American Stasis

It's gonna get worse before it gets better

The United States are in a tricky position right now and everybody knows it. The level of social division continues to rise and all of us, in some way or another, feel a tension that we all know isn’t going to be released merely by voting harder. Simply put, there are overwhelmingly powerful civil disjunctions that the normal methods of politicking simply will not resolve.

A good model for understanding what is happening right now is to look back in time to the Classical Greek and Hellenistic eras. At one point or another, just about every polis had to deal with what was called stasis (pl. staseis). Stasis was a phenomenon described by most of the major ancient writers and it refers to the situation within a body politic where the entire society was divided into factions that vied for control of the city and which most often led to civil war. This differs from the more familiar type of case where a small clique would seek to subvert and overthrow a government but the struggle for power didn’t extend broadly throughout the population. In cases of staseis, the struggle for power - because it was so widely distributed - was much more envenomed than usual and typically involved a good deal of bloodletting. It also often served as an engine for Greek colonisation as the losers in a conflict would many times find themselves exiled and expelled from the metropolis.

As you might imagine, this tendency was more prevalent in poleis with popular constitutions, or at least which provided for more popular involvement. Indeed, the majority of staseis involved popular overthrows of originally aristocratic regimes, followed by further troubles between various popular factions. The best example of this was Syracuse, a city in Sicily that was founded by Corinthian colonists around 735 BC, which had 19 instances of staseis between 650 and 210 BC mostly for this very reason. So democratic forms of government tend to contribute to the envenomisation of politics that led to this phenomenon.

Sound familiar?

While the United States is significantly larger than a Greek city-state, the fundamental dynamics of our civil discord are not that different. Popular involvement in government has led to the rise of factions with very different worldviews who are literally developing into different cultures and nations. This tendency has grown over the past several decades as our society’s asabiyya, its social cohesion, has decayed into nothingness. The honest observer is hard-pressed to not see how this can only develop into violent social discord in the near future. Indeed, it’s difficult to say that this hasn’t already been happening to a certain extent for quite a while.

All of this is really the natural result of our place in the cycle predicted by demographic-structural theory (DST). As our “elite” strata have expanded, increased competition for wealth and political power among these elites leads to the subversion of institutions and the creation of increasingly violent factional strife, something which I outlined last week. This is common in the collapse phase of a polity’s secular cycle. Now, when you have a monarchic or aristocratic system, these troubles tend to be confined to the upper classes as the barons and princes are the only ones who are potential stakeholders in the political system - commoners are less likely to be involved in the ensuing violence (except as collateral damage, of course). The problem with this occurring in democratic social systems is that because everybody gets a say, everybody gets to be involved. And when everybody is involved in forming factions and then fighting the other guys, this leads to civil war in the truest sense of the term.

I know there are people out there on the Right like Scott Greer (for example) who doubt the reality of the coming American national divorce. Typically this is because they are invested in the current status quo (e.g. being a media personality) and don’t want to see that status quo end and believe that their magic words can make this happen. But these folks are fooling themselves, as the testimony of history abundantly attests. The United States is reaching Syracusan levels of stasis, this is only going to get worse, and this is not something we can talk or vote our way out of. We’re waaaaay past the point where statescraft is going to save the situation.

Now, the recent leaked draft opinion in which it appears that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned (as well as the ruling’s apparent questioning of other pillars of left-wing social policy like the Obergefell ruling) is going to greatly accelerate this. The woke progressive Left has a lot of political and social capital invested in using its social agenda (globohomo, transgenderism, at-will abortion, etc.) to subvert traditional norms as part of its long-term socialist revolution. Overturning Roe v. Wade via one of the few institutions in our system that possesses effective sovereignty would be a tremendous blow to progressive prestige. The Left simply will not tolerate this sort of attack upon its status and the status of the “inevitability of progress.”

But the pushback against leftism has been going on for a while, it’s just in recent months that most normies have started to really pay attention. Fighting the inroads of critical race theory in publik skoolz, punishing Disney for interfering in the state of Florida’s effort to protect its children from groomers - these are really all part of the greater culture war that the Left has provoked and continues to provoke. For decades, the Left has purveyed its self-appointed status (ritually enforced via the media and other culture-generating institutions) as representing “the right side of history” into sociopolitical power which it then uses to punish its opponents. Because “conservatives” have hithertofore done precious little to actually conserve anything, the Left has gotten used to winning. Even the little bit of not winning that they’ve had to endure recently is literally sending them over the edge. I mean as in threatening to murder Supreme Court justices and stuff like that. These are not stable people, which is why the likelihood of an American civil war is much higher than it ought to be.

Fedpoasting is a lot easier when you’re a left-winger

Indeed, as I alluded to above we’re already basically in a low-level civil war and have been for a while. We’ve already seen widespread left-wing political violence and insurrection during 2020’s “George Floyd celebration of life.” We’ve seen elections stolen for years before 2020 to the point where it became a stock-in-trade joke. The Left regularly uses PoC criminals to intimidate the other team and rampant illegal immigration to adversely affect American demographics in their favour. The only surprising thing is that it hasn’t gone hot yet. However, that is increasingly likely to change as what little social cohesion we have left drains away and the Left continues to grow even more unhinged.

Part of the problem for the Left is structural - America’s federal system is organised in such a way as to present a lot of impediments to federal power if the states will actually utilise them. Since the (first) Civil War, the states have largely not done this for a variety of political and “moral” reasons. However, there is a tremendous amount of potential energy that can be channeled through the states should they decide to get serious about opposing the federal level progressive agenda. This is finally what we’re starting to see happen as Red states begin to engage in what is essentially nullification across a host of issues.

While the Left is institutionally strong at the federal level and in Blue states, the fact that they are receiving more and more pushback from Red states is surely galling to them. One thing they understand from this is that their actual bench of support is surprisingly shallow - regular everyday Americans really are just not that into them. This is why they’re freaking out about the likely overturn of Roe v. Wade and understand (correctly) that it puts the rest of their judicially-imposed social program in jeopardy. As we’re starting to see and as insane as it sounds, this social program is something they are more than willing to threaten civil war over. They don’t have broad popular support (polls reflect the imposition of social power much more than they do actual popular beliefs) so all they have left is the threat to dynamite the whole thing if they don’t get their way. But the problem is that they have enough true believer zealots to actually try to make good on the threats.

The zealotry of the Left is why every election, in its turn, becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER!!! And if elections can’t be won, then they must be stolen. And when elections can’t be stolen, eventually they’ll just have to be nullified directly by The Powers That Be. So expect to see the Left pulling out all the stop going forward, accelerating their attacks on “our sacred norms.” Eliminating the filibuster, packing the Court, decertifying election results from states that refuse to implement DoJ-approved “reforms” - it’s all probably going to come down the pike sooner or later. And when Red states refuse to go along with these, expect more heavy-handed measures to be used to try to enforce compliance, which just furthers the cycle…

Also expect to see more street-level leftist insurrection, which may or may not be countered by right-wing organisation, depending on the location and local institutional support. Certainly that phenomenon will further create divides within communities between those who support antifas victimising “class enemies” and those who oppose being victimised. It will also further the division between states who support these insurrectionists and those who suppress them. It really won’t be a surprise to see actual assassinations of the Left’s opponents and the like. I frankly don’t see how current trends don’t end in some form of official national divorce, though it’ll be one that the Left violently tries to stop.

Understand as we move forward that the Left in this country is only going to become more deranged as they face more successful pushback - pushback that their own violent radicalism helps to create. The political redshift that Elon Musk was talking about is only going to increase. This level of stasis is simply not sustainable indefinitely. Something will break and it will probably do it sooner rather than later. What those of us on the Right need to be doing is preparing for when the dam breaks, not trying to figure out which bag of cheap quick-setting concrete might keep it from happening. Organise, train, prepare. Lay the groundwork for working with and within your local communities and institutions to weather the coming storm. The sides are already picked and will not be reconciled, so we’d better get cracking on strengthening our own.