Boomer Armageddon, unresolvable vibes, and the American civil wars (real and fake)
Donald Trump will be the last ever Boomer candidate for president, which seems deeply appropriate for this moment in American history - of which many came before and many will come after.
I was about to push the button on this when word dropped that Joe Biden was leaving the race and endorsing Kamala Harris. It changes nothing about the core points. So I only edited the subhead.
“I think you’re probably right. One one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.” — Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” — Kevin Roberts, top Trump advisor, architect of the Trump Project 2025 dictator plan Trump is pretending to run from now.
I count five post-independence American civil wars (or revolutions) that resolved specific, uncompromisable American issues through two-sided national competition with ourselves that would fit into the Alito/Roberts cultural concept of "the left” vs. “the right.” All but the first were “bloodless” in Roberts’ parlance. They are:
The civil war over slavery as the dominant political and economic system of American capitalism. (1861-1865) — won by “the left.”
The first civil war over full black citizenship/legally enforced social deference to white America in Reconstruction. (1868-1876) — won by “the right.”
The civil war over alcohol prohibition. (1919-1932) — won by “the left.”
The second civil war over full black citizenship/legally enforced social deference to white America. (1915-1930-ish) — won by “the right,” with caveats. See here and here for detail.
The third civil war over full black citizenship/legally enforced social deference. (1954-1970-ish) — won by “the left.”
I see count three new civil wars, launched by “the right” against “the left” in the last two years over specific “fundamental things that really can’t be compromised,” but can be resolved, definitively. They are:
The civil war over 15-week-or-less forced birth and a woman’s control of her sexual and birth decisions (2023-???) — just started by “the right,” ongoing.
The civil war over keeping specific gross felon and Capitol Lynch Mob architect Donald Trump out of jail — just started by Alito and “the right,” ongoing.
The civil war over whether the American president is openly a dictator unbound to respect any right Americans might declare for themselves and protected from the people by the unelected and corrupt Supreme Court. (2024-??) — just started by Alito and “the right,” ongoing.
I don’t think same sex marriage and legality of same sex love qualifies as a civil war yet. What we’ve seen in the last decade or so is more evolution of understanding. But if the “right” seeks to nullify that evolution, roll back legislative and judicial branch ratification of same sex marriage, and re-impose the closet by fiat, it will launch the 9th civil war.
“Mass deportation” — which the Nazis couldn’t pull off logistically at smaller scale, so they pivoted to mass extermination — would be the 10th civil war if Trump orders Grady Judd and his fellow local lawmen to attempt it, as he says he will.
We’ll come back to what “mass deportation” would mean on the ground in Polk County in a different article. But if you think it’s an orderly, carefully-targeted process quietly collecting “illegals” only, I have a shelf full of Trump bibles to sell you.
“Build the wall” is a just infantile chant.
Deploying the military and Grady Judd’s SWAT haphazardly into the Disneyburbs of Poinciana or to Lake Wales or Frostproof or Wabash to hunt “illegal” Hispanics and Haitians and herding children into sweltering pens or into forced adoption after deporting (or killing) their parents is very very different and very real.
It’s fake Christian-on-actual Christian violence and depravity of unfathomable depth.
The end of the *fake* Boomer civil war is not the end of American history
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Alito and Roberts seem to see the abstract Boomer armageddon of the Biden v. Trump II as the defining moment of American history — the Super Bowl election of the endless Boomer season after which America will never be the same.
That is the most Boomer vibe of all Boomer vibes ever vibed.
Alito, who is a Boomer, who was 18 in 1968, probably thinks history started in 1968. He likely sees the 2024 election as the decisive culmination of a life spent fantasizing about punching hippies. And judging by all the lamentation, dread, and surrender blame-casting in general lib discourse, the “hippies,” writ large, seem to agree.
Past, present, and future beg to differ with all that narcissism, which is about all I have to say about this election, as a symbolic competition between two elderly individual politicians.
Indeed, I see only one definitively resolvable, permanent aspect of this entire gross, farcical, needless 2024 spectacle: after Biden or Trump, we will never again have a Boomer president. The pretend Boomer civil war, which wasn’t ever real, will be over. It ends in one of two ways, my dear friends:
The whimper of a generally effective, generally well-run administration, figure-topped by a kindly, declining old man (or somebody else; I don’t care either way), who will not try stage a lynch mob coup or use the military to keep him in office until death or try to do a bunch of violent, unpopular things to people in the name of a fake strain of corrupted Christianity that has elevated his opponent above Jesus and thinks God killed a retired fire chief to save his new Son from a gunsick 21-year-old registered Republican aspiring mass shooter with an AR-15.
A years-long spasm of hourly corrupt-declining-old man-rage drama, that, you, my dear Trump-voting, Trump-curious friends, will own for every second until he dies or you drag him screaming out of power because he won’t leave and even you get fed up with him — not to mention the extractive, nepo-billionaires and gross younger minions looking to ride him to economic/social/fake Christian grifter domination. And it will be you, not me, that ultimately has to do it.
Every normal person in America is exhausted by the addiction-feeding performative fake revolution and/or civil war drama that MAGA must continually generate to exist. Many, if not most, MAGAs themselves are exhausted by their persistent addiction, in my observation.
We only get that exhaustion out of our shared lives — or at least diminish it significantly — with choice number 1. And you all know it. I will not waste any time or effort arguing with words you do not mean — or excuses you don’t believe.
The alternative is endless drama, fed by the intensification or commencement of real civil wars, in which the human beings of “the left” have no option but to fight for their existence. “The right” in America kills a lot of people and sheds a lot of blood on its side of moral civil wars; but it tends to lose them in the end because of its betrayal of American founding ideals and aspirations.
And just between you and me, I am not exhausted; because I’m not normal. I’m not addicted. And I’m not cynical.
I’d love to pivot to constructive collaboration with “the right” for a shared future. Let’s start by making sure God doesn’t have to kill anybody to protect anybody else from gunsick 21-year-old registered Republican mass shooters with a Dad-gifted AR-15. Deal?
Until then, the mental exercise and moral competition of fighting the civil wars and gross revolutions you impose on me will keep my mind active and hopefully slow my deterioration as I age. So there’s that.
Undefeated, for now
On its face, “the left,” as Alito and Roberts would understand it, is 3-2 in the real American civil wars already clearly decided.
But if you count the civil war over full black citizenship and legally enforced social deference to white America as one long civil war, with three key multi-year battles, “the left” is actually 3-0. In any decisive war, the last battle matters most.
I do not think this undefeated civil war streak will last.
“The left” will likely lose the least significant of the three new civil wars — holding 78-year-old gross felon Donald Trump personally accountable for his many crimes and misdemeanors.
I congratulate my friends on “the right” for that stirring, historic victory. I’m sure you and your descendants will gather in public commemorations in 50 years to celebrate DJT-Day and how you all owned the libs by making sure Ex-president Lynch Mob stayed out of prison.
Why “the right” cares so much about protecting this 78-year-old gross felon from personal accountability is important to understanding how to fight the civil wars that really matter. We’ll come back to it.
But, in every way, the forced birth civil war matters exponentially more than Donald Trump’s personal impunity. And “the left” will win it in a rout over the next decade, if not sooner. This is because most of “the right” is “the left” when it comes to forced birth — even though they once preened around pretending to be morally superior to us and getting abortions on the down-low.
Forced birth has never been less popular in America than it is today. It’s already gone, again, via overwhelming voice of the people, in Trump-voting Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, etc. — not to mention “blue” America. Texas and Florida will follow eventually. The timeline is the only question.
Indeed, one could argue “the left” has already won in a rout, based on the utter abandonment of the moral battlefield by the flaccid sliver of “the right” that claims to want forced birth. They deserve to be made fools of in the way Trump and his bros are making fools of them. If Florida manages to get above 60 percent on the anti-forced birth amendment (I’m skeptical), you can almost declare game over in November. But only almost.
“The right” does have the capacity to delay its forced birth defeat by winning civil war #8 — creating a national fake Christian dictator, ending honest elections, and then deploying massive, vicious state power against “the right’s” own wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers and those who would care for them.
That’s what Trump’s guy Roberts means, among other things, when he says: “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
It won’t ever look like “Civil War” the movie
When you look at the civil wars I’ve named, only the civil war over slavery looks like a war as people commonly understand it — with organized armies, backed by rival bases of industrial capital, fighting each other on behalf of territorial/political entities.
It’s the bloodiest American civil war, obviously.
(“The right” would have claimed that forced birth was bloodiest civil war before they saw how vastly unpopular it is to label American mothers, daughters, and sisters — including their own — as holocaust-level murderers of life that supposedly begins at conception. But it’s hard to fight a civil war successfully when you don’t remotely believe your own bullshit.)
The rest of those civil wars are about the reach and tyranny of American state power, as it relates to America’s stated founding values. Those civil wars weren’t fought, aren’t being fought now, and won’t be fought in the future like the slavery civil war or the recent dystopic fantasy movie Civil War.
“The left” did not fight, lose, and then win America’s other civil wars with armed divisions — because it has none. And it will not get them. The U.S. military is an institution of “the right” because it is an institution of power. If it ever fights itself, it won’t be “left” v. “right.”
“The left” has only brought “the right” to its knees once in a war of raw hard military and capital power. And the war over slavery wasn’t really “left” v. “right.” It was “right” v. “right” — with one army of the “right” destroying an institution of the “right” — slavery — in which the interests of “the left” aligned. That alignment was temporary, which is why “the right” destroyed Reconstruction as successfully as it did slavery.
Bloodless? LOL.
The other wars have involved — and will continue to involve — “the left” pushing “the right,” which is the embodiment of power in American society, to accept “the left’s” point of view about “the right’s” assertion of state power. “Left” vs. “right” in this lens means “human decency” vs. “systemic power.”
“The left” has fought these civil wars, generally, with a combination of morality and non-cooperation and mass disobedience of morally illegitimate power.
But that does not mean they were “bloodless.”
“The right” spilled enormous quantities of “the left’s” blood in all four of the post Civil War civil wars. You will notice it took three (perhaps four) American civil wars to overthrow official American racial apartheid — and unofficial personal black deference to white America.
Winning the first two civil wars over apartheid and personal black social deference did nothing to win the third for “the right.” That is the nature of civil wars when raw power and human morality are vastly asymmetric.
“One side or the other” can only win a civil war permanently, definitively, if “the right” either acknowledges “the left” is morally and operationally correct or uses its power to suppress and murder the actual human beings of “the left” at vast scale.
Absent one of those two, the civil wars just grind on.
Even in defeat, what remains of “the left” would find ways to push “the right” not to murder it at scale. Indeed, the human and political population of “the left” and “the right” can and does shift in an instant. Ask all the heretofore Putin allies in Russia who have accidentally fallen to their deaths from open windows. I guess you can’t.
Not much personal appetite for civil war
Let’s recap “the left’s” enduring civil war wins, shall we?
Slavery: gone. Alcohol prohibition: gone. The American state’s violently-enforced expectation that black people separate themselves from whites; that men tip their hats to white women or leave the sidewalks as white men pass; or that black women submit sexually without recourse to ravenous white men: gone.
I have many, many running conversations with actual human beings of “the right.” I don’t know any who would admit to wanting a reversal of any of those civil war outcomes.
I think there are quite a few who would, shall we say, quietly welcome a bit more of the social deference their grandparents and great grandparents enjoyed from black citizens they don’t personally know. But that’s a wistful daydream, not a policy ambition or war goal. They’ll settle for the Drug War, mass incarceration, and gerrymandering, which aren’t exactly civil wars now in my view — but could be in the future. (Mass incarceration and the Drug War are worse for America than its actual civil wars and prevent us from being an actual democratic republic.)
I know very few folks on “the right” who will now admit to wanting 6-week forced birth — and almost none willing to think practically about how to operationalize it as a maternity care system.
I know a few who will hint at rolling back gay marriage and re-imposing the closet; but I don’t know any who have said it to me directly. They prefer to say “gay people icky — why must I see them? Lalalalala. Except that guy; he’s kinda cute.” (Yes, I see very close correlation between the intensity of “hide the icky gays” and the likelihood somebody feels uncertain about how their own sexual identity aligns with the packaging they show the world.)
While many folks I know on “the right” enjoy chanting “build the wall,” I don’t think any of them really want the military and Grady Judd’s SWAT deployed haphazardly into the Disneyburbs of Poinciana, herding children into sweltering pens or into forced adoption after deporting (or killing) their parents.
They prefer to conceive of “mass deportation” as a Star Trek fantasy. America will just beam 11 million people “home” without consequence or error. And they won’t have to see it — or have it confront them. LOL.
Finally, I think the people of “the right” want Trump, specifically, to get off and die a heroic figure of the common man — or something. But I don’t know any who claim to want an actual unbound dictator. When that person is not Trump, it will be fascinating to observe their behavior.
What does “the right” actually want?
So if most people on “the right” don’t really want the real civil wars they impose with their votes and fantasies, what do they want?
They want comedians to be able to make fun of people it’s always been easiest to ridicule. (They can. No one is in prison for telling trans jokes. Dave Chapelle is still very rich, as he will tell you.) They want to laugh without feeling bad about it. (Go ahead. Nobody is stopping you.) And they want “the left” to laugh, too. (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
They want the U.S. military, which has helped Ukraine brutalize Russia to a bloody standstill without using any airpower or troops, to be “tough” again, like it was before America let in all the gays and people of color and “the left” ruined it. Just ask Gary Clark.
They want to police how white men are portrayed on TV commercials. They’re too weeny now.
They don’t want the High Council of Indoctrination sprinkling gender fluid pixie dust on their kids.
And they want to vaguely force you to love Jesus by sticking Charlton Heston “Ten Commandments” props in your kids’ classroom.
These are all paraphrases of actual exchanges I’ve had with people on “the right.”
It’s all vibes — and the pettiest of vibes, when you compare them to what’s actually at stake in the real American civil wars.
How could I even surrender in the vibe civil war?
How could I even surrender in this petty vibe civil war if I wanted to? What tribute of submission can I possibly deliver that will quench this thirst? I can’t give them what they really want, which is validation today, exoneration in the future, and a confession that, “Yeah. I really am the one who sucks. You’ve been right all these years even though you’ve lost all the moral civil wars — except the one about keeping Trump out of prison.”
Even my J6 neighbor awaiting trial wanted validation more than revolutionary violence.
I told him he was a lynch mob criminal to his face. He could have beaten me to a pulp on the sidewalk and made me take it back. Instead, along with calling me “pussy,” he wanted to do a resume measuring contest. These are actual quotes.
“Nobody likes you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“What have you done with your life?”
Well, I did not storm the Capitol as part of a giant coup-attempt lynch mob. So there’s that. I consider it addition-by-subtraction for my resume.
By contrast, my neighbor wanted his D-Day acknowledged and respected — or at least he rejected my standing to condemn it as a fellow citizen. It was like the last scene of Saving Private Ryan if remade for a Black Mirror episode.
Tell me I’m a good man, pussy.
Dude, I can’t. Even if you beat me half to death and make me say it, I still don’t believe you’re a good man. And you know I don’t believe it.
Likewise, dear friends on “the right,” I can’t give you the vibes victory you want. You wouldn’t believe me if I tried to.
The bound and the unbound
And this is why, I think, so much of “the right” — and not just MAGA — is so intent on winning their civil war to keep Trump out of prison.
Exonerating themselves from what’s happened in this country in the last decade or so — for the raw vicious petty daily corrupt cruelty they released and enjoyed in a moment of indulgence — depends on exonerating Trump. If he’s guilty; they’re guilty.
If he’s rightly prosecuted/adjudicated as a felon and sex abuser and auctioneer of military submarine capabilities … well, do the rest of the math.
The people of “the right” bound themselves to Trump forever in 2015 — even though he would never bind himself to them, or anyone else, in return. Unbinding is one the thing that most defines Trump’s dwindling existence; and he is bound to no one who lacks the individual power to bind him. There is no MAGA he would not sacrifice for even the barest of momentary gratifications. Everybody knows that.
What the people of “the right” want, in my observation, is for me to agree that binding themselves to Trump — and all that came with it — was worth it because we dirty libs just generally suck — and what else could they do?
They must fight the vibe civil war with “the left” — or … what exactly?
It was worth their mass negation of self and conscience, worth the grievous damage to their religion, worth their many acts of personal and public cruelty in the service of vibe grievances and sense of social entitlement. All of that was necessary in 2015 “to save the country” and remains morally justified now.
Look what you made us do, libs.
No. Not close — and they know it. It was a mass act of free will and rank indulgence and national abuse. They should own it like adults.
Instead, the people of “the right,” in my experience, do not want to admit they they are the type of people who would inflict a Donald Trump on their neighbors, friends, family. So they’re just going to pretend this Donald Trump is not Donald Trump and lalalalalala at anyone who tries to tell them what they already know. I think that’s the main reason they’ll vote for him this time — a mixture of self-exoneration and spite for “the left” daring to prosecute them.
I can see a scenario in which exonerating Trump and themselves for what has happened up until now makes it easier to for “the right” to stand down on the rest of today’s civil wars and decide against starting new ones.
See, “the left” blew that all out of proportion. We didn’t want to do all that dictator stuff. We’re ok with the gays. You can teach some history. We just didn’t want the Deep State to win. You should be glad we fought the lawfare warriors for you. Can’t we all get along? Etc. I actually hear this exact narrative quite often these days from folks on “the right.”
I, personally, would sacrifice victory in the Trump-prison-civil war if it helps “the left” win the important civil wars — including the larger question of presidential dictator power. Or if we can avoid fighting them altogether.
But it will certainly feel gross for all of us to spend the rest of our lives pretending stupidly that none of this ever happened.
Dread and lamentation are not armor
I can also see it going totally the other way — where the gross Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk bros of “the right,” who are riding Trump’s last gallup for all they’re worth, try to go full unbound fake Christian tech bro brutal dictator. I can see mass deportation and protest blood running in the street. I can see Netanyahu dragging us right back into the Middle East for a war with Iran, which J.D. Vance seems pretty eager for, and which Trump could use as pretext to cancel elections.
I can see the sullen masses of “the right” choosing to just sit back and say: ya’ll had it coming, libs. Welcome to the second American Revolution. At least until they realize we’re all libs to these bros.
Dread and lamentation will not save you from that. Or anyone else.
America’s best defense is how corrupt and incompetent and thirsty Trump and is people are. They’re all much more Caligula than Caesar. But these Caligulas are only vulnerable if we engage their vulnerabilities.
Many opportunities will emerge to gum up their dictator works, make them ridiculous, and drive them from power because of the overwhelming unpopularity of how they will try to demand that we live and serve and pay them. America’s 250 years of civic habits born of the illusion of comprehensive representative government is good ground to fight on.
Yet, rather than preparing the moral battlefield for a Trump spasm rather than Biden (or whoever) whimper, if that’s what emerges from Boomer Armageddon, I hear a lot of folks on “the left” acting as their own black mirrors to Alito and Roberts — getting off on the catastrophe drama of inevitable loss, like political and social disaster porn, with almost masturbatory dark fantasies about the end of “our democracy.”
Trump has proved a lot of people on “the left” right about the nature of America. And it was strangely crushing to them.
The hottest part of the fantasy is blaming somebody else’s candidate or way of life or identity for the obvious future outcome — which, of course, only you can see with vivid tragic clarity.
Fuck off with that. Replace the old guy. Or don’t. Create a spasm to punish a whimper, if your vanity demands it. I fully endorsed Team Whimper; but I’m prepared for Team Spasm.
If nothing else, learn some history to humble yourself about the nature of time and permanence and human disasters. Go learn about the blood and brutality of “our democracy” in the 1920 presidential election. Within a generation of Ocoee, black America had risen from the catastrophe of its second civil war for citizenship to win its third. Voting had almost nothing to do with it.
Whether we live in whimper or spasm come November (I tend to think it’s gonna be whimper, but it could definitely be spasm), American life and its civil wars are not going to end with Boomer Armageddon. Catastrophism drama is as exhausting in its way as MAGA drama.
And know this: ongoing history will find you — even if you’re in the fetal position.
Why should we be any different?
I’m going to wrap this up with a passage from a piece I wrote on July 4th, 2017 for a book of essays I called Seminole Wars. I used Florida’s actual Seminole wars as a metaphor for the collective civil wars I’ve laid out here — the idea that a shifting amalgamation of vulnerable Americans are always pushing American power to improve or relent — since even before American existed.
In this metaphor, “the Seminoles” more or less equals “the left,” as I’ve used it in this article — and as Alito and Roberts conceive of it.
They have absorbed many defeats and much violence; and yet, the metaphorical American Seminoles have to now persisted — as does the dream of resolving the Seminoles Wars with aspirational American values. There’s a bit of “moral arc of the universe” vibe to that sentence on its face, which I interrogated in the essay and largely reject.
Moreover, in my view, many of the loudest voices of dread and lamentation on “the left” today are coming from people who have traditionally enjoyed the most personal protection from “the right.” I touched on this cultural hierarchy a bit in my 2017 essay.
Indeed, none of liberalism’s checkered victories on behalf of Seminole citizenship came without the blood and unpleasant confrontation of the Seminoles themselves, who fought and died and suffered in their own human interests. Liberals provide the words. Seminoles provide the death. Jacksonian America allows liberals to live — at least so far. After all, so many of us descend from Jacksonians. It’s much easier to hurt a child you don’t see or recognize.
Trump brought the visceral sensation of menace that most vulnerable Americans always feel to a much wider lib audience. This post-January 6th Boomer Armageddon ratchets up the menace even more and makes it conceivable that “the right” might move on the more socially-insulated people of “the left” in a way it perhaps never has before in America.
So I would suggest focusing all energy on delivering the whimper rather than the spasm — and laying off the pre-game dread and lamentation.
White libs did not experience the three brutal civil wars for black citizenship in the same way the black foot soldiers did. This time we may have to, especially in fighting “the right’s” civil war over unbound dictatorship. That might be historically unique — if it happens. And it’s a good test of one’s commitment to one’s dramatic Facebook posts. I sort of addressed this notion of shared risk in advance back in 2017. And I think this passage makes a nice conclusion for this article:
But I do see a powerful case for purpose. I see a rebuke to anyone who would use worldly cynicism about power as an excuse not to engage in the slog of shared life. I see a reason to reject the fake savvy half-despair that Americans of all kinds (especially highly paid journalists and Facebook addicts) indulge far too often.
Understand this: you can bleat on about America’s super-awesome exceptionalism or retreat to your tiniest corner of comfort. The moral arc does not care why you’re indifferent to how it actually bends for real people. It doesn’t care about your tragic handwringing. There are no extra points for conflicting emotions. Indeed, the arc only barely cares about your vote. No presidential unicorn will mark final victory. The Seminole wars exist almost entirely outside the realm of voting.
The battle before us today still has an equal protection truce as its prize. My patriotism demands that I try to fight for that truce. I find it a good purpose for existence. I’m not very important; and I do not expect to win on any massive scale, at least not in my lifetime. But neither did any of the Seminoles.
Why should I be any different?
I do appreciate your articles!!! Wish more people would turn off the TV and twitter and find their own info sources. Who do you think will be a good candidate? Not that I care... they could have propped up Biden's lifeless body and I wouldn't hesitate.