We Have To Be Truthful About This Mess

Our Civilization Is More Fragile Than We Think

Hannah Arendt, from a 1964 interview

I have a short period of time to write an addendum to today’s earlier post. In that previous diary entry (subscriber-only), I led with an angry complaint about Donald Trump’s role in saving Canada’s odious Liberals from the political abyss, through his taunting and trolling of Canadians. (His tariffs no doubt had a big role too, but certainly his frequent mocking of the Canadian people played a role.) I’m seeing a lot of conservative Americans on social media this morning saying that the fault is 100 percent Canadian voters’. In a basic sense, that is true. But this position seems to be more about exonerating Trump from some of the blame than it is to explain what actually happened.

I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of the “Who lost Canada?” question, but I want to talk briefly about an ancillary but important issue. And it’s this: the urgent need for steady, wise government in this combustible time.

My basic point is that even though I supported the Trump candidacy, and am still grateful that he is president and not Kamala Harris, that does not absolve Trump of the responsibility to use his power wisely. That is a truism, I guess, about any politician. But it’s massively important at this juncture in history, for reasons that Prof. David Betz and Ralph Schoelhammer discuss in this must-listen podcast. If you listen to nothing else today, make it this one:

You regular readers know that I’ve been banging on about David Betz’s warnings about coming civil wars in the West since I first heard them in February on Louise Perry’s viral podcast. In this more recent interview with Ralph Schoelhammer, Betz, a civil war specialist in the War Studies department at King’s College London, expands his critique beyond Britain’s borders, and talks about the breakup of the West. If you heard the Perry podcast, you’ll be familiar with his basic argument; in the Schoelhammer interview, Betz places it in historical context, and explains why it matters to all of us. I’ll summarize it here.

Betz’s analysis is based in academic theories of civil war, official statistics, and observations of societal trends. He emphasizes the point later voiced by J.D. Vance in his Munich speech: that Western leaders are focused on external conflicts, but the greatest dangers to us are internal. That is to say, our countries and societies are internally fractured, and that fracture is reaching a breaking point.

What are the factors involved?

1. Multiculturalism and Social Disintegration: Betz contends that multiculturalism has eroded social cohesion by fostering competing identity-based groups with little shared sense of national identity. He describes Western societies as "incohesive," with segregated communities competing for diminishing resources, creating conditions ripe for conflict.

2. Asymmetric Multiculturalism and Perceived Injustice: He highlights an "asymmetric multiculturalism" where minority groups are encouraged to express ethnic pride and solidarity, while similar expressions by white majorities are stigmatized as supremacist. This perceived double standard fuels resentment and a sense of "downgrading" among majority populations, providing a narrative of injustice that could justify revolt.

3. Ethnic and Cultural Tensions: Betz predicts that future civil wars will likely be demarcated along ethnic lines, exacerbated by demographic shifts where white majorities are becoming minorities in some areas. He references the "Great Replacement" theory as a powerful narrative driving majority discontent, aligning with civil war theories about status reversal.

4. Urban vs. Rural Divide and Infrastructure Vulnerability: He foresees conflicts with a rural-urban dimension, where cities, described as "feral" and poorly governed, become flashpoints. These wars may involve low-tech, savage tactics like targeting infrastructure, exploiting the West’s fragile systems to cause mass disruption.

5. Elite Disconnect and Political Polarization: Betz argues that Western elites are increasingly disconnected from the public, exacerbating distrust and polarization. The failure of "managed democracy" and declining social capital, coupled with economic decline, further destabilizes societies.

6. Imminence and Inevitability: Based on statistical trends, social attitudes, and civil war causation theories, Betz warns of a "high statistical probability" of conflict in multiple Western countries before 2030, potentially spreading across borders. He believes societal arrangements are failing rapidly, making conflict "practically inevitable."

Betz says that judging by academically well-established standards that predict the likelihood of civil war breaking out in a given society, conditions in the West today meet not one or two of them, “but effectively all of them, extremely well.”

The West’s economic model is winding down under the weight of massive indebtedness. The Western political model of “managed democracy” is also reaching its limit. Ordinary people are fast losing faith in the system, because they no longer think that elections change things. We don’t want to think about any of this, in part because the idea of “civil war” in our stable, prosperous societies seems unthinkable. Betz wants people in the West to understand that civil war “is not a phenomenon particular to black and brown people in faraway, dusty places.”

Betz says he used to think that civil war would first break out in the United States, but the Trump election served as a pressure-release valve. He now believes that the pressure will build again in four years’ time, as people come to understand the difficulty of fundamentally changing things in the American imperial system.

Today, though, he believes that Britain and France are the most likely candidates for civil war. Germany is not far behind them. It’s important to keep in mind, he says, that in an age of globalized, instant communication, civil war breaking out in one country could quickly spread to others.

Interestingly, the former communist countries of Central Europe have been largely inoculated against all this because of Soviet domination. In particular, they were not subject to the mass migration that Western European countries permitted over the past half century. But, warns Betz, Central Europeans had better not take it for granted that they’ll be safe. A decade ago, you could have said the same thing about Sweden, for different reasons, but now Sweden is in real trouble. Import the Third World, become the Third World.

I bring all this up this morning in light of Trump’s important role in bringing about the Canadian election result. Canada has been badly governed by its left-wing elites. It should be obvious to Americans that it is in our interest to see Canada move towards a more sensible government. Four more years of left-wing government can only make things worse there. A wise conservative American president would have at the very least adopted a stance towards Canada that did not exacerbate Canada’s problems. Trump did not do that. Why not? All I can figure is that he simply didn’t care. He doesn’t think about things like that. He lives in a world of memelords.

To be very clear, I supported Trump’s candidacy and still consider myself to be a supporter of Trump’s government because something had to change; the status quo was unsustainable for many reasons. But — and this is important — I did not and do not support Trump out of any personal affection for Donald Trump. I do so because I love my country, I love Western civilization, and I desperately want us to pull away from chaos and collapse. Listen to David Betz: civil war, if it comes, will be unspeakably horrible.

I’ve written in this space recently about what I learned about conditions in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, following Communism’s collapse — this, from reading Svetlana Alexievich’s electrifying oral history, Secondhand Time. I came to that book after first hearing Betz’s podcast with Louise Perry, and read it with the idea in mind that we could very well be seeing something similar in the West in the coming years. If you read that book, and absorb its lessons, you will very quickly come to have no patience with the idiocy of Western leaders, in refusing to face the clear and present danger to our own societies, regarding civil war.

That also applies to Donald Trump. We on the Right have got to put aside the narcissistic idea that whatever Trump does to own the libs, or whatever, must be supported, because it pisses off the corrupt elites. I’m quite happy to see the governing boards of Ivy League colleges lose their lunches over Trump’s antagonism. They deserve it, and deserve it not because of some cheap resentment, but because their policies and actions have caused so much real-world damage. Similarly, it seems obvious to me that the United States, thanks to bad government by Republicans and Democrats since the 1990s, has to find some way to extricate itself from China. There are so many other ways that this unsustainable system has to change, and change meaningfully.

This is a task of monumental complexity, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to be grown-ups about this. We can’t afford to have leadership that carries out its mandate carelessly, with pointless destruction. After Trump announced his “liberation day” tariff agenda, it quickly became clear to ordinary Americans that the thoughtlessness with which the president rolled it out would massively impact the kinds of Americans who voted for him to defend their own interests. In a recent Free Press piece, I cited an American small business-owning friend who voted for Trump with confidence, but once she saw how his tariffs would destroy her own business overnight, she flipped. This is not an abstract issue for her. This is how she feeds her family. There are millions of people like her. I heard a conservative economist say on a podcast a couple of weeks ago that when Trump voters go to Walmart and find suddenly that the prices of everything have doubled, they’re going to think twice about their man.

Look, I get it: weaning ourselves from the globalist teat will be painful and even to some extent politically unpopular. That is precisely why it has to be undertaken with utmost care and deliberation. That is not what we are seeing from this administration.

David Betz, in the Schoelhammer podcast, is blackpilled — not so much about Trump (he barely speaks of Trump), but about the civil war situation in the West. He says, “The tipping point — the point after which there is not much to be done to prevent it — that’s in the past already.”

I hope he’s wrong. The future is not fated. We can turn this around, but we can’t do it like this. The fact that Trump replaced a failed elite does not therefore make Trump a genius. Far too many of us on the Right treat Trump as a man who cannot fail, who can only be failed. And we regard any criticism of Trump, even from people who support him generally (like me), as disloyalty. This is the kind of mindlessness that is going to break a lot of things.

I was talking to a conservative, Trump-voting friend this morning in Nashville, who told me, “I don’t understand these MAGA people, with their ‘bring it on, burn it all down’ line. Do they have any idea what they are saying?!” No, they don’t. It’s all online gamesmanship.

Last night at the Nashville screening of Live Not By Lies, someone asked me in the Q&A section if I was less worried about soft totalitarianism now that Trump is in power. Only slightly, I said. I’m grateful for his efforts at dismantling DEI and other mechanisms of imposing progressive totalitarianism, but we have to remember that all the conditions that Hannah Arendt wrote about in 1951, as characterizing a pre-totalitarian society, are very much present today. Read this piece I wrote once for The American Conservative to understand this in greater depth. Her bullet-point signs are:

• Loneliness and Social Atomization

• Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions

• The Desire to Transgress and Destroy

• Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies

• A Mania for Ideology

• A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise

These are all with us today; Trump did not make them go away, nor could any president, by executive order. These are deep-seated cultural facts about our time and place. Trump, and any president or prime minister, has to work within a society and culture characterized by these realities.

Last night, I recalled for the audience a conversation I had at a dinner table in Moscow, in 2019, with an Orthodox family. I had just spent three days interviewing people who had suffered horribly under Communism. I said, naively, to the family, “I cannot imagine what the Russian people ever saw in the Bolsheviks.”

The father said, “Really? Let me tell you.” And then he went through a 400-year history of immense suffering imposed on ordinary Russians by the ruling class. True, the Bolsheviks never had widespread popular support; they were devilishly clever revolutionaries who capitalized on mass discontent and chaos to take power. But, the father insisted, the appeal of Bolshevism didn’t come from nowhere. Ordinary Russians were fed up with the Tsarist state and the aristocracy crushing them. Bolshevism offered them hope. In the end, the Bolsheviks imposed a tyranny that was incomparably worse and more murderous than anything the Tsars dreamed of. The Moscow man’s point was not that the Bolsheviks were justified — remember, this family were Orthodox Christians, and therefore anti-communists — but rather that Bolshevism came from somewhere.

In my research for the Live Not By Lies book, I came across a similar point made by the Czech writer Heda Margolius Kovaly. She was a Czech Jew who barely survived Hitler’s death camps. When she arrived back in Prague, she signed up with the Communists, because, in her account, they were the only ones who offered hope in the ruins of European civilization. Plus, she said, they were the farthest thing from Hitler, so what could go wrong?

Her husband was a Jew who worked in the early Communist government there. He was executed in the early 1950s after an anti-Semitic show trial. This revealed to her the true nature of Communism, and she became a dissident. If you cannot understand why a Jew who survived the Nazi camps would turn to Communism out of naive hope, then you know nothing of human nature. Similarly, if you can’t understand how dirt-poor and oppressed Russians would find hope in what the revolutionaries were offering, you don’t grasp how people think. I’ve had similar arguments with anti-Trumpers of the Left and the Right over the past few years, trying to explain to them how the world looks from the point of view of the kind of person who would vote for Trump. One reason — the main reason, I think — that they cannot grasp this is they personally benefit from the system as it is construed, and lack the imagination to see things from the point of view of others — especially if the Other is a white working-class person, whom they’ve been educated to think of as the enemy, as a “deplorable”.

Why do I bring that up here? Only to say that our own situation today is very precarious. David Betz explains why. The work of Hannah Arendt does too. I no more want to live under a totalitarianism of the Right than I do a totalitarianism of the Left. We are going to get one or the other if we aren’t careful. If, God forbid, civil war breaks out — and to be clear, Betz’s scenario is not two uniformed armies squaring off against each other, but rather bombings, riots, things like that — people will ultimately accept anything to restore peace. Putin’s Russia is authoritarian, not totalitarian, but that’s bad enough. Yet if you want to know where Putin came from, read Secondhand Time. Had I been a Russian in the 1990s, I would have seen Putin as some kind of secular savior — and so would you have. People cannot bear anarchy for long.

There’s something else to think about. Totalitarianism came to both Russia and Germany despite the fact that they were much more religious societies than the West is today. True, the traditional churches were weak, which created a moral and spiritual vacuum that allowed totalitarian ideology to gain ground in the hearts and minds of the people. Still, those societies had far more residual Christianity than ours have today — and it did not protect them.

Where are we? I’ve spent the last few days here, writing for paid subscribers about sociologist Christian Smith’s dynamite new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete. Because I’ve got a plane to catch, I asked Grok to summarize the book:

Christian Smith’s core argument in Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America is that traditional religion in the United States has not merely declined but has become culturally obsolete, particularly among younger generations (post-Boomers), due to a profound mismatch between its forms and the contemporary cultural zeitgeist. He contends that this obsolescence stems from a convergence of long-term, complex, and unintended social forces—including technological changes (e.g., the internet), neoliberal capitalism, transformed family structures, the end of the Cold War, and religious scandals—that have eroded the social functions and cultural relevance of organized religion. Rather than being replaced by secularism, as traditional secularization theory might predict, Smith argues that Americans’ spiritual impulses have shifted toward a “re-enchantment culture,” embracing alternative spiritualities like neopaganism and personal spiritual practices, which better align with modern sensibilities.

I would add, as the author of Living In Wonder, that most churches gave up talking about spiritual realities and the transcendent dimension of life, deferring instead to dwelling on therapeutic strategies for living your best life now, moralism, or politics. My book is about why it is urgently important for Christianity to reconnect with its “enchanted” roots, and advice for how to do it. Christian Smith brings the social science evidence to explain why traditional religion is so alien to the younger generations. It’s not so much that they have considered the arguments of the churches and rejected them as it is that the kinds of claims that traditional religion makes — about Truth, about human nature, and so forth — can scarcely be grasped by people formed by postmodern culture.

I bring all that up in context of this post to say that people who think civil war and social collapse can’t happen here because hey, we’re a Christian society, are lying to themselves. Again: despite the relative weakness of the Orthodox Church in pre-revolutionary Russia, it was much stronger than any church is in the West today. And yet, here is Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

The Covid experience was such a shock to many of us because it revealed how fragile our way of life is. As I’ve said here many times, we saw in our little Orthodox parish in Louisiana an ingress of young Christians, mostly megachurch Evangelicals, who were so shaken by Covid that they concluded they needed to be part of a church and Christian tradition that offered them more depth and stability in a time of chaos. Covid was a kind of apocalypse — an unveiling. I don’t think we have fully reckoned with how destabilizing all that was.

If you think we have dodged the totalitarian bullet in the US, you are mistaken.

Once again: I think Donald Trump was the best thing on offer in the 2024 election. But his chaotic and often pointlessly destruction governing style is making things worse than they have to be, precisely at a time when we Americans need steady, determined, and wise leadership. The world order is breaking up, and re-forming. This could be done peacefully … or not. The Right now has political power in America, but it won’t hold on to it if it makes the lives of ordinary Americans worse. The Left has no answers. It is urgently important, from a civilizational perspective, that the Right gets this right. Listen to Betz, read Arendt: we don’t have much margin for error. This is a hinge moment in American history, and in world history. The old order has exhausted itself, and discredited itself in misgovernment. Something new is being born.

There is no guarantee at all that what is coming next will be better than what it is replacing. This is a historical moment that requires serious men acting seriously. We don’t have that. And it does nobody any good to pretend that we do. Maybe the power-holders now can change course. I have my doubts. Prepare yourselves, spiritually and otherwise, for the upheaval.

See y’all tomorrow from Europe.