A Sober Look (From a Civil War Researcher) at The Next Dangerous Decade (or Two) of the American Crisis

To use a video game analogy, America was in hard mode (since 2016), but when America chose to re-elect Donald Trump as president in 2024, we chose NIGHTMARE mode. Think of the difference between hard and nightmare modes like the difference between stage 2 cancer and stage 4 cancer.

This nightmare is expected to last another decade or two, but more on that claim in a minute.

I hoped the break-up between both Republicans and the American electorate with Trump would come after Trump attempted to consolidate power and overturn the election results (culminating in the January 6th storming of the Capitol). America was unable to hold Trump accountable. The Republican Party, led by Trump, valorized this shameful series of events.

And like many people in abusive relationships, people go back to the abuser.

America (including countless Christians) went back to their abuser by re-electing Trump in 2024.

When people (in their normal lives) finally break off a toxic and abusive relationship, it escalates into a nasty ending. I've experienced these firsthand. We can expect that to happen when America finally decides to fire Trump.

Moving past hard mode into nightmare mode, what I expect is coming down the pike will make Trump's 2020 attempt to stay in power and the January 6th storming of the capital pale in comparison (all those people and guardrails that limited and stopped it before are gone and being disassembled). And because it was dimissed and valorized, it sets the stage for the bigger sequel.

"Your attitude towards a specific event in the past reveals your specific intent towards the future… When you deny a specific crime that people with whom you identify carried out in the past, you're affirming that crime." - Timothy Snyder, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Genocide

If an event like the Jan 6 insurrection is dismissed and valorized, as it has been by Trump and Republicans, it means it's okay for it to happen again, which means more people will feel permission to participate the next time it happens, which is why it will likely be much bigger and consequential. And this possibility is why I felt a deep sense of dread after discovering Trump won the 2024 election.

“…hatred, once unleashed, doesn’t stay contained. It twists us. It consumes us. It rots away the very ideals we claim to defend. Does hating the left change the left? No. It only changes us. It makes us cruel. It makes us reckless. It leads to deranged places—where human life becomes a pawn, where political disagreement justifies dehumanization, and where tragedy multiplies instead of healing.“ - Kaeley Triller Harms, Silenced By a Bullet, Not By Truth: Honoring Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

What we're seeing is a lot like humanity's relationship with sin. The more we feed our sin, the bigger the monster gets. Eventually, the monster gets so big, it's beyond our capability to keep it contained, and it wrecks the lives of everyone involved. It's at this escalating point that we need an intervention and a miracle to prevent the horror to come. How to Train Your Dragon offers a powerful example of this playing out, with the giant Red Death Dragon controlling the other little dragons, culminating in the movie's climactic battle.

This dynamic makes for great movies, but horrifying realities for us to live.

So, let's talk about the situation we find ourselves in. My goal is not simply to scare you into sobriety, but rather to give you motivation to play a part in making things better and stopping what's making it worse. It's bad and likely to get worse, but we can all play a part in making it the least bad as possible while creating pockets of truth and goodness.

A Clear Eyed View of The American Crisis: 'America is entering a 10-20 year period of sustained instability and violence'

"I find it totally plausible that by dismantling the checks & balances (all to "punish" the "guilty" opposition), the Red & Blue will gradually, iteration by iteration, dismantle the whole system of checks & balances, creating the ground for dictatorship... but later, not now." - Kamil Kazani, X

Yikes. At least the good news is that it will happen later.

Unfortunately, that's just the beginning of the bad news. The political violence in our country has been escalating and unraveling as America's Republic is being systematically dismantled. Unfortunately, much of this hostile action is connected to and fueled by people who call themselves Christians.

Let's dive into the claim further. To tease this bad news out, I want to introduce you to someone who studies Civil Wars. Her name is Barbara Walter. You can see her TED Talk on civil wars here. 

On her Substack, Barbara recently talked about her expectation for what's ahead. I'll give you the conclusion, and then we'll work through the elements.

"America is entering a 10-20 year period of sustained instability and violence. That’s because even if Trump exits the stage (which is a big if), the conditions that fuel violence are unlikely to change anytime soon. I know this is a dark forecast, but it’s a necessary one."

Upward to two decades of upheaval are what we can expect. That's a bleak assessment. Before reading that, I was expecting a 4-8 year window, so 10-20 years is longer than I was anticipating. And yeah, while Trump is part of the problem, the deeper problem is the amount of ideological blindness and resentment that oozes through the veins of my political party. If that doesn't change, things may get worse after Trump is out of the scene.

But in the meantime, I'm expecting 2028 to be the worst of his four-year presidency, with things culminating in a series of terrible events and tragedies. Elections are high-tension events that will likely lead to escalation. Here's why Barbara says 2028 is a likely candidate for things going terribly. 

"Trump could once again refuse to leave the White House in 2028 and encourage his supporters to rise up to prevent his exit. He could also easily manufacture a crisis in early 2028. Here are just a few possibilities: escalate a confrontation with Mexico under the guise of fighting cartels, provoke a clash with China over Taiwan, inflame domestic unrest through crackdowns on immigrants or protesters in cities.

Trump was clear in 2024 that if he won re-election, he wouldn’t leave the White House again. Historically, the most common way autocrats avoid elections that could remove them is by using violence. It’s difficult to imagine Trump choosing a different path."

Yikes. Here are the triggers that Barbara foresees. 

"Political violence often spikes around elections, especially in winner-take-all systems like ours.

Two pathways are most common:

1. The loser refuses to accept defeat. We saw this in 2020, when Trump primed his supporters to distrust the election, then urged them to “fight like hell.” The result was January 6.
2. The incumbent manufactures a crisis. Leaders anticipating defeat sometimes spark or exploit violence to justify emergency powers and consolidate control."

These are the types of things to focus our attention on to know what is unfolding and what to expect at each step.

After illuminating the triggers, Barbara Walter gives numerous historical examples of how these two things have been triggers across regimes. As Americans, we often think it couldn't happen here, but that belief makes us more vulnerable to it actually happening. 

Regarding the refusal of a defeat as a trigger, I'd like to emphasize the difference between how Trump responded to his 2020 loss and how Harris responded to her 2024 loss. It was a night and day difference, and it's why I voted for Harris and campaigned against Trump. 

Trump is contributing to the American crisis. But he could not do it without the people who keep giving him power, including a large portion of the population. 49% of the voters in this country voted for the person making our crisis worse. What's demoralizing is that many of these Trump supporters are people who call themselves Christians. Their support for a deceptive and destructive man has, unfortunately, superseded their Christian values. 

This reality, after discovering the 2024 election results, was what made me feel a deep sense of forsakenness by the American people, who, from my point of view, would plunge us all into nightmare mode; into hell.

I'm a highly optimistic person, so it's unusual for me to lean into this dark reality, but it's also been a part of the work on my third book about Jesus' passion. What we're seeing is not new, and we are not immune to it happening to us. 

If things were all sunshine and rainbows, Jesus would not have had to die on the cross. America is getting a front row seat to how depraved humanity can be to others and ourselves. In the resurrection of Jesus, there is hope, but it passes through the horrors of suffering and death.

America's Vulnerability and Why We're Descending Into Crisis

Why is America facing this crisis and spiraling downward so fast? In her article, Barbara Walter outlines the conditions for violence.

Here's what she says. 

"We know the factors that make civil war more likely. They’ve been studied in hundreds of countries. The U.S. has them all:

1. A weak, rapidly declining democracy.Stable democracies almost never collapse into violence. Neither do hardened autocracies. The danger zone is the unstable middle between them - what political scientists call anocracy. That’s where America is now. (Next week’s post will be about how we got here.)
2. Political parties divided along identity lines. Violence is much more likely when political parties in anocracies divide along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. At that point, politics stops being about competing policies and becomes a battle over the racial and religious identity of the country and who will ultimately dominate. In America today, the best predictor of party affiliation is not ideology, but race and religion.
3. Unfettered access to weapons. Americans own more guns per capita than any other country on earth. And research has shown that gun deaths are higher where guns are more available.
4. Leaders who tolerate or encourage violence. Research across hundreds of cases shows that when elites normalize political bloodshed rather than condemn it, violence rises. Elite cues matter. If leaders signal that violence is acceptable, their supporters are far more likely to see it as justified."

Unfortunately, America is ripe for upheaval and violence. On that last point, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump went on television to blame his political enemies and also to justify why the violence committed by his side/group was acceptable. And he also talked about how he didn't want forgiveness for the enemies he hated.

Barbara Walter emphasizes this same point.

"Republican leaders, including the President, have responded to violence not with restraint but with incendiary rhetoric. After Kirk’s murder, Trump vowed to “beat the hell out of” the left. Steve Bannon called him a “casualty of war.” When leaders frame politics as a fight for survival, citizens are more willing to condone and use violence."

Thankfully, in its entirety, the Democratic Party leadership condemned the violence, even if some individuals celebrated Kirk's assassination. If Democratic leaders responded like Trump and some of their extremists did, and we had both sides fueling the fires from the top, we'd be in a much quicker rise of escalation.

"Experts agree we are now firmly in that middle zone and sliding deeper. The reason is simple: Democrats lack the votes to pass reforms that could strengthen democracy, and Republicans have no incentive to change a system that benefits them." - Barbara Walter

Democrats and all bi-partisan resistance must be restrained in our protest and involvement. The Trump regime is fishing for opportunities to fuel the cycle of violence and justify its lies and wrongdoing.

"Americans are, by nature, unusually optimistic. That’s a strength. But it also makes us easy marks for leaders who promise greatness but then slowly tear the country apart. What we need now is not calm, but action. Because a wannabe strongman doesn’t stand a chance against 340 million Americans who finally decide they’ve had enough." - Barbara Walter

If you've dealt with a narcissist and highly abusive, toxic leader, you'll know it's very difficult to build a relationship and not get ensnared in their abuse.

Having and enforcing boundaries usually repels these people, so those who don't have and enforce boundaries are completely exploited (I know this from personal experience).

America's Descent Into Hell: The Only Way Through is Through

"I don’t think there is a precedent for an administration with this kind of open contempt for American citizens in contemporary American history... We will learn very soon whether Americans want politicians who actually deliver improvements to their real lives, or whether they prefer to sit back and enjoy dark memes and sadistic videos. Or perhaps they simply won’t pay attention until it’s too late. That’s what happened in Venezuela, as another Atlantic colleague, Gisela Salim-Peyer, recently wrote. She grew up there, and remembers how it happened:

'The disintegration of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all…'

...we are not yet Venezuela. There is plenty that we can still do." - Anne Applebaum, Grim Reapers

If you want to better understand what happened in Venezuela, check out my conversation on the Share Life podcast with Sorayana Bravo here.

America has chosen nightmare mode, and the only way out of the nightmare is to keep moving forward. The only way through is through. We can run through the valley of death or sit and brew in it. I've chosen to help us move through it. 

Unfortunately, we must make that descent into hell. As we learn from Dante's Divine Comedy, hell is something we'll need to see firsthand. Going through it is how we get out of it.

Mark Vernon explains.

"That hell is what Dante must see, not so much because of who's there... if you or I went to hell, we'd see different people because we put people in hell.

Dante is saying, by our limited understanding and by seeing them there, we're able to understand something of ourselves and how we too can get trapped in these infernal states of mind." - Mark Vernon, Descent is Ascent - How the road up is the road down

Facing the nightmare is part of what's ahead for us all. Or, we can bury our heads and hope things will work out on their own (without good people stepping into the fray). But that second option will force us to face the first option in a much worse way.

It's in the character of Judas and his assertion to act outside of Christ that fosters the tragedy. But it's also a necessary step in the journey out of hell (in Dante's Inferno). Mark Vernon explains how the Judas moment is a turning point as well.

Getting Specific

If we want to look at this dynamic directly, what might we expect to see? If civil war were to unfold, how might it start and unravel? Gwynne Dyer speculates.

"Like the civil war of 1861-65, an American civil war in the 2020s would technically be about states’ rights. It would also have elements of religious war, race war, and old-fashioned left-right ideological struggle, but the main division would be between large blocs of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states.

Most cities are ‘blue’, and one by one they are coming under siege by the red-controlled federal government. The reds (Republicans) are hard right, and the blues (Democrats) are centre-left, although President Donald Trump and his friends call them a ‘radical left terror group’.

Trump’s shock troops are the ICE troopers (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a 20,000-strong masked-up private army directly answerable to Trump. The fourth blue city to be picked off, just last week, is Portland, Oregon, which Trump described as “war-ravaged” (i.e. there were demonstrators).

What remaining bulwark remains? Local governments. Gwynne continues.

"So what should Oregon governor Tina Kotek do? (She told Trump “we don’t need help”, to no avail.) She and her fellow blue-state governors are the only source of constitutional authority that has not fallen under MAGA control. If they are arrested, it’s all over, and there are ICE offices in every state.

The governors almost certainly have contingency plans in place already to avoid arrest and work from hiding. They might not exercise that option if push came to shove, but they’d be foolish not to keep it in reserve.

This is not a likely scenario, but it is certainly plausible. And it’s America, where most people have guns, so the civil war could kick off right there. People find it hard to believe that it could come like that, practically overnight, but in fact big changes of that kind usually happen overnight. You wake up in a different world.

I’m not predicting that this will happen, but it is a non-zero possibility. Maybe a ten percent probability, maybe less."

And if you think it's outlandish that arresting a governor would NOT happen, here's what Trump said about arresting governors on October 8th, which MAGA folks are quick to cheer on and celebrate; from the Daily Beast.

“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, without providing any evidence to support his allegation. “Governor Pritzker also!” 

Everything is a joke until it isn't. And the constitutional alarm bells are ringing.

Understanding and facing these possibilities is step one. 

Years ago, I had a situation where my marketing company's operations manager was going to be gone for a month. We spent the months prior preparing for her absence. Metaphorically, I saw it as stacking sandbags for the storm. And when the storm came, the storm wasn't as bad, and the sandbags did their job of repelling the water. 

That's how I see this situation. We need to prepare ourselves and plan for how things unfold. Otherwise, we'll be caught off guard and be flat-footed, and that will make the situation even worse.

And, we need to speak up.

Our voice matters, not just in what we say, but who sees us speaking.

"One of the biggest hurdles preventing people from protesting is uncertainty: “Am I the only one who feels this way?” The more people see others resisting, especially from unexpected sectors (think “Pastors and Police for Democracy”) the more likely they are to join. That’s why it matters when veterans protest. Or when small-town mayors speak out. Or when conservative business leaders publicly break with an authoritarian figure. These signals blow up the myth that everyone is okay with the status quo." - Barbara Walter, How to Break a Tyrant

Additional Quotes From Barbara Walter