Civil Strife and Secessionism

 “The Next Civil War – Dispatches from the American Future” by Stephen Marche, 2022

This book is a mixture of speculative fiction and journalistic reporting, using present facts to populate a possible coming reality.  These two views take their turns in the telling. Marche imagines some kind of civil war will break out in the 2030s, though he understands that there has been a slow-burning one for years.  His outlook is of a dismayed bourgeois liberal looking at the fraying institutions in the U.S. with little understanding of economics or the dual ‘Party’ nature of political decay.  To Marche it is a question of partisanship run amok. 

The book is marked by making specific predictions based on the situation in 2022, though conditions have changed quite severely.  The ‘guvmint’ is now in the direct hands of billionaires and dictatorial Libertarian privatizers, not a female Democrat. 

The fiction part is a ‘sovereign citizen’ and ‘Constitutional’ sheriff’s revolt against the repair of a run-down bridge in a rural town.  Fixing the bridge by the federal government would force residents to drive the long way around.  The Sheriff’s standoff attracts a host of armed right-wingers.  It profiles a young, isolated loser radicalized by the internet who decides to shoot the female President as part of his intervention in history. It is a return of a virus that the government and part of the population can’t agree on how to combat, involving a NYC producer who temporarily visits her 'red-state' sister and mother in Davenport, Iowa.  This visit is compounded by a financial crash in the markets. It is a hurricane barreling into New York City, even when it is protected by 3 water gates. New York is flooded and mostly destroyed, while climate refugees run.          

The fact part is Marche’s visit to the largest gun show in the U.S. in Oklahoma and a recounting of the large number of killings done by fascists of various kinds in the U.S.  He looks at the various right-wing ideologies that combine and develop, mutating in a kind of viral reactionary soup. He includes a psychological profile of assassins and mass shooters.  He analyzes the predictions of climate modeling on drought, farming, food and property issues.  He interviews losing alt-right figure Richard Spenser.  Marche retails the stats on the vast increase in inequality in the U.S., which he attributes to the 2006 financial crash especially.  He predicts a severe economic contraction, based on a theory of capitalist cycles and inequality.  Like most liberals he thinks inequality is unsolvable, citing an ostensible failure of the workers’ states to reduce it far below capitalism.  Yet they did.

As you can see, Marche’s theme is interrelated crises, cascading crises, multiple crises, threat multipliers all at one time, which the capitalist system cannot handle.  What he doesn’t mention is that profit rates are the only goal, which makes crises absolutely inevitable and multiple serious crises liable to lead to some kind of barbarism if not confronted in a mass way.  

Marche predicts violence is the result, sort of like those dystopian films of zombies, riots, thieves, killings, refugees and civil war.  Marche visualizes a dirty bomb dropped from a drone on the Capitol dome, a sort of domestic 9/11 that rearranges the synapses of the U.S. population.  A pivotal event so to speak, a match dropped on a dry prairie, but the reverse of Mao’s idea.  He first pictures a sort of war of ‘all against all’ – not defined by any geography.  He wonders whether the Left will be armed.  He thinks the military’s occupation and counter-insurgency tactics will not really work, showing that he expects the military to protect the state and that it will not split.  He predicts a military dictatorship that will end ‘the Republic.’  All this is marked by a breathless liberalism. Yet the real Left will be armed.  Many cities will be redoubts of resistance to fascism.  The military will split.  It could become a class war – if all this actually comes about as he thinks.

Marche posits that the solution to this conflict will be a splintering of the U.S. – but done rationally like a reasonable divorce, though probably also violently.  The country is done as he puts it.  He discusses secessionist movements in California and Texas, though secession is illegal but ultimately will be accepted as a logical solution.  He endorses the conventional map of ‘blue’ and ‘red’ areas, of Democratic zones and Republican zones, suspiciously like the 2020 electoral map.  He has no thought for class, but only psychology, identity and such as the sources of division.  The first Civil War was based on a very grievous and potent economic construction – slavery.  The present economic structure that plays a similar role now is wage slavery and capitalism itself.

Marche’s cheery and cheesy map of the U.S. split into 4 pieces looks like this:  #1) Cascadia – California, Oregon and Washington; #2) the Texas Republic alone; #3) the South, Mountain and Central states, called ‘The Republic of the United States’ and #4) Minnesota all the way over to Virginia, as ‘The United States.’  Hawaii would be part of #4 and Alaska #3. Seems there is no role for Canada or Mexico, while some states would dicker about where to belong.  Colorado?  Arizona?  Nevada?  His plan was, I think the fictional basis for the movie “Civil War’ starring Kirsten Dunst, reviewed below.    

Marche did not anticipate ‘sovereign citizen’ billionaires directly taking over the federal guvmint and becoming the ‘not so deep’ state, an anaconda of attempted Orbanism.  Is this really a prelude to a geographic civil war waged by bourgeois factions of Democrats and Republicans?   Or by the working classes against the rich and corporate government instead? It seems to be our choice, not his.  

Marche claims at the end that “The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit.”  He advocates ‘starting over’ as the “ghostly Constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirt that animated their (the founders’) enterprise.”  Not sure what any of that means, but these words don’t seem to relate to a 4-way secession.  At any rate, a think piece book for people who don’t think about these things, with some thoughts, scenarios and solutions untouched.

Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Civil War,” ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming.’

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / March 8, 2025

A Female Writer From the GDR

 “Crossing – A Love Story” by Anna Seghers, 1971

This short novel was written by the top female writer in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who became famous during the Weimar period as a youth.  Seghers was a long-time member of the Communist Party / Socialist Unity Party but resisted their command to write socialist realist prose.  She favored modernist methods instead, considering them to be as worthy as socialist realism.  

I’m not sure from this sample if this is an improvement.  There is little modernism here except the story within the story.  This straight-forward novel is like a hundred other novels about unrequited love – not that I have read those books. It seems entirely conventional, and could be a love story on the NYT best-seller lists.  I would have preferred more social content.

It is a man's life-story told to a fellow passenger on a Polish ship crossing the Atlantic from Salvador in Bahia, Brazil to Brunsbüttel, Germany in the 1950s.  A doctor, Ernest, buttonholes an engineer, Franz on deck and begins to describe his long love affair with a young girl he met in Rio, Maria, that continues to haunt him up to the day he came onboard.  Like Franz, we the reader are trapped in the telling as the ship glides by prison islands, dolphins and flying fish, crosses the equator and transits under the stars of the Southern Cross and then Ursa Minor. 

Franz is a listener, much like the reader is forced to be a listener. At first, Franz wonders why Ernest is telling him this intimate story, but gradually, like the reader, he wants to find out what the hell happened.  It is an 18 day voyage after all.  The book is shorter than that thankfully.

Segher’s herself was in exile from Europe during the Nazi period in Germany, living in Latin America and Mexico.  She crossed the Atlantic via ship 3 times, twice to Brazil, so the story comes out of those experiences. The exoticism of Brazil is apparent to any European reader – its foods, climate, religions and people - which is why Europeans might have read this book, and not just for the love story.  The side trip to Bahia and its African-American population is more exoticism.  Yet this is not B. Traven.  There is no class struggle, just pity for the poor.  Seghers was mentioned in the film 'Goodbye Lenin' in a nostalgic way, so she's not an unknown quantity. 

The plot, to be short, is that Ernest met Maria as a young boy in Rio, they grew close, he returned to Germany after the war to study and get money for her to follow, and he waited too long.  Maria finally got married, either committed suicide or died in an accident, or did not die but faked her own death.  It’s a mystery and Ernest could never figure out which story was true. The upshot was his love was never realized due to his slowness and abandonment of Maria.  After Franz hears the end of the story, he tells Ernest to forget this damaging life-long obsession and go on and find another woman. Life is short, yes? 

The background to the tale is World War II, the liquidation of the Jews, the formation of the GDR by socialists and anti-fascists and so on, but only as historic ‘color’ in the background. The central drama is an individual’s unrequited love, or actually two people’s failed romance. This is a standard plot in the U.S.  It is a somewhat sad story that will leave little impact except to remind you that love, like everything else, is not forever, and timing is key. Go for it or make up your mind not too, but do not pine like Ernest … unless, like him, you can’t stop. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “GDR,” “Brazil,” “Socialist Realism” or ‘love.’

And I got it at May Day’s excellent used and cutout section, which has fiction!

Kultur Kommissar / March 5, 2025 - Happy International Working Women's Day!

A Vital Comparison

 Will the U.S. Follow Hungary Into Autocracy?

As has been evident for a while, the Republican Party’s ideologues have adopted the methods of Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary in their bid to turn the U.S. into an autocratic, capitalist ‘illiberal democracy.’  Orban has become a European leader in the EU for other far-right movements like Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally, the Netherland’s Party for Freedom, Austria’s Freedom Party, the Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law & Justice.  The Israeli Likud has just joined.  Putin’s United Russia and Argentina’s Milei are also parts of this reactionary political front, but not yet formal members.

Orban has gained a main lock on the media; the universities and schools; the judicial system; the Parliament; the arts complex, grants from the EU; the banking and financial system and more. This was done slowly over 15 years, breaking laws and expectations, with the EU allowing some of it.  The EU has yet to hold up some grants for instance. 

Fidesz revised the Constitution 12 times.  They instituted gerrymandering, packing opponents into larger districts.  They got rid of run-offs in elections.  They blocked joint electoral lists.  They removed many judges as ‘too old’ and appointed new ones of their own.  They increased the size of the Constitutional Court.  That Court was outlawed from reviewing budget-related laws, so the Parliament retained that power. The Curia, Hungary’s top court, was put in the hands of a Fidesz loyalist.  They extended the terms of these judges, then created a new court system for administrative issues, all controlled by Fidesz. 

They fired many civil servants and hired their own loyalists.  They took over TV and radio media by having wealthy supporters buy outlets, or putting them under a ‘Media Council’ for TV and radio as government media or as paid outlets thru Fidesz advertising. The Council enables censorship.  In 2022 the opposition candidate got 5 minutes on one station once. All that the opposition had was on-line. 

They use business patronage to deny funds to any opposition, as businesses were afraid to anger Fidesz.  They outlawed sending political materials through the mails.  They allow some people living outside Hungary as ‘honorary citizens’ (Transylvania) to vote by mail while making it almost impossible for actual Hungarians living abroad to vote.  They have blocked foreign NGOs.  They closed certain universities, while putting a government body in control of the rest.  They dominate the arts institutions through financial grants.  They are starving Budapest of funds for hospitals and more, a pattern that Trump is trying to use.

They stole far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Roma ideology from Jobbik, the fascistic far-right party - and built ‘a wall,’ supplementing that with culture war rhetoric from the U.S. about gays, identity and birth rates.  Orban has just banned Pride celebrations in Budapest.

Hungary & the U.S.

What are the differences and similarities between Hungary and the U.S.? 

The Republicans have pushed white Christian nationalism and their targets are immigrants, Latinos and African-Americans primarily.  The difference is that there are already millions of actual immigrants in the U.S, so the rhetoric might be the same in Hungary but the situation on the ground is completely different.  African Americans, Arabs, Africans, Asians and Latinos make up a huge percentage of the U.S. population, unlike the Roma and tiny groups of 'foreigners' in Hungary.

Hungary changed their Constitution, yet changing the Constitution in the U.S. is almost impossible.  ‘Interpretations’ can change, as the Supreme Court is now in ‘originalist’ hands, but that is not the same thing.  Orban practices obvious gerrymandering, as is done in the U.S., always securing a majority in the Parliament.  The Republicans haven’t achieved a permanent majority yet.  The small Hungarian judicial system was overhauled by Orban, replacing many judges.  The Republicans would have to somehow institute a nationwide purge of judges in a far larger system.

So the MAGA strategy is to ignore rulings – to ‘move fast and break things’ while hoping the Supreme Court will back them up.  The ability to ‘enforce’ a judicial decision on Trump is almost impossible, as any decision against him has to be enforced by someone.  He will not be impeached, as he controls the Congress right now. They do not care about legality as they know the courts are too slow, too obtuse or too cowed.  Orban has used a ‘state of emergency’ 3 times already, and Hungary is still under one due to the Ukraine war, as part of a ‘unitary executive’ outlook.  If Trump declares some sort of invasion or Insurrection ‘emergency’ it will be harder to justify and might provoke military refusal or acts of armed resistance.

Hungary has around 9.6 million people, while the U.S. has 340.1 million.  Note, a smaller population is easier to dominate.  Hungary has a very small bourgeoisie, including many cronies of Orban’s who he has enriched.  Farmers and petit-bourgeois small businessmen support Fidesz outside of Budapest, as would be predicted.  The Hungarian bourgeoisie itself has a narrow, national profile and interest.  The U.S. on the other hand has a very large and powerful bourgeoisie, which is not of one mind, but is split between two main factions, with some sectors switching sides, as the tech sector has just done, crossing to Trump.  A large sector of the U.S. bourgeoisie does business across the world, including the Trumpist oil sector, so they are not purely nationalist, as their relation to the world is transactional. The petit-bourgeoisie in the U.S. is split between the professional strata and the businessmen/farmer strata, but the latter - Trump’s voting base - is nationally oriented. Hence class structures are different in both size and complexity in each country.  What the nationally-oriented capitalists and small capitalists forget is that we are in a world economy.  Tariffs will make that quite clear, which is what large capitalists are especially worrying about.

The working-class in Hungary is the majority, but still small, with only one big city in the country.  There are more small farmers and fewer rural workers.  The class structure of the U.S. is complex and huge.  The city of 1.6 million, Budapest, provides the biggest obstacle to Orban.  The next biggest city in Hungary has 115k citizens, Debrecen.  The U.S. has 9 cities over a million and 27 cities with populations from under 1 million to a half million, so there are many more sites of opposition.  If you look at metro areas, there are 54 metros over a million in the U.S.  Hungary is dominated by rural areas and smaller cities and towns.  The U.S. is not, except in its undemocratic Constitution which gives power to small states and rural areas through the Senate, the Electoral College, the Constitution and now the Supreme Court. The U.S. military is far vaster than Hungary’s and its role could become key, especially if all its soldiers are not on board with abrupt changes.

The press in the U.S. is variegated and multiple, though 6 large corporations control nearly all content.  If those 6 could be intimidated into conforming then that would be a victory for Orbanism.  That is happening right now in small ways. U.S. oppositional journalism is migrating to the internet, as in Hungary.

The opposition to Orban and Fidesz is scattered, temporary and weak.  There is an LMP (Green Party), a center-left Democratic Coalition, a neo-liberal Socialist Party, a center-right Tisza grouping, a fascistic Jobbik Party and others, but they get a minority of votes due to the system.  The opposition coalition in 2022 included some of these smaller parties and lost the election.  The opposition has no guiding idea of the future except getting rid of Orban, using anti-corruption as the main political angle. 

In the U.S. the Democratic Party is far larger and more powerful, yet comes off as weak, moralistic and yearning for ‘bipartisanship.’ Democratic Congress people actually voted for Trump cabinet and Supreme Court nominees, for instance.  Many are still literal collaborators.  It has no guiding idea of the future except getting rid of Trump.  So both opposition parties, while of varying sizes, have no future outlook and come off as parties of a dead ‘establishment.’  Neither is oriented towards the material needs of the working class or the future as they see it.  As some labor leaders and Marxists have noted, it is clueless ‘opposition’ parties that enable authoritarians and fascists.  Tony Mazzocchi of OCAW said about the founding of the Labor Party in the U.S., that if we don’t win workers they will move towards a far-right populist movement.  A plurality of the U.S. population doesn’t even vote any more.

Classes

Socialist transitional strategies are taboo in both countries, as Parties red-bait regularly.  So the only opposition  to Orban/Trump comes from liberal or neo-liberal ideology, both ideas of high-capitalism.  Yet capital is passing into another phase, that of late autocratic capitalism, using Libertarianism. The oppositions are living in the past as a result, as a stressed capital does not really need even bourgeois ‘democracy.’ 

Orban himself came out of the anti-Communist student movement in the late 1980s and many of his closest allies are friends from that time.  I.E. his government is personalist, much like the Trump loyalists, chosen for their fealty and personal ties, not for competence or knowledge. Orban is smarter than Trump, though Trump is surrounded by think-tankers and Project 2025.  Both represent an abandonment of internationalism of a neo-liberal sort in favor of bully nationalism, a perspective impossible in a world economy in the long run. It is a prelude to barbarism.

Historically Hungary was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1919: a short period in 1919 of a Red council republic; a long period up to 1944 of Horthyite autocracy and collaboration with Germany; 1 year of Arrow Cross fascism and round-ups of Jews; a deformed workers’ state period until 1989 and then the re-institution of capitalism and the first institution of bourgeois democracy.  Orban and Fidesz have now been in power for 15 years of that period as an ‘illiberal democracy.’  So the history of the 2 countries is very different, with Hungary having various forms of top-down rule for much longer.

In Hungary govt. money is doled out to capitalist cronies, families that have many Hungarian children and the comfortable middle-class.  The EU gives more to Hungary than they contribute to the EU, and then EU money is stolen.  It is somewhat like Southern states in the U.S. who feed at the federal government tax trough and northern productivity.  There are unions for teachers, bus drivers and so on in Hungary but blue-collar workers as a whole are not targets of largesse.  Small villages and towns do not have much support either – doctors and teachers don’t want to work there, much like the U.S.  Because of emigration, possible political enemies, a brain drain, labor and youth leave for other EU countries.  This is not the same as in the U.S.  There are far more guns in the U.S., while only a few Hungarian hunters have arms.  This could prove to be a key issue at some point.  Catholicism is stronger in Hungary than the U.S.  In the U.S. 30% of the population is atheist, agnostic or ‘unchurched.’  Orban heavily relies on religion instead, creating a virtual Catholic theocracy even though many Hungarians are not actually observant.

Conclusion

Orbanism is unlike classical fascism and should be understood that way.  Trump has a fascist fringe on the streets in the shape of the 3%ers, Oath Keepers, Patriot Front and Proud Boys, along with mercenaries like Eric Prince’s outfits. They are backup thugs to be used at certain times.  But using complete state and street terror and murder against the working class is not yet in their Libertarian wheel-house.  They are going to try what I call the Anaconda – to strangle democratic rights, public services and labor unions in an attempt to privatize everything for profit, putting capital completely in charge without as much bloodshed. This is how capital learns from its prior fascist mistakes.  Looting the public sector is actually a sign of capitalist weakness due to falling profit rates, which is why they are desperate to privatize public sources of wealth or destroy parts of the government that impede their profitability.  

The upshot is that Orbanism, from these facts, probably cannot be fully implemented in the U.S. as it was in Hungary due to differences in culture, national size, class structure, legal institutions, ethnicity and economic power. Democratic Party panic over Orban is designed to demobilize and depress opposition. They are the other wing of the collaborationist Democrats. “Move fast and break things” will come back to haunt Trump and his cronies, as is happening now.  Orban took years, while Trump is trying to do it immediately.  The key thing, of course, is the resistance of, not the Congress or even the legal system but the general population, and especially the working class.  Class struggle will have to go beyond legalism and result in new forms of transitional collectivity, like workplace and community committees, united fronts, anti-fascist fronts and new electoral labor parties.  If the population rolls over on the other hand, then authoritarianism will be instituted, even in the U.S.  If Orbanism fails, the Right may choose a more direct method... fascism.  

P.S. - Fascists in Hungary and Europe gathered in Budapest, wearing Russian and Nazi symbols, to celebrate the resistance by Arrow Cross and SS units to the Soviet Army in the battle of Budapest.  2/8/2025.  

Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Hungary,” “Orban,” “libertarian.”

Kultur Kommissar / March 2, 2025