“What do you mean ‘started’?”
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want to clarify that I’m talking about open mass-killings in the vein of Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday.
Reading and seeing the public’s reactions to things like the gassings and beatings at pro-Palestine encampments, BLM protestors getting run over, Kyle Rittenhouse’s victims, etc. it seems like the American people take an open and ghoulish delight in protestors getting brutalized, maimed, and killed. Go to any video or article about these things happening, and the comments section is an endless parade of the worst people imaginable cheering and hollering for it with extremely little or no pushback. It’s depressingly consistent.
It just gives me this horrible feeling that one day the police are going to unload into a crowd of protestors and leave a mass of bodies in their wake, the American people will hoot and clap and cheer about how the victims got what they deserved, and that’ll become the new MO. The only reason they aren’t already doing this is fear it might make them look bad, and if it doesn’t end up making them look bad in the eyes of the public, then there isn’t a single thing stopping them.
There’s another mentality as or more troubling to me and that’s the hold of the myth of American civil religion.
Their inclination will not be that they need revolutionary communism, that they need to seize the means and read Lenin and Mao, it will be a strong desire to RETURN to what was. To attempt to get back this mythic liberal Democracy they believe their country had for two centuries and many will cling to that as their real religion, as what they grew up being indoctrinated in in school, as the association with patriotic songs that have brought tears to their eyes, etc. They are invested deeply in not just the capitalist project or the settler one but in the myth, in being fooled, in believing that this is PEAK of societal development and that we just have to bring it back. I expect many of them will get sucked into pointless actions trying to do just that and some will take up arms against both the communists and the reactionaries and seek to put both down but likely prioritize the communists as the more dangerous I’m sad to say.
Americans are the most indoctrinated people on earth. It isn’t merely class interests, it won’t vanish the day those interests change, I fear it will take years, even possibly decades for the old true-believer to die or age out and for a disillusioned younger generation who never experienced the good parts of the myth and doesn’t believe in it at all to come along and be swept up in communism and act on it. It’s possible we might build something without them, that they’ll just sit on the sidelines and not fight us, staring at the broken pieces in their hands instead but its a real problem. I think we will find the most fertile ground among the ‘apolitical’, those sitting it out because they feel and know on some level it’s bullshit and things could take off like fire among this part of the population, it’s a wildcard.
From my own personal experiences, a lot of people who were born after 1980 or so have no real love for the USA
They were indoctrinated, but it just didn’t take (being forced to say the pledge of allegiance in school everyday basically just fostered resentment)
But because of that, they basically don’t have any real ideology aside from
Everything's bad! This sucks, but what are you gonna do?I try my best to be optimistic and tell them that better things are possible and they believe it, but it’s hard to break them out of the doomer spiral