Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those who dissent from the accumulating theses of “Progressive” orthodoxy. (A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is to make it safest simply to say nothing.)

Writing at at PJ Media, Richard Fernandez has taken up this topic in a brief item about the possibility of a new kind of civil war. After listing some examples of deepening political viciousness, he brings up the idea of “hybrid warfare”:

While one explanation for the fractiousness is a reversion to our primitive natural tendency to mistrust outsiders, the other possibility is that it is now the way modern warfare is waged. The Russians have ascribed events unfolding in Venezuela to an American Trojan Horse strategy. It “would rely on ‘protest potential of the fifth column’ to destabilize the situation in the countries with unwanted governments … using the technologies of color revolutions.” The Russians, whose Soviet empire was overthrown by the color revolutions, have been experimenting with similar strategies known as hybrid warfare. As the NYT reported: General Gerasimov laid out in an article published in 2013 … which many now see as a foreshadowing of the country’s embrace of “hybrid war”… analysts see a progression from the blend of subversion and propaganda used in Ukraine to the tactics later directed against Western nations, including the United States, where Russia’s military intelligence agency hacked into Democratic Party computers during the 2016 election. With conventional war rendered suicidal by the advent of nuclear weapons, a cocktail of lawfare, info war, deliberate population movement, and targeted physical intimidation is now the toolset of choice and the Russians, Chinese, jihadis, EU, and USA each have their versions. “The idea that the Russians have discovered some new art of war is wrong,’ Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Royal United Services Institute and the author of “Russian Political War,’ said of the general’s latest speech. “This is basically the Russians trying to grapple with the modern world.’ Hybrid war has long been a Western military term of art, analysts say, especially in the context of counterterrorism. But since the resulting battlefields are waged inside the country, there is little reason why domestic political conflict should not resemble the international ones. Because victory is now attained by jailing opponents, silencing or financially sanctioning them, punitive prosecution, deplatforming, and universal surveillance are used alike in both cases and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart.

In recent months I’ve made frequent reference to military historian Michael Vlahos, who, as another regular guest on Mr. Batchelor’s nightly show, has been discussing the possibility of civil war in America. One of the points he’s made often is that it’s hard to say, except in retrospect, when civil wars actually begin; before the armies take the field there are years, or often decades, of deepening strife in which comity disintegrates and the two sides learn to hate and dehumanize one another. When, for example, did America’s civil war of the nineteenth century really begin? At Fort Sumter? Or was that merely the moment that a civil war already in progress for decades burst into flame? In hindsight, it’s clear that the bitter antipathy between North and South was already beyond all hope of reconciliation long before the shooting started. The evidence is plain enough: Bleeding Kansas, the John Brown atrocities, the caning of Charles Sumner, the Congressional brawl of 1858 — or even the Graves-Cilley duel, which happened all the way back in 1838, and became a rallying point for an already darkening North-South antagonism.

So: has our new civil war already begun? Mr. Fernandez continues:

If a civil war were actually underway it would take the form of hybrid warfare and look much like what can already be observed today. It would explain why, in an era obsessed with safe spaces and tolerance, there is little of either left; why no one is safe from offense, nothing is private; why everything is increasingly criminalized. That context would explain why each new restriction, whether on the use of cash, private transportation, or gun ownership can be perceived as a veiled threat. “Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: ‘I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.'” It might shed light on why so many people already feel like psychological refugees with the strange sense they have been evicted from their homes and wondering: what happened to my country? To the church on the corner? To family gatherings? Trust networks? Why have they been turned into battlegrounds? … Is America already in a state of civil hybrid war from which only one winner can emerge? The problem with Trojan horses and the reason they’re so effective is that they remain ambiguous until it’s almost too late.

How did we come to such a pass? For those of us on the Right side of this gaping chasm, the answer is clear: the ground under our own feet hasn’t shifted much at all, while everything to our Left has torn away at an accelerating pace. Cultural and political opinions that were shared, without controversy, by almost every American just a few years ago — opinions still held by half of the nation’s people — are now “right-wing extremism”, and their public expression denounced and suppressed as “hate speech”. Saying a thing that once was obvious to everyone can now cost you your reputation, your livelihood, and in many parts of the West today, your freedom.

In China, the government has built a “social credit” system to track every citizen’s life in granular detail, and examine it for conformance to political and cultural guidelines. A low score is to be punished by, among other things, blacklisting for jobs and bank-loans, restrictions on travel, and public shaming. How is any of this different, except perhaps quantitatively, from what is happening in America and the West? The consequences are the same: express forbidden opinions, and you can already lose your job, your social-media accounts, and your access to banking and financial services. The social-credit system in China is overseen by a group called the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. Would this not be an accurate title for what the new Democratic Party, in conjunction with media and academia, have become?

In a related item at PJ Media (thanks, by the way, to Bill Keezer for both of these links), Sarah Hoyt describes our horror at this steepening slide into totalitarianism, and explains why so many of us support Donald Trump, despite his obvious flaws. Referring to the new Left, she writes:

They don’t realize how much they’re scaring most of this country. They don’t understand how much we fear and loathe the faces they’ve revealed for decades, and particularly since Hillary lost: the praise of socialism, their reluctance to condemn even Venezuela, their crazy desire for not having borders and being open to invasion, their general hatred of America and hatred of all Americans. Even if the media soft-pedaled it, most of us understood perfectly that Mr. Obama loathed America to the point of hating our flag. And most of us saw in his presidency the perfect example of what happens when you elect a president who hates the country he leads. We knew that to elect Hillary was to put in power the rest of the program of our destruction and we didn’t want that… For decades, regardless of the party nominally in power, our polity had been in the hands of those who at best thought America was uncouth and needed reform, and at worst hated us and wanted to bring us low among the nations of the world. Open borders, ever-multiplying regulations that stopped our economy cold and sent jobs overseas, destructive welfare policies that actively made it punitive to stay together as a family. It goes on. And in 2016, when they thought us softened enough, they brought out the full panoply of “socialist this” and “Marxist that.” Hillary’s running mate, for instance. And since then? The mask has come off yet further. So we can either allow them to destroy this country, the last great place on Earth, or we can vote for whosoever opposes them. Even if the person is not what we wish. For anyone in that frame of mind ”“ and I think we have a majority of the country at this point ”“ it doesn’t matter if Trump slept with a sex professional or if she blackmailed him under threat of talking about sleeping with him (remember, whores lie). Heck, if he were found with a live boy and a dead girl at the same time, most of us would go, “not before breakfast’ and keep on trucking on. Because we’re desperate. Because a president who loves America is better than the one who hates it, and because the socialist/communist madness is so strong in the Democrat Party that anyone who opposes them is better than anyone they run. (Remember, the USSR called itself socialist. The difference is one of degree and the sort of fiddly proprietorship on paper stuff only they care about, just like only penguins care about penguin sex differences.) Because the next Democrat president might be the last president of a free America, and then we will have to shoot our way out of socialism.

That’s it exactly: we are desperate. We know how close we are to the edge, to the dissolution of civilized order into chaos and tyranny. We can feel in our bones the implacable hatred of our would-be commissars for everything we believe is good and right and true — along with a growing understanding that their hatred doesn’t stop at our traditions and beliefs. As long as we live and breathe, we are a threat. If the blood-soaked history of the twentieth century can teach us anything at all, it should teach us that it will not be enough to see us displaced and destroyed. They will want us dead and gone.

One of the milestones along the road to civil war is the normalization of violence as a rational response to a dehumanized enemy, followed soon after by an eagerness for general conflict. This eagerness arises first in the breasts of those seeking radical change, who see violence as justified by the righteousness of their cause, and who are usually young and excitable people who have a much better sense of how to destroy what exists than to build and preserve a system that, however flawed, actually works. (This also reflects that the Right, almost by definition, moves toward order, while the Left is always entropic.) But the Right is eminently capable of reactive, or even proactive, violence when confronted by an existential threat to order, and is every bit as liable to the “othering” and dehumanization of its enemies in preparation for war.

There is, then, a spiral of mutual threat and provocation in the run-up to war, along the course of which a people can go from general comity and commonality, to political or cultural division, to rancorous debate, to increasingly bitter struggle for political power, to “othering” and dehumanization, to normalized violence, to bloodthirsty eagerness for war, to general armed conflict. We are already well into the latter stages, and even on the Right I see martial enthusiasm increasing: the hatred of the enemy, the idea that we are now so far beyond reconciliation that there is going to be a fight, and that we might as well get on with it (especially as we are the ones who will most likely win).

I’ve written before that only a fool would actually wish for civil war:

Where I think I part company with many on the dissident Right ”” in particular, those who call themselves “neoreactionaries’, most of whom are, I think, several decades younger than I ”” is that so many of them seem to have a kind of breathless excitement about all of this; it seems they just can’t wait for all the fun they are going to have watching the apocalypse, and then rolling up their sleeves to show everyone how it ought to have been done. This seems to me profoundly, childishly, foolishly, heart-breakingly naÁ¯ve. If this Fall happens ”” slowly at first, probably, and then quite suddenly ”” it will not be fun, and it will not be exciting. It will be awful. There will almost certainly be terrible suffering and dislocation; chaos, violence, plunder, terror, and despair. A great many irreplaceable treasures ”” our children’s ancient birthright and heritage ”” will be forever lost. Whether we will be able to build something worthwhile upon this rubble is doubtful at best, and even if we manage it, it may take a very long time. High civilizations, and in particular high-trust societies, do not grow upon trees, and they are by no means the default human condition. Whatever follows a general collapse, or a civil war, in the West will not be a swashbuckling plot from a Robert Heinlein novel; it is far more likely to be a time of brutality, poverty, suffering, uncertainty, and fear. Others may snap their fingers at the noble experiment now coming apart in America, and may imagine, on no practical experience, that they will know how to do it better. Not I. I will mourn and grieve for the great Republic we have, in our great unwisdom, so recklessly destroyed. Perhaps, as is received doctrine amongst neoreactionary sorts, the American system was doomed ab ovo; it carried in its very democracy the disease that would kill it. I have often said the same myself. But the men who framed this system knew this all too well themselves, and they knew and named the essential qualities and principles that might have inoculated us: qualities that we not only have failed to cherish, but now actively despise. What makes us think we will get it right next time?

Whether we wish for it or not, however, our next civil war may already have begun. I will say also that if the only alternative is tyranny, then as stewards of our civilization we must fight.

Either way, I grieve for the American nation.