Will Civil War Come to MD Again?

In the coming 2024 election, Maryland is holding a referendum to amend its state constitution. The results of the vote will be divisive either way, but they’re of secondary importance. It’s the referendum’s very existence that matters most.

It was introduced as part of a political conflict that’s tearing the nation apart. If this conflict is resolved through a Constitutional process, we in MD will see big but peaceful changes. If it’s not, we may be pulled into another civil war.

Two incompatible worldviews are in conflict.

On the ballot is a question: Should MD establish a right to “reproductive freedom?” That phrase means two very different things to its proponents and opponents:

THE LEFT	THE RIGHT
It means that a person can determine how, and under what circumstances, they will have a baby.	It means that a woman can kill her own baby, in secrecy, up until the moment it would have been born.
It also involves the primacy of professionals over parents in molding and informing all children.	It also involves the primacy of parents over professionals in guiding and protecting their own children.

For the Left, the amendment represents moral progress, an enlightened policy carried out by compassionate experts. For the Right, it represents child sacrifice, and parental authority being usurped by Left-wing apparatchiks.

The fact that this amendment is on the ballot shows that two very different worldviews are in conflict right now. In terms of the Spiral Dynamics model of cultural evolution, it’s the Postmodern vs. the Traditional.

POSTMODERN	TRADITIONAL
The Left’s worldview. It values personal expression, secular ideals, and social sensitivity. It’s thoroughly feminine.	The Right’s worldview. It prizes law and order, religious morality, and social stability. It’s predominantly masculine.
Its chief proponents are women with professional degrees who work in government bureaucracies.	Its chief proponents are men with a military background who work in private enterprises.

What makes these two worldviews incompatible is that both the Left and Right now regard each other as a threat to their fundamental values and way of life.

THE LEFT SAYS:	THE RIGHT SAYS:
The Right is a “basket of deplorables,” an evil patriarchy that wants to oppress and subjugate people like us.	The Left is a mob of loonies, a satanic matriarchy that wants to marginalize and manipulate people like us.
A Right-run America looks like our idea of the rural South: a backward and barbarous place controlled by a bunch of brutal, bigoted bible-thumpers.	A Left-run America looks like San Francisco: a formerly prosperous and pleasant place despoiled by a smug, immoral globohomo aristocracy.

What seals this incompatibility is ideology. While the Right has taken a turn towards trad populism, the Left adheres to wokeness. So, while people on the Right generally observe the Christian precept that every soul can be redeemed, many on the Left see those outside their circle as having no redeeming qualities at all.

They’re part of a geopolitical power struggle.

The referendum isn’t just a MD matter. It’s tied into a national conflict, which in turn is part of a worldwide power struggle. In this struggle, the Left is being used by a globalist oligarchy to grab power and hold it against a rising populist, nationalist Right.

(By way of explanation, populism is the idea that regular people, not just a ruling class, should be able to live decently. Nationalism is the idea that citizens of a nation-state, not globalist bureaucrats, should control their own culture and affairs.)

This globalist oligarchy is composed mainly of billionaire financiers with firms on Wall Street and in the City of London. Allied with the US and UK intelligence services, it controls Left-wing governments throughout the Western world.

Its strategy to prevail in this struggle is to swamp every Western country with mass illegal migration. It’s no coincidence that Ireland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States are all simultaneously having millions of migrants pour illegally across their borders, against the wishes of most of their citizens.

Here’s why that strategy was chosen, and how it works:

• This globalist oligarchy, which makes itself most visible at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, wants to run the world, or at least the West. To do this, it must destroy its opponents on the populist, nationalist Right.
• Mass illegal migration is the means it employs to achieve this end. Why? Because it divides and weakens the countries it wants to control, and migrants can be bribed to vote for its front politicians with subsidies, handouts, and green cards.
• This illegal migration program, along with its accompanying “non-citizens should vote” push, is being executed by Left-wing governments in Europe and the United States, with the help of international NGOs.

No doubt the globalist oligarchs see this program as necessary because the world needs their leadership. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have gone to school at Choate or Eton, they might say. Not everyone is smart enough to have made billions through hedge funds. Shouldn’t the people who are run the world?

This program is also seen as a good thing by people on the Left. Heavily propagandized and indoctrinated into wokeness, they see illegal migration as a triumph of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and defend it by labeling anyone who objects to it as racist.

As you might imagine, people on the Right don’t like this globalist program one bit. They see it as an attack on their national sovereignty. That’s why Germany’s nationalist AfD party has skyrocketed in popularity there, and why Right-oriented governments were recently elected in Austria and Hungary. It’s also why 25 US states backed Texas in its defiance of the Federal government’s open border policy.

Here in MD, many on the Right see this program as an attack on their local sovereignty as well. They see the City of Frederick’s recent decision to allow non-citizens to vote as part of it. They also see the indictment of Frederick County’s popular Sheriff, who had illegal migrants convicted of crimes deported, as “lawfare.” That is, courts being weaponized by the Left to attack elected officials on the Right.

A new American Revolution is imminent.

The scientist Peter Turchin developed a model that predicted civil wars and revolutions. A decade ago, he used it to predict that the US would see civil unrest in the early 2020s. He was correct. Now he thinks that the US will have a civil war or revolution soon, because it “checks all the boxes” of a nation about to have one: exploding public debt, declining wages, a growing rich/poor divide, and declining public trust.

With its rapidly-increasing $35 trillion national debt, wages falling behind the rate of inflation, extreme wealth concentration, and elections widely perceived to be fraudulent, the US does indeed check all of those boxes. Historically speaking, it’s well on its way to a civil war or revolution.

All civil wars and revolutions need a spark to light the fires of open conflict, an initiating event that sets two opposing sides against each other. Usually that’s some sort of budget crisis, as happened in France before the French Revolution. Sometimes it’s an electoral dispute, as occurred in the United States before the Civil War. Right now, in America, either one could spark armed conflict between the Left and the Right.

If and when such a conflict begins, it will most likely take one of two forms: a dissolution of the nation, or a new civil war.

When the US was being formed from the colonies of an imperial power, it had two incompatible factions within it: Loyalists and Patriots. Some Loyalists avoided the Patriots by moving to Canada, others joined the British redcoats in fighting it out. Now the US is an imperial power itself, and again it contains two incompatible factions.

America’s Left and the Right are incompatible because each regards the other’s values as inimical. For example, the Left is just as determined to indoctrinate kids with woke ideology as the Right is resolved to protect kids from it. Like the Loyalists and the Patriots of the nation’s founding days, neither is willing to live in a nation under the other’s control, so they must either separate or fight it out.

The global power struggle makes this a certainty:

• If the globalist oligarchs’ program of mass illegal migration continues for four more years, it will likely transform the US into a one-party nation, as it turned California into a one-party state, and the Right will never hold national power again. Thus, to ensure its survival as a political force and cultural presence, the Right must end this program now, either through winning the upcoming election and reversing it, or by establishing a new nation (or nations) composed of “Red” states.
• If the Right keeps winning elections in the US, the key country in the West, the globalist oligarchs know that it will become impossible to achieve their goal of running the world, or at least the West. Their power is waning, so if they’re ever to achieve their goal, they have to act now. They must place Left-wing politicians into decisive power, or cripple the Right-led government, and then put their mass illegal immigration program into overdrive, while forcing the US to stay intact.

Scenario 1: The Union dissolves, new countries are born

In one dissolution scenario, the Right wins the 2024 US presidential election, and…

1. The globalist oligarchs use their allies in the intelligence services and “blue” city/state governments to employ their regime-change techniques here in the US: assassination, color revolution-style protests, false flag attacks, etc.
2. The Right, with the help of the US military, beats back these attacks. However, the damage is done: this regime-change assault makes the blue states ungovernable by a Right-led central government.
3. By this time, the Red states aren’t too keen on governing the Blue states anyway, so they call for a new Constitutional Convention to propose an amendment to dissolve the Union and let the states do as they like.
4. The rank-and-file Left, propagandized to regard the Right as reprehensible, “slips the lead” of its globalist masters, jumps at the chance to separate from the Right, and agitates for blue states to approve this new Convention.
5. A new Constitutional Convention is called. After a month or so of horse-trading (Northern VA joins the blue states, Western PA joins the red states), the amendment passes.
6. Texas declares itself a republic. So does California. The states of the old Confederacy organize themselves into “Dixie 2.0.” The mid-Atlantic states and New England come together to form a new nation. The states of the midwest and great lakes, mountain west, and southwest form new countries as well.
7. Many people in red rural areas within Blue territory (most of New Hampshire, for example) move to red states. Many people in blue urban areas within Red states (Austin, Texas, for example) move to blue states.

In this scenario, Maryland joins a new nation composed of blue states, and residents on the Right are faced with a choice: stay and live in a country that promotes values contrary to their own, or leave and live in one based on the same values they hold.

Scenario 2: A new and bloody Civil War is fought

In one civil war scenario, the Left wins the 2024 US presidential election, and…

1. The Right declares it illegitimate, pointing out examples of ballot fraud, widespread voting by non-citizens, and electronic voting discrepancies. It asks the Supreme Court to invalidate the election so a new one can be held.
2. The Supreme Court refuses, and rules that the results should stand. In response, the red states that sided with Texas in its border dispute with the Feds call for a new Constitutional Convention as a first step toward secession.
3. The Left leverages its control of the executive branch to prevent that, using heavy-handed legal tactics and budgetary maneuvers to remove the Right’s leaders and pressure red state legislatures.
4. Right-led protests erupt, led by young men. One of them is killed by a Homeland Security drone. Enraged by this, young men on the Right begin forming militias.
5. Fearing a full-blown rebellion, the Federal government arrests and jails militia leaders. This inflames the situation. The red states begin mobilizing their National Guard units, while the Federal government mobilizes the active-duty military.
6. Much of the active-duty military refuses to obey its orders to occupy red state capitals, so Homeland Security forces are sent in. They are resisted by red state National Guard and militia forces, and the new American civil war is on.
7. Lacking enough conventional military power to prevail in the conflict, the Federalists launch a “decapitation” biowarfare attack on the Secessionist capital.
8. In response, Air Force units aligned with the Secessionists launch a cruise missile attack with one tactical nuclear warhead on Washington DC.
9. A truce is arranged. Some horse-trading is done (Northern VA joins the Federalist nation, Western PA goes Secessionist), and a peace treaty is signed.

In this scenario, Maryland becomes part of a new nation composed solely of blue states, with many of its Right-leaning residents relocating to a new red-state nation.

This election presents many different possibilities

Those two scenarios aren’t the only ways in which things could play out, of course. Simplicius notes other possibilities for what he says is “likely the most momentous election in US history:”

• The election could be so obviously fraudulent that the “losing” side just declares that it won, and the country descends into turmoil.
• The winner takes office, after which the globalist-run financial system is used to tank the economy. Globalist-owned media blame him, and chaos ensues.

I would note some other near-term possibilities as well:

• Patriots in the US intelligence services release incriminating info on globalist oligarchs and their front politicians, and put a stop to their dirty tricks. Their allied officeholders then try to “drain the swamp” and restore the republic.
• Members of the globalist oligarchy decide to protect their current positions of privilege, abandon their campaign of global domination, and retire to their estates overseas to avoid the coming storm of crises in the West.

We are living at a world-historical moment

Whatever happens in this election, fundamental changes are bound to occur. That’s because we’re living at a time when three historical cycles are turning over:

• The historian Oswald Spengler noted that civilizations take around a thousand years to go from birth to their decline. This happened with Greece and Rome (1000 BC to 0), the Middle East (0 to 1000 AD), and the Western world (1000 to 2000). The Western civilization that arose around the Thames, Seine, and Rhine rivers, and got transplanted to the Potomac, is in decline.
• Sir John Glubb, a colonial administrator, noted in his writing that all empires have an inception-to-fall lifespan of around 250 years. This, he pointed out, was true regardless of the place or time. The empires of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Persians lasted that long, as did those of the Mayans, the Spanish, and the Dutch. Now the American empire is falling, and its 250 years are up in 2026.
• William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book titled The Fourth Turning that described how America undergoes revolutionary changes every four generations, or around 85 years. In 1776, for instance, the USA declared its independence. In 1861, it fought a civil war. In 1941, it became the world’s preeminent power. Now, in the mid-2020s, it is losing that position and heading toward a political crisis.

We have an opportunity for peace and renewal

Maryland, as a bastion of the Left with many Right-leaning residents, and a blue state bordering red “Pennsyltucky” and the predominantly red South, will be in the thick of whatever political changes occur in America during the coming months and years.

These political changes, if we are fortunate and wise, will include a “velvet divorce” between the American Left and Right, a peaceful parting of the ways conducted according to a Constitutional process.

Some may lament the passing of “one nation, indivisible,” but in the way that matters most, that nation will live on. The new countries that arise from it will all have constitutions based on the one adopted in 1789. That Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, is a great gift bequeathed to us, one that will benefit future generations.

Some may look back in nostalgia, and curse the changing times. Change, however, includes gain as well as loss, and if we behave as typically resourceful do-it-yourself Americans, we stand to gain quite a bit.

Western civilization is dying? A new and different civilization that will succeed it is being born on this continent.

The American empire is falling? The United States was never intended to be an empire, so good riddance to it.

The “fourth turning” involves conflict? Well, conflict can spawn creativity, which can take the form of a cultural rebirth.

Here’s wishing everyone in Maryland, as we prepare to vote in the upcoming election, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and the blessings of a lasting peace.