Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Let's have a thread about everyone's favorite subject: Apocalyptic Race War!

2/I remember as a kid, watching a video about Charles Manson, and how he believed that the U.S. was on the verge of an Apocalyptic Race War.

I remember at the time thinking how crazy that sounded. A race war? What the heck???

miamiherald.com/news/nation-wo…

3/And yet that must have been around the same time that I saw the news about the Rwandan Genocide, which was, in fact, an Apocalyptic Race War.

history.com/topics/africa/…

4/And my refusal to believe in ARWs was kind of ironic, given that all of my Lithuanian Jewish relatives, to my knowledge, were killed in an ARW:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holoc…

5/The Lithuanian Jews were probably the best-integrated in all of Europe. They thought they were secure in Lithuanian society.

Then one day the Nazis rolled into town, and non-Jewish Lithuanians, eager to get on the Nazis' good side, started murdering their Jewish neighbors!

6/ARWs are some of the most astonishing events in all of human experience.

One day everyone's getting along, the next day the guns and machetes come out.

7/Of course, you don't need racial divisions to have an apocalyptic war or genocide - just ask the Cambodians!

endgenocide.org/learn/past-gen…

8/But race and religion provide easy dividing lines in an apocalyptic war situation. You can just look at people's skin color, or their hair, or the type of clothes they're wearing, and tell what group they're in. So it's easy to use those markets to separate friend from foe.

9/OK so why does this matter?

Because I'm starting to think that lots of people go around with ARW scenarios sort of lurking in the backs of their minds. And that these dark imaginings inform what looks like boring normal politics.

10/It's certainly on the mind of Donald Trump.

esquire.com/news-politics/…

11/I often hear people on the political right say things like "we've got the guns" - a clear reference to ARW. But people on the left think about it too. A friend in a performance art PhD program told me about how her friends used to talk about ARW all the time.

12/Does this mean America is preparing for an ARW?

It's always possible (as the lesson of Lithuania teaches us). So maybe? But almost certainly not.

Still, despite the extremely low likelihood, I'm starting to suspect that ARW scenarios inform much of our politics.

13/Historian Richard Hofstadter distinguished "status politics" -- which is similar to what we now call "identity politics" -- from "interest politics", and claimed that status politics prevailed during periods of prosperity...

newyorker.com/news/george-pa…

14/But what if "status politics" is really just another form of interest politics - a process of coalition building and positioning ahead of a possible ARW?

What if "status anxiety" isn't about respect for its own sake, but about fear of being on the wrong side of an ARW?

15/What if gun rights aren't about home defense or personal defense or any of that stuff, but about fear of ARW?

vox.com/world/2017/6/2…

16/America is at kind of an unstable moment in terms of racial coalitional politics. Recent immigration has enlarged the size of groups of people who have reason to feel insecure about their position in American society.

17/At the same time, the demographic turning point when white American become a minority is fast approaching. White identity politics has become especially virulent and paranoid due to this approaching changeover.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

18/For the past few years, I've seen every racist episode and atrocity of America's past (well, at least, all the popular ones) rehashed, the stories told again and again.

Why?

Perhaps because of fear that an ARW approaches.

19/Nothing that can happen to a society - not even natural disasters - is as terrifying as an ARW. The prospect of your neighbor and friend becoming your pitiless executioner.

That fear drives people to a desperate search for group solidarity, for allies, for safe spaces.

20/Again, an ARW is incredibly unlikely in modern America, despite all the dark talk and the crazy NRA ads etc. Incredibly unlikely.

But it probably feels a little *less* incredibly unlikely than 10 years ago, and I believe that fear is driving more than we realize or admit.

21/What we need are leaders who can credibly assure us that an ARW will never ever happen. That Americans will never turn on their neighbors. That this is a nation of all races, and always will be, and that every group is secure here and has a place here forever.

22/That sort of reassurance would permeate American politics like a healing balm. Every issue and every interaction would be improved by that stabilizing, reassuring message.

But with Trump in the White House, we're getting the exact opposite message.

(end)