the criteria you have listed. (And keep in mind that I am white, so I'm just reflecting back what a few black friends have told me, or forwarded me online articles on the subject.)

Black men in the US have the highest incarceration rate of any population in the developed world. This isn't for violent crime but for drugs and petty crimes that have added up. Since many black people turn to dealing drugs or committing petty crimes because they live in poverty and don't perceive themselves to be able to make ends meet in any other way, this is pretty much the equivalent of going to debtors prison, from their POV. We also have large numbers of black young adults entering the army as a way to beat poverty. And when they come back from war and get caught in a dis-functioning VA hospital, or otherwise not getting the help then need to re-integrate into civilian life, they also feel trapped by economics.

Many black people do perceive the government as autocratic (in this case, meaning that they get no say in elections.) They see it as oppressive and as murdering people willy nilly. They understand voter suppression and they understand gerrymandering and they view these as reasons why the current government is not legitimate.

For many black and hispanic communities, (certainly not all) and certain sectors of white america, they do see themselves as living in squalor. They do see themselves as desperate.

Now, we could argue all day about whether these perceptions are valid, but it wouldn't matter who won. What matters is the perception on the part of the individual when it comes to deciding if you are willing to die to participate in civil war.

Do I really see us as going forward into civil war? No. I don't. But I also didn't see the Orange Hitler getting elected, so you'd best not trust my opinion.

Liberals don't in general have guns. And many of us, like me, are too busy hoping for a brighter day to really go take up arms. But the potential for violence is present in the US. Queer/trans people, the black and hispanic americans who are middle class, women who like to have sex without having a baby - we've gotten used to the liberties we've gained in the last few decades. And when the GOP tries to take them away, there are going to be a lot more people who are willing to sacrifice in order to wrench back these liberties.

It's harder to remove a liberty after its been granted. Think about being a kid and bedtimes. If you had a 8:30 bedtime, being told you now get a 9 PM bedtime is great! but if you have a 10 pm bedtime and all of a sudden your Dad decides that's too late for someone your age, and tells you to go to bed at 9, he'll have screaming child on his hands. Taking things back is never a good idea. When Obamacare falls next year, we're going to have a bunch of metaphorically screaming children, who got used to having healthcare. It's my hope that this will be the momentum we need to get a real universal healthcare plan going when we get the current GOP out of Washington.

Another example: Think of Greece a few years back. They tried to take away the liberties that we see as luxuries. I forget what it was but they had some kind of universal base salery and some wonderful amount of paid vacation time. The people were very upset when that was taken away. So, it doesn't have to be absolute squalor that leads to civic unrest. It can just be less than what people have gotten used to.

I guess I'd ask - do they see the country getting better toward them or worse?

It's perhaps not impossible that the less affluent across all races share this sentiment and enough agitation of the right kind might be able to start a chain reaction. The trouble is they would end up in a world that's worse off, and the question is how many are aware of that, how many aren't, and how many really would rather live worse off if it meant pulling everyone else down to that level as well.

I think my friends who were forwarding this stuff to me would say that things are staying the same. But remember that we are just over a 100 years or so out from actual slavery, so by "staying the same" they mean it's a sh** show.

You would have to ask them, though. It's hard to tell when people are just trying to make a point and what reflects their real feelings. Certainly, we have more middle class, secure and relatively happy black families now than we did 100 years ago? It seems self-evident to me. I really don't know.

But the principle of taking away being harder is the same. When you have a kid, who was raised in a middle class suburb, given a college education, and earning good white collar living; its harder to expect that person to react well to being threatened by a police officer before after being given a speeding ticket. They are used to being treated with the dignity that white people usually get, encountering a bigot is going to feel awful. In that case, the bigoted cop situation would be an example of their liberty of being treated with respect by the law was taken away. The fact that there is more news of black people having bad run in's with currupt cops might be a good sign that the black community is, in general, stronger than it was decades ago. But as I said, this is me just making stuff up. It's just my theorizing on the matter.

Liberals may not have guns, but leftists certainly do. Gun control is a position of the Democratic Party, which is very right-wing. They'd sooner lick the boots of a fascist hypercapitalist than pick up a rifle and resist.

One of the things that's always been challenging to me about the left/right paradigm is that their extrema seem almost identical in practice. That and a lot of neoliberals and neoconservatives seem to cluster quite close to the center.

Huh? O.o

This made me smile. Agreed in that the far right and the far left show that the political spectum is more of a circle than a line. As you get far enough left, you'll meet up with the people on the far right. It's all consipiracy theories and taking our country back on that part of the circle.

In this election cycle, I would annoy my family (which is over 50% republican. I'm an undeclared progressive) that they should vote for Clinton because she's a really solid republican candidate. They thought I was being snotty with them but I wasn't. She had a lot in common with the Regan Era GOP, before they decided that they were going to rally ignorant voters with culture war slogans instead of promote their platform.

Thats what gets me too. The "left" didnt loose the election. It was the Republican Right that got destroyed in the election, and got destroyed in the Primary season before we even got to the general election. They lost it to their own candidate: a guy who loves the Russians, is against free trade, is for single payer healthcare like they have in Canada, and who violates family values in his personal life.

I think that Hillary is more like Nixon (quite liberal by today's standards) than like Reagan, but you're right that this election had little to do with the traditional american right vs left politics. It was about two non conservatives duking it out:one globalist, and the other isolationist, and xenophobic. The actual Republican "right" was no where to be seen in the general election.