Life During Wartime

We are in a “soft” Civil War that may soon become “hard.” We should prepare accordingly.

We find ourselves in a very dangerous, turbulent, rapidly changing situation that is hard to define. I feel we need to start recognizing that we are already engaged in a war — a war for our future survival that is taking an unfamiliar shape at first. Soon, it may take more conventional forms. We can talk about this as a “hybrid war” which is very much an information or psychological war at the moment, waged between global authoritarianism and more egalitarian forms of representative democracy that seek to protect human rights. We can call it a “soft” or “cold” Civil War, instead of a hard or hot one, which may be coming very soon. We might call it an “anocracy,” a collapse of Democratic institutions into the authoritarian abyss.

It still feels to many of us that Trump, the Reality TV star, is only “cosplaying” Fascism and race war. It feels bizarre, uncanny, surreal — a bad, weird joke. Yet this cosplaying of Fascism is quickly morphing into the real thing, which may soon have horrific, entirely predictable results.

This morning I’ve been reading articles on where we find ourselves right now by Ralph Nader, Noah Berlatsky, Thom Hartmann, Paul Krugman, and Anand Giridharadas, among others. Everyone is sounding the alarm, with growing urgency. As Giridharadas notes, “In recent days, something feels like it has changed. It has to do with the concept of war and the very particular way in which Trump is using it on the home front.” Trump recently posted this on Truth Social, equating his desire to use military force in Chicago with America’s disastrous war in Vietnam:

In Public Notice, Berlatsky writes about “the imperial boomerang,” a phrase from Hannah Arendt. Fascism can be defined as the application of techniques originally used in foreign colonization — lawless mass murder, concentration camps, and so on — to the domestic situation. He quotes Aimé Césaire’s “Discourses of Colonialism,” where he argued that Hitler and the Nazis “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for” the colonies.

“Fascists don’t just learn strategies of repression and atrocity abroad which they can then apply domestically,” Berlatsky writes in “Trump dreams of making Chicago a colony”. “They also build on, hone, and develop ideologies and justifications. This is what Trump is doing in comparing Chicago to Vietnam, and in suggesting that the former should be treated with the massive force and sweeping violence that defined America’s approach to the latter.”

In “Trump’s Worst Crimes Are Yet To Come”, Ralph Nader predicts eventual impeachment followed by a dire Constitutional crisis when Trump refuses to leave office. As of now, Nader writes: “Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party… thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.” A concern is, if cornered, there is no conceivable limit on what Trump would do: “Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.” In this extreme circumstance, Nader suggests we need to remember Aristotle: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

Hartmann believes the reason for the military incursion into Chicago and other U.S. cities is “preparing to use troops for voter suppression in Blue areas of the country during the 2026 elections to prevent Democrats from taking Congress.” Illinois Governor Pritzker agrees, noting that sending in the military now is part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”

In “Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?,” Krugman notes that Trump is seeking to do something very unusual:

The Trump administration is obviously attempting to follow the familiar playbook by which autocracies consolidate their power, effectively turning America into a one-party state where almost everyone accepts that resistance to the regime is futile and is afraid to show any signs of opposition… But historically, anti-democratic parties that establish lasting autocracies have done so with considerable initial support from the broader public. At least at first, they’re actually popular, especially because they deliver, or seem to deliver, major economic gains.

That’s not happening for Trump, at all. And the big question — to which I don’t know the answer — is whether a regime that inherited a good economy but ruined it and whose non-economic policies are deeply unpopular can still consolidate autocratic rule.

Trump’s insane overreach could be a great thing, if it wakes the people up to what’s happening. A slow, insidious march toward authoritarianism — implementing total surveillance via Palantir step by step, and so on — would be much harder to track or resist. Trump’s kayfabe Fascism is blatant, crude, and coming at us fast. As I’ve written recently, I still find an eerily muted quality in how people here are addressing the situation. But that could change quickly. It needs to change quickly.

As Hartmann also writes, Republicans in Congress are no longer concealing their intention to remake the U.S. into a White Christian nation.