Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella comments on the Kate Steinle verdict, in a post rightly titled A Struggle for the Soul of America. After quoting a passage from this essay by the indispensable Heather Mac Donald (an essay you must be sure to go and read in full), Bill adds:

There you have it. Which side are you on? Will you tell me that we need to ‘come together,’ and ‘drop the labels,’ and ‘find common ground’? There is no common ground here. Either you stand for national sovereignty and the rule of law, or you don’t. Either you distinguish between legal and illegal immigration or you don’t. Either you stand for the defunding of ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions or you don’t, leaving aside the denialist lie that there are no such jurisdictions!

Bill’s right: increasingly, there simply is no common ground in what I recently heard someone describe as “this walking carcass of a nation”. Order may yet be imposed, but when the organic and horizontal ligatures that bind a population into a nation have rotted away — as they have in America — then it will be an artificial, top-down order of increasingly authoritarian style.

Bill quotes a reader of his, who emailed:

At this point I believe that a shooting civil war in this country is inevitable; a government that fails in its first duty to protect its citizens is no longer legitimate, and the Left will not leave except it is forced out.

Bill responded:

No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order. Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be.

Quite so. I recalled that I had written something about this myself, and looking through my archives found a post from two years and a day ago, entitled This Ain’t No Disco. I repost it in full below; I invite you also to visit the original post to read the discussion in the comment-thread.

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In a recent post I remarked that, with bitterly opposing forces tearing at our rotting social framework, every public shock ”” in this case, the San Bernardino jihad assault ”” is a hammer-blow that “strains the joints and widens the cracks’. “Each time,’ I remarked in a subsequent comment, “we split apart a little more.’

Commenter “pangur’ asked:

Why is this bad? Why is it that we should make common cause with our enemies? A longing for an America that no longer exists is at best sentimental, and at worst destructively futile. Time to move forward, and apart.

The point is a good one. If, as I believe, the rot is already too deep, the disease too advanced, the rifts too wide, the enmity too bitter for the nation to recover, then the only hope for the restoration of something built on the old foundations of Western greatness will require, first, that this tottering edifice ”” this walking corpse ”” collapse. Indeed I think this is already underway.

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?