50.1% of Americans Think There Will Be a Civil War in the Next Few Years.
It is doubtful that this will happen, but it speaks volumes about the mindset in America.
A civil war in America in the next few years?
That sounds far too alarmist to be true, but it is the opinion of just over half of Americans as I write this!
It is doubtful that this is the case, but it says a lot about the state of mind in the United States. The political system there is no longer capable of dialogue and compromise. This means that there is no immediate way out.
Only in America. This appeared on Fox News in the last week of July 2022: “Video shows Utah child, 4, shoot at police outside McDonald's drive-thru.”
You can't even imagine a title like that, even for a bad horror movie. But that's the brutal and harsh reality. While we are already stunned and silenced by headlines like “Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting: 21 dead, 19 of them children” or “Already 308 mass shootings in the U.S. counted through July 5, 2022, more shootings than days in the year”, the degeneration of American civil society continues to stun us.
In Utah, a father ordered his four-year-old child - you read that right - to shoot at the police during his arrest. And shoot he did. We could call this yet another news item, so much so that in the United States the abnormal seems to become the norm.
1 in 25 Americans think they will eventually shoot someone
With this in mind, the results of a survey of 8,620 Americans conducted by the respected market research firm Ipsos do not even seem surprising.
Many Americans assume that the situation will get completely out of hand in the next few years. A staggering 50.1% of Americans - a word often misused in the media, but appropriate here - assume that a civil war will break out in the next few years.
January 6, 2021, riots on Capitol Hill would therefore be a prelude to a full-blown armed conflict. Nearly 20% of those polled want to arm themselves in the event of political unrest in the next few years. In conclusion, one in 25 Americans thinks they will shoot someone:
Dialogue no longer seems possible in America
There are many problems in the United States, and a large number of guns in circulation is only one of them. What is worse, however, is the polarization of society into two major ideological blocs and the fact that these two groups no longer talk to each other, both convinced of their right to do so. Anyone who knows the United States knows that friendships between Republicans and Democrats are no longer possible. There are only two options left: break the friendship or avoid talking about politics.
This is a consequence of the “first past the post-voting system” that characterizes Anglo-Saxon countries. After all, there is always only one winner in elections, not a group of winners. What one wins, the other loses. In Europe, several parties can declare themselves winners because they have all made progress. This is not the case in the United States, where every election has a single winner, whether for the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the presidency.
What happened to moderate voters in America?
In the United States, you have true far-left activists, center-left voters, center-right voters, and a large group of far-right voters who follow populists like Donald Trump. Their choice is limited only to Democrats or Republicans and they cannot, as in Europe, vote for a wide range of parties. There are no other choices, which means that any nuance in the debate has now disappeared.
Whoever shouts loudest wins. Note that it was different in the past in the United States, where compromise was possible, but mores have changed for dozens of reasons. But that is another matter.
The re-election of Donald Trump would be the fatal blow to American democracy
In this toxic environment, the re-election of Donald Trump - who, along with others, has largely contributed to this atmosphere - would of course be the final nail in the coffin of American democracy.
According to an in-depth investigation by the American news site Axios, Donald Trump is preparing an attack on the so-called “Deep State”. He wants to make sure that every Democratic vote - or liberal vote, as they say in the United States - is purged at every level, from top to bottom. The whole system of checks and balances on which American democracy rests would then collapse more than ever.
It seems increasingly clear that this polarization is also possible in Europe. The French presidential elections are an exception in Europe. There too, as in the United States, there are only two choices. While father Jean-Marie Le Pen had to settle for 18% of the vote in 2002, daughter Marine Le Pen won 41% of the vote when she ran for president against Emmanuel Macron in April 2022. Here too, the divide is an increasingly prevalent reality.
Proportional representation is a blessing
In Europe, we have a different political system, where every vote counts. In the United States, the person who gets the fewest votes may be still elected. George W. Bush and Donald Trump both received fewer votes than their respective opponents Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, but they won more electoral votes and thus the presidency.
In Europe, every vote counts - although there are electoral thresholds - and you can vote for a much wider range of parties. It's also much easier to start a new party, as the rise of Emmanuel Macron in France in 2017 showed. This is not possible in the United States.
This proportional representation system creates a very different culture, of which the European Union is proof.
The United States of Europe, which we are rapidly moving toward - the British have seen it clearly - has this culture. In time, this will prove to be a blessing. The great solidarity that has existed since the Russians attacked Ukraine and since the Brexit is admirable.
The cooperation of national governments often leads to many frustrations. The most recent example is the hallucinatory show given in Italy by Mario Draghi. But this cooperation will have to intensify more than ever in supranational organizations. Certainly when it comes to huge challenges like Covid, unpredictable Russia, or climate change, which will dominate our lives in the next 50 years.
Shooting each other at political meetings is not the way to go.
Some reading
4 Barriers to Bitcoin Mass Adoption (and Their Solutions). We can trust the Bitcoin community to address these issues in the future.
Recession in America? Here We Go! So, What’s Next Now? The Fed continues to apply its strategy, which is bearing fruit, as the drop in 10-year rates demonstrates.
History Often Rhymes — Lessons for the US Dollar From the Collapse of the Roman Denarius. For some, America is in the midst of a modern Diocletian moment.