The American Un-Civil Wars to Come: Lessons from Africa in Our Time

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan. Judges 12: 5-6, KJV

Talk of an American Civil War is fashionable if not pervasive. A recent (2022) study by the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis found that half (50.1%) of the people surveyed agreed that "in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States." Major policy and opinion influencers such as the billionaires Ray Dalio and George Soros have issued warnings about if not predictions of the same. On 31 July 2022, the highly respected international newspaper Financial Times asked “Is America heading for civil war?” On 26 August, 2022, The Washington Post asked “Is the United States headed for civil war?”  

Academics and public intellectuals have likewise weighed in. Barbara F. Walters, Rohr Professor of International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, recently published How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (2022).  Also in 2022, Stephen Marche, cultural commentator and contributing editor at Esquire, published The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future; and NYT reporters Martin and Burns delivered This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future.

           Dakar, Senegal. November 2007. Student protest near military base. © 2007. 

Learning from Africa?

At American Exile, we find unhappy parallels between the conditions behind the violent conflicts in Africa since independence (the end of colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s), and the current conditions in the USA. This comparison will seem a stretch to many Americans, who do not know that the majority of post-colonial violent conflicts in Africa either were or started as conflicts within a nation, not as conflicts between nations. It might also wrongly seem insulting — if one presumes the USA must be different or better just because. Regardless, civil war has been the curse of Sub-Saharan Africa since independence, and hence much studied.

To briefly review the history of conflicts, Elbadawi and Sambanis (2000), covering only the period from 1960 to 1999, estimated that over “the last 40 years nearly 20 African countries (or about 40 percent of Africa south of the Sahara [SSA]) have experienced at least one period of civil war.” Olaosebikan (2010) likewise discussed the intra-state conflicts (civil wars) in Sudan (1995-1990), Chad (1965-85), Angola since 1974, Liberia (1980-2003), Nigeria (1967-70), Somalia (1999-93) and Burundi, Rwanda and Sierra Leone (1991-2001). Okana (2016) has discussed the civil wars up to 2009 — but the intra-state conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa have not ceased.

                                          Chart above above courtesy of Okana (2016).

The Obvious Objection Answered

Lessons from Africa might also seem a non-starter for another obvious reason. The USA is a wealthy and powerful nation whereas the African nations are relatively poor and geo-politically weak. Yes, as Victor Davis Hanson (2021) has pointed out:

“millions of Americans who own little or no property. The new majority has scant, if any, savings. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. … [Our] twenty- first-century American ‘peasants’ — currently perhaps about 46 percent of the population — usually die with a net worth of less than $10,000, both receiving and bequeathing little, if any, inheritance.”

Yes, as Joel Kotkin (2020) has argued:

“We [the USA] are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.”

And yes, the USA national debt may be safely rounded to $31 trillion or $250K per taxpayer or $93K per citizen. But the USA does remain wealthy and powerful beyond any or likely all of the African nations. For the intermediate future.

Our claim here does not depend on a direct comparison between the USA and any particular African nation. Only that researchers have well identified the conditions, the recipe as it were, for intra-national violent conflict and civil war in Africa. And the USA currently has the same ingredients cooking.

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Not Red vs. Blue

First, however, we must ask our readers to discard entirely the 19th century American civil war as a useful model for present violent conflict in the USA. This is not about a possible war between Red States and Blue States over a single or a few defining issues: say, Abortion, Gun Rights, or transgendered biological males competing as women in athletic competitions.

The map above (CC 0 Universal Public Domain), showing the country-wide results for the most recent USA Presidential Election (2020), reveals the obvious: if we are indeed considering a conflict that puts citizens against citizens, it makes little sense to speak of Red States and Blue States. Only three states — Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts — seem to have populations with generally uniform political affiliations.  But even this unravels somewhat when we examine the “An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election” by the New York Times.

In the USA, the states do NOT define clear boundaries of peoples with shared cultural, political, ethnic, and linguistic affiliations. Moreover and likewise, the primary shibboleths (identity markers distinguishing group membership) are not based on political party affiliation.

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. Judges 12: 5-6, KJV

Nor Race Either

Group memberships is neither necessarily voluntary nor based on objectively testable facts or recognized standards: you are what the mob out for violence says you are, unless you can persuade them otherwise. Reality might matter little. We will quickly review two examples presumably based on racial identity and relating to the Portland riots of 2020.

In “Thoughts on the Cultural Revolution in Our Midst”, Victor Davis Hanson (23 September 2022) has argued

We are in the middle of a grand effort to create an equality-of-result, race-based, radical Jacobin society. … Actual class status is less important than race to the Left.

VDH seems correct that race, or rather the notoriously ill-defined categories of race, dominates how the power elites wish to redefine American society. Their redefinition itself requires the inherently racist assumption that all members of a given race must or at least should share a distinct ideology which otherwise separates them from people with similar economic, professional, educational, faith or spiritual, and regional status or affiliations. Time now for our examples.

Portlandia, the Police, and Woke Pathology

In the video below, the black American police officer Jakhary Jackson of Portland, Oregon recounted his experience dealing with blatant racism from BLM/Antifa protesters who were allegedly protesting racism. Because Officer Jackson was in uniform, he was evidently no longer human and hence no longer black: so the N-word could be freely applied to him by BLM/Antifa protestors in their group effort to fight against racial prejudice and professedly related concerns.

Likewise, female Portland police officers were also targeted by protestors with threats of sexual violence, and with general verbal abuse and harassment. This is discussed with some detail in the same video — and please see also the accompanying news article, “The most horrific displays of hate that I've ever seen” (KGW, 6 August 2020).

In particular, Officer Rehanna Kerridge, who is biracial (having one black and one white parent), shared her story of dealing with on daily basis with the racist behavior and speech which many Portlanders had displayed based upon their understanding of her appearance. Officer Kerridge is light-skinned and therefore must be white.

She was also falsely accused of racism because she worked on the Gun Violence Reduction Team, which was generating positive results within Portland’s black community.  But neither results nor statistics — nor for that matter, any reality-based test — has any merit with our power elites and their indoctrinated adherents.

To our power elites, biological sex evidently no longer exists. Nor does gender apply to police officers, or military personal, or the like — unless they are transgendered. And individuals with bi-racial or multi-racial heritages are coerced into pre-existing categories which deny their personal histories and social experiences.

All this is undeniably happening, aided and abetted by the MSM and academia — but how and why? Let’s get beyond the political personality contests, to start.

Group Identity: Three Buzzwords

To employ college professor language, on rare occasion useful, we say that group identities (based on ethnicity, religion, or race) tend to be simultaneously intersubjective, factionalized and relational.

Intersubjective

By intersubjective, we mean that the group identity is defined by social interactions — by what people other than yourself believe, think, and do. Since the group identity does not belong to anyone individual, it cannot simply be a matter of personal choice— your subjective position. The existing group members get their say. Opposing or competing groups also get their say — you might get labelled or lumped in ways you do not agree with. Good luck with sorting that out.

Factionalized

By factionalized, we mean that no social group is entirely homogeneous. There are always disagreements — and hence factional splits — over who gets decide what is authentically “X”, who gets to speak for the group to outsiders, and who gets to control the group’s collective resources and decision-making processes (or even institutions). On the same general concern, see also James Madison (22 November 1787), Federalist Paper # 10, on the human tendency towards factions in political life.

Relational

Finally, by relational, we mean that group identities both develop in relation to and require an “other” — people who are not members of the group but perceived as belonging to different and perhaps competing groups.

How does knowing this help us? Good question. Please keep reading.

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Two Essential Ingredients for Civil War

We know from modern history in Africa the recipe for violent civil unrest — including civil war. The two essential ingredients are polarized peoples (a society divided by identity politics based on ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, or any combination thereof) and neopatrimonialism replacing or subverting the rule of law (for now, neopatrimonialism defined as “winner-takes-all” political outcomes which undermine civil institutions and public trust in governance). 

Polarized Peoples

The trick to “divide and conquer” is to exacerbate and exploit existing divisions —divisions that naturally occur both between groups and within groups. The existence of differing social groups does NOT by itself lead to social unrest and civil violence —no more than the differences within group necessarily do so.

Diversity — ethnic, religious, linguistic, and so on — in itself does NOT necessarily lead to violence: diversity is not a causal agent, but a necessary yet not sufficient contributing factor. Diversity matters when it becomes politically mobilized — this requires deliberate decision-making, planning and coordination by the power elites and their supporting clerisy.

The MSM Business Model

Has this been happening in the USA?  It certainly seems so. Batya Ungar-Sargon (2021) calls our attention to “the belief” perpetuated by “our leading national news media outlets” that

“America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state that confers power and privilege on white people, which it systematically denies to people of color. … [Hence] an interconnected network of racist institutions infects every level of society, culture, and politics, imprisoning us all in a power binary based on race regardless of our economic circumstances.”

But Ungar-Sargon (2021) also finds that “hidden behind a story that looks like it’s about race is a story about class—even caste” and so “the language of wokeness has allowed affluent white liberals to perpetuate and even excuse a deeply unequal economic status quo, with the help of the national liberal news media.”

We are experiencing an “identity culture war,” Ungar-Sargon (2021) has claimed, in which the MSM portrays “our nation as hopelessly divided along partisan and racial lines” even as doing so serves “as a smoke screen for the actual impenetrable and devastating division that is happening along class lines.”

If Ungar-Sargon’s analysis has merit, and at American Exile we believe it does, we have unquestionably the political mobilization of diversity — the deliberate effort to polarize peoples, to represent and only allow for the discussion of American society as competing factions.

The Cost to Common Goods and Services

We reach the state of social polarization and factionalization, to cite the definition by the Political Instability Task Force, when “political competition is dominated by ethnic or other parochial groups that regularly compete for political influence in order to promote particularist agendas and favor group members to the detriment of common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas” (76).

A nation of polarized peoples: When political competition is dominated by ethnic or other parochial groups that regularly compete for political influence in order to promote particularist agendas and favor group members to the detriment of common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas.

Is this happening in the USA? Consider the troublesome history of the Biden-Harris administration to expand infrastructure spending to include “human or social infrastructure” (Investopedia, 6 July 2022) — an expansion which seemed to many observers as rewarding key constituent groups by deficit spending under the guise of infrastructure improvement.

Consider Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s concerns about the “Corrupt Weaponization of the FBI and DOJ” (9 August 2022);  former Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo’s claims that “the Democrats continuing to weaponize federal government agencies against Americans who do not share their narrow political ideology” (12 August 2022). Likewise, consider the concerns expressed by the Locke Institute (among many others) that American public should “beware a weaponized IRS” since “it has often been used an instrument of intimidation, even terror, against political foes” (14 September 2022).

Certainly, to quote again from the Political Instability Task Force definition, we have a widespread perception that the Biden-Harris administration has been seeking to “promote particularist agendas and favor group members to the detriment of common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas.”

If dear reader you deem this simply as business as normal and consider even the Eisenhower Federal Highway Act of 1956 as an example of white supremacy, please do understand that your response itself assumes that the American public is irrevocably divided into competing groups and factions. Your cognitive patterns likewise reveal how deeply social polarization and factionalization have permeated the public discourse. You might also regularly read the Atlantic or the NYT.

Elections as Direct Pathways to Violence

When we reach the worst-case scenario of social polarization, the democratic process itself — or, at least, holding nation-wide elections — will provide a direct pathway to violence. Although the information cited below is dated, the pattern is consistent: as we learn from Voting in Fear: Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa (2013): “Seventeen African countries held presidential, legislative, or parliamentary elections in 2011.  In eleven countries (60 percent), the elections were violent in some manner.” Why?

Because the elections confer sovereignty — and sovereignty is generally exclusive not rather than divisible. In a factionalized, polarized society, elections mean that one group wins — de facto becoming the legitimate government. The other groups lose. But this zero-sum representative (in matter of speaking) government means we have lost any sense of a traditional republic or even a democracy. Why?

Because people do not vote as individuals, but instead vote as group members. They vote without any shared sense of a greater good, of a common cause. They participate in political life as a zero-sum game: for their prospects to improve, another group’s prospects must diminish. Or, to put it in terms of economic policy, we have abandoned growth for redistribution.

The role of government is now to take from some and give to others, by any means necessary. The Administrative State — and not the marketplace — choses the winners and losers. But our elites will do their best to ensure that they are not the targets of redistribution. Think of Obama’s cash for trash bailout of Wall Street. Think of the residents of Martha’s Vineyard in less than 48 hours booting the migrants into a military base. Etc.

Elites Incentivizing Group Conflict

When someone like Hillary Rodman Clinton speaks of democracy, she calls for increased inter-group competition even as she demonizes the opposition and hence rationalizes further social unrest and civil violence. Her desired outcome is one-party rule. Elections which serve to ratify the Administrative State, and to remove rights and responsibilities from individual citizens. You voted — you’re done — now do what you’re told. In four years, you get to vote again — choosing from our carefully curated candidate list.

According to the Boston Herald editorial staff (4 September 2022), President Joseph Biden was “channeling his inner Hillary Clinton” for his now infamous Independence Hall speech in which he seemed to target 74 million American voters as possible enemies of the state. Or, as Orlando Sanchez (8 September 2022) of The Dallas Express well-summarized Biden’s effort:

“President Biden attempted to take the attention off of his failing presidency, while marginalizing and even criminalizing close to half of the voting population of America, and he chose to do it at one of America’s most historic locations, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. … [Biden] is acting like a Third World dictator, using the FBI and Justice Department to go after his political opponents in ways this country has never seen.”

Dear reader, you need not agree at all with Orlando Sanchez to appreciate that he and many other Americans do believe we have a factionalized, polarized society. Enough people believing this makes it true because they will interact with and react to each other accordingly.

Diversity and Wealth Inequality

To repeat, we mentioned that scholarship affirms that for the worst-case scenario of social polarization, the democratic process itself — or, at least, holding nation-wide elections— will provide a direct pathway to violence. What comprises the worst-case scenario? The worst-case scenario is a society polarized — divided — across both socio-economic and ethnic lines: that is, a society with both high economic inequality and high diversity. So how does the USA measure up?

For diversity, consider the Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the United States: 2010 Census and 2020 Census.  In regard to socio-economic status, we cited earlier work by VDH (2021) who noted that “Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank” and

“A fifth of America receives direct government public assistance. Well over half the country depends on some sort of state subsidy or government transfer money, explaining why about 60 percent of Americans collect more payments from the government than they pay out in various federal income taxes, in various health care entitlements, tax credits and exemptions, federally backed student and commercial loans, housing supplementals, food subsidies, disability and unemployment assistance, and legal help.”

This is a society with both high economic inequality and large numbers of people dependent on the state. These large numbers of people do fall into definable groups — and some of these groups can be and have been politically mobilized to vote, to protest, or to riot.

The Suffering and Shrinking Middle-Class

How do we counter this: the increasing probability the democratic process itself — or, at least, holding nation-wide elections — will provide a direct pathway to violence?

What resists social polarization is a strong middle-class consensus. Why?  Because the middle-class is typically pro-growth and pro-peace. They want social stability, value education, and engage in consumption and investment.  Rather than polarized ethnic or racial identities, members of middle class share a more general if vaguely articulated national identity.

So how is the American middle class doing? Ungar-Sargon (2021) has noted:

“Since the 1970s, upward mobility for the middle class has totally stalled, even declined. In the golden era of economic mobility in the United States, from 1945 through 1973, the top 1 percent owned just under 5 percent of America’s income. The average inflation adjusted income of the bottom 99 percent of families grew by 100 percent during those years, while the average income of the top 1 percent of families grew by a third of that. But over the next two decades, the top 1 percent would come to own the majority of US income growth. The richest four hundred Americans now own more than 185 million others, or the bottom 61 percent.”

Similar to the earlier reports by VDH (2021) and Kotkin (2020), Ungar-Sargon (2021) also finds we have an increasingly bifurcated society, with a shrinking middle class.

The USA is also increasingly a renter nation. For 2022, Statista and other sources report roughly 44 million rental households — an all-time high. NPR (9 June 2022) has reported that the median listed rent has risen above $2000 a month. CNN Business (19 May 2022) has likewise reported that “Rents in the US climbed to a new record high” and “are expected to keep rising.” We do seem — as several experts (30 May 2022) have argued — to be witnessing the emergence of Neo-Feudalism, and the slow but perhaps soon rapid contraction of the American middle class.

Judging by what we can learn from Africa since independence (1960s-70s), does American society meet the criteria for the worst-case scenario?  No, not yet.  But all the momentum seems in that direction. As now part of the American election cycle, we should reasonably expect increased social unrest and civil violence.

Neopatrimonialism

Earlier in this post, we discussed how modern history in Africa shows us the recipe for violent civil unrest — including civil war. Once again, the two essential ingredients are polarized peoples and neopatrimonialism. We just finished covering polarized peoples. Let’s now tackle the tongue-twisting designation “neopatrimonialism.”

Following Williams (2011), we define neopatrimonialism as “mix of legal-rational bureaucracy and personalized systems of power involving clientalism and patronage.”  If this sounds like “rules for thee but not for me” or K Street or “10 [percent] held by H for the big guy” (Devine, 29 November 2021), dear reader, you got in in one. It is the use and abuse of state power to benefit supporters at expense of others, and to advance agendas devoid of both public support and oversight. As such, neopatrimonialism strongly overlaps with what some call Permanent Washington or the Administrative State.

Neopatrimonialism and Factionalization

Neopatrimonialism directly encourages and exacerbates factionalization — the polarization of peoples. We discussed earlier how diversity itself does NOT necessarily lead to violence: it is not a causal agent, but a necessary yet not sufficient contributing factor. Once again, diversity matters when it becomes politically mobilized — and this requires deliberate decision-making, planning and coordination by the power elites and their supporting clerisy.

The relationship is now clear. Neopatrimonial governance requires the zero-sum mobilization of diversity, creating group winners and group losers based upon political affiliation and identity status, and not on merit or need or a commitment to widely shared civic values or sense of the greater good.

Weakened Public Trust and Civic Institutions

Neopatrimonialism weakens public trust in civic institutions. We mentioned above concerns about the FBI and the DOJ. Even prior to President Joseph Biden’s plan to greatly increase the number of armed IRS agents “willing to use deadly force” (Rachel Greszler, 12 August 2022), the IRS appeared to many observers to be using its “vast powers of bureaucratic oversight for patently partisan purposes” (VDH, 2021). 

To cite Victor Davis Hanson (2021) yet once more, the IRS under President Barrack Obama became a “Frankensteinian bureaucracy at war with the citizen:”

‘From 2010 to 2013, the IRS created a BOLO (be on the lookout) list. Its aim was to check the political affiliations of nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status. Purportedly nonpartisan IRS auditors began focusing on organizations with nomenclature that included supposedly telltale terms like “patriots,” “Tea Party,” or “Constitution.” Lois Lerner, head of the IRS tax-exemption division (who would later be held in contempt of Congress and seek early retirement), inordinately delayed or refused these groups’ requests for tax-exempt status.’

 Likewise, VDH (2021) also astutely notes that

“studies authored jointly by Andreas Madestam (Stockholm University), Stanley Veuger (American Enterprise Institute), and Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (Harvard Kennedy School) argued that the Obama administration had essentially weaponized the IRS.”

In addition to the concerns raised about the FBI, the DOJ, and the IRS, we must now add the CDC. Although we could cite over a dozen similar reports and sources, consider the following headline by PBS (14 July 2020), which more typically peddles soft propaganda on behalf of our power elites: “CDC’s politicization ‘extremely dangerous’ for Americans, says its former head.” Or, the NBC (14 January 2021) editorial, “The CDC was damaged by marginalization and politicization,” which used KFF data (16 October 2020) to report that “public trust in the CDC is diminished” and “many Americans see the agency as vulnerable to partisan influence.”

It seems beyond doubt that public trust in civic institutions is being undermined as those institutions become increasingly politicized. The USA is fast approaching Sub-Saharan African levels of neopatrimonialism.

Policy Wars of Attrition

Further evils follow from the emergence and entrenchment of neopatrimonial governance (again, defined earlier as “the mix of legal-rational bureaucracy and personalized systems of power involving clientalism and patronage”).

When it comes to public spending and providing common goods, for example, expect policy wars of attrition: each interest group tries to wait the other group out — and having already taken losses, is reluctant to quit without a victory. This goes well beyond gridlock. Policy wars of attrition are destructive to physical infrastructure, to general economic growth and hence shared prosperity, and to civil institutions otherwise tasked with implementing policy.

Does any of this sound familiar from our recent history?  As the Biden-Harris administration and progressive Democrats fight amongst themselves over what “human infrastructure” actually means and which client groups will get rewarded with taxpayer monies, Transportation for America reminds us that “68,842 bridges – representing more than 11 percent of total highway bridges in the U.S. – are classified as ‘structurally deficient,’ according to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)”:

“Structurally deficient bridges require significant maintenance, rehabilitation or replacement. A number of bridges also exceed their expected lifespan of 50 years. The average age of an American bridge is 42 years.”

The same general state of disrepair holds for our national and state highways, and many municipal public roads. We are more concerned with road equity than road maintenance and repair, which translates into decaying infrastructure for the vast numbers of Americans — the outcome one might expect from policy wars of attrition.

Decaying Infrastructure, Sickened Bodies

On it goes. But, of course, at least President Obama back in 2016, after making a big show of support, helped solved the Flint, Michigan water crisis: only he did NOT. That particular public health crisis continues. Moreover, as Science reported in 2018:

“Tainted tap water isn't just a problem in Flint, Michigan. In any given year from 1982 to 2015, somewhere between 9 million and 45 million Americans got their drinking water from a source that was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”

Likewise, a nine-month study by the Guardian and Consumer Reports (31 March 2021) found “alarming levels of forever chemicals, arsenic, and lead in [drinking water] samples taken across the US” and reported the following results:

• More than 35% of the samples had PFAS, potentially toxic “forever chemicals”, at levels above CR’s recommended maximum.

• About 8% of samples had arsenic, at levels above CR’s recommended maximum.

• In total, 118 out of 120 samples had detectable levels of lead.

But our current administration seems more supportive of efforts to coerce children into gender-change, including life-altering surgeries, rather than ensuring that these same children have safe and clean water to drink.

Priorities, priorities: but what one might expect from neopatrimonial governance run amok if the gender-change agenda serves a well-connected and politically important special interest group, and one likely largely sheltered from the immediate effects of our decaying infrastructure.

Who needs clean and safe water to drink, to cook with, to bathe in? What matters for the masses to our power elites is not this world but the next, the one in which we get the ever-changing pronouns right and so obtain salvation. Just not in their heaven. Nor in their gated communities on this earth.

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In Summary

Based on scholarly studies of post-colonial Africa, we know the two essential ingredients for violent civil strife, including the escalation to outright civil war. Those two essential ingredients are polarized peoples (a society divided by identity politics) and neopatrimonialism (which subverts the rule of law and undermines civil institutions). Both result from choices and actions by the power elite and their supporting clerisy, and not by irreversible social or economic forces — until a certain threshold is reached.

Crossing the Threshold?

Once a nation reaches a certain level of instability, the violence takes over. The result is unpredictable.  Consider the 27-year on and off again Angolan Civil War from 1975 to 2002. Consider the short-lived Nigerian Civil War from 1967 to 1970, which left unresolved the issues that even today motivate the Boko Haram movement in northern Nigeria and the Nigeria Delta conflicts in southern coastal Nigeria. Nigeria effectively remains in a state of simmering civil conflict with violent outbreaks which threaten not only national but regional stability and security. Or, to escape Africa and take a recent European example, consider the Yugoslav Wars from 1991 to 2001, which resulted in the break-up of Yugoslavia to six new political entities.

Has the USA crossed this threshold? Is an American Civil War — the late 20th to early 21st century version, not the 19th century version — inevitable? Unavoidable by any means? Much now depends on the very people it seems the American public can trust the least: our power elites, and their supporting clerisy of technocrats and academics.

As Africa, as USA?

In an earlier post on China and Africa, we cited from The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth (2015), by Tom Burgis, a journalist who has paid his sweat dues and his blood dues in places the majority of Americans could not find even with the help of Google Maps:

“Where once treaties signed at gunpoint dispossessed Africa’s inhabitants of their land, gold, and diamonds, today phalanxes of lawyers representing oil and mineral companies with annual revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars impose miserly terms on African governments and employ tax dodges to bleed profit from destitute nations. In the place of the old empires are hidden networks of multinationals, middlemen, and African potentates. These networks fuse state and corporate power. They are aligned to no nation and belong instead to the transnational elites that have flourished in the era of globalization. Above all, they serve their own enrichment.”

We are and have been witnessing the same general players and tactics involved in the looting of — and the perhaps soon enough the destruction of — the American constitutional republic.  We have our own globalists, our power elites, who are 

• “aligned to no nation and belong instead to the transnational elites that have flourished in the era of globalization,”

• and who above all “serve their own enrichment” by and within

• “networks [which] fuse state and corporate power” to socialize the risks and then privatize and extract the gains.

This is true of Sub-Saharan Africa, and this is also true of the USA.

Reversing Course or Accelerating Around the Bend?

Can we return to our constitutional republic, to shared civic values, and to cooperative efforts on “common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas?”  Another way to ask this question: Who else will join Tulsi Gabbard in declaring independence from the rigged game that — on behalf of our power elites —both the Democratic and Republican party leaders insist is the only game in town? To quote Gabbard:

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”

All true, but has the Republican Party in practice performed any better? The forever wars of George W. Bush have only recently ended — but inspired the Obama-era regime change wars in Libya and Syria which truthfully are still ongoing. Now, the same members of Permanent Washington who brought us the Gulf Wars and more have set their sights on regime change in Russia — even if this means fighting to the last Ukrainian and causing global economic hardship.

None of this can or does happens unless the Congress and Senate prioritize the agendas of our power elites over the American people as a whole. Once again: our Un-Civil Wars to come will not take the form of Republicans versus Democrats, or Red States versus Blue. But the election process itself, as we discussed earlier, will provide a direct pathway to violence. Our two-party system, corrupted if not consumed by neopatrimonialism, will make happen the zero-sum political outcomes which result in civil violence. Unless.

Unless we have leaders — in politics, culture, academia, business, and more —who are willing to find or create common ground, establish a strong center, and work to de-polarized American society and to check neopatrimonial governance. To resist the transformation of our Republic into an Administrative State. Unless we have an American public which desires the same, and is willing to support such leaders even while holding them accountable. The body politic. Let’s take that literally.

Zombieland at the Frankford El

In truth, every time your author returns to the USA, your author wonders if the Zombie Apocalypse has not already happened: that is, the Big Pharma, Big Food destruction of American bodies and hence American minds. From over-prescribed Oxycodone to self-medicating with street Fentanyl, with fast food and junk food as the constants. Is the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, the childhood city of your author, an aberration in the present or a root colonization of the future?

A red-wave in the November mid-term elections means little if you are on your way to obesity, whether pharmaceutically supported or otherwise (6 June 2022). If you are on your way to or remain trapped in wage-slavery. If you are already living in Big Pharma zombie land. The government will not save you — the government wants you right where you are. In the Un-Civil Wars likely to come, you serve as one of the walking dead to be marshalled against other groups of the walking dead. Instead, choose liberty — choose life. Accept personal responsibility and so declare independence.

Resist. Physically. Financially. Then, mentally and politically. Take care of your body. Eat clean. Strength train (9 July 2022). Reduce or end your dependency on the Medical-Industrial complex.  Establish some FU money — the emergency fund needed for job change or time-off, relocation, and more. Healthy citizens, not sickly serfs, make for better political outcomes.

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Standard disclaimer: Our link to or citation of any source or person does NOT imply that source or person in anyway endorses American Exile. Our preferred pronouns remain: “small fringe minority” & “unacceptable views.”

Notes & Sources: In the post above is a mix from memory, notes, and source-checking of material your author has been working with on and off for some time. Synergy and fusion are good: not good is a mismatch of quotation, summary, and paraphrase. But this is not an academic paper, so please accept that although the Africana studies are credited here below, scholarly sins in citation have almost certainly occurred above.

Autesserre  (2010), The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and International Peacekeeping; Autesserre (2014), Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention; Bekoe, ed. (2012), Voting in Fear: Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa; Burbank & Cooper (2010), Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference; Burgis (2015), The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth; Collier (2010), Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places; Easterly (2001), The Elusive Quest For Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics; Easterly (2006), The White Man's Burden: Why The West's Efforts To Aid The Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good;  Easterly (2014), The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor; Meredith (2005), The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence; Münkler (2005), Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States; Nugent (2004), Africa Since Independence; O’Rourke (2018), Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War; Prunier (2008),  Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe; Reno (2012), Warfare in Independent Africa; Williams (2011; 2016), War and Conflict in Africa, 2nd Ed.

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Nota bene: My apologies to my few readers, and to the Substacks I likewise follow and would regularly comment on. Much going on the past two months, some of which will continue until late December 2022. Expect to be highly active for 2023, but less so for the remainder of 2022. All best.