There is apparently a new movie about a new American civil war. The trailer looks impressive but painful. One wonders how successful it will be. I have no idea of the political bias or motivation for making it, but the trailer itself does speak to the terrible reality of our times.
The pains we suffer in real life from overweening government power, censorship, medical impositions, betrayal by so many once-respected institutions, and ongoing attacks on regular people simply trying to live peaceful and normal lives have become too much. In other words, we might not need to see the movie when we are already living the reality.
When did your own sense of foreboding begin? Everyone to whom I speak has a different answer. Some people date it from the 2016 election and the rage of the establishment against the populist movement that voted the “wrong person” into office. The deep state targeted Trump voters as the enemy and decided democracy wasn’t working.
Others say it really began with the Obama presidency, which was nothing but a stalking horse for corporatist takeover in the name of social justice. Others trace the breakup of the United States to the response to 9/11, in which the United States institutionalized massive statism at home and abroad.
For me, it was none of this, although I was against all these trends at the time. Still, these issues seemed solvable within our normal processes and parlor debates. I never seriously considered the possibility of a complete collapse of American liberty and nationhood. I never imagined the possibility of a literal sacking of the country, with rampant violations of basic property rights, bands of illegal immigrants flooding major cities, and whole states toying with literal secession as a means of survival.
For me, the realness of all this hit hard on March 12, 2020, the beginning of extreme and unprecedented travel restrictions, and then the hour-by-hour tightening of restrictions over the coming days and weeks. Churches and businesses were closed, and schools, too. The whole of American life and liberty were overthrown in a seeming instant and under a pretext that was mostly built on a fictional threat to everyone from a virus that was medically significant for a small and known cohort.
