The Civil War is Already Here

Picking sides in the ongoing class war against the poor, the planet, and the future

Image by Adbusters. Used with permission.

Through the 4th of July CELDF will be challenging dishonest narratives about America’s past and how those lies distort our lives in the present. This essay is the last installment in a four-part series of reflections on the Declaration of Independence from CELDF’s staff.

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By Max Wilbert

The destruction of our planet isn’t a mistake or an accident. It’s driven by deliberate policies designed to maximize extraction of resources from the natural world and labor from workers for the benefit of the wealthy.

The same is true for resurgent fascism and white supremacism, mass extinction of wildlife, ecological collapse, the climate crisis, and social polarization. In each case, these are either policy instruments of the ruling class (aka the Epstein class) or what they see as acceptable costs.

George Kennan, former State Department Director of Policy Planning and at the time one of the most influential men in government, wrote in a 1948 memo that “[The United States has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity...”

Kennan is telling the truth that is often obscured: the primary goal of US government policy is not to raise the global standard of living, spread democracy, education, or health, but to maintain disproportionate wealth. Whatever scraps are provided to the working class in this country are mostly aimed at keeping us too content, distracted, and addicted to muster an effective rebellion.

The United States of today is far, far more unequal than in 1948. This country has more than twice as many billionaires as the second-ranked country (China), despite having less than 25% of China’s population. And the power these wealthy people wield is totalitarian. Research which examined 1,800 policy proposals in the United States and compared the level of public support vs. likelihood of a proposal becoming law found that ordinary people have a “non-significant, near-zero level” of influence over government decisions. Meanwhile, the results showed that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy”.

In other words, our votes, public comments, and activism are exerting “near-zero” influence on government policy; the wealthy control the government entirely.

We live in an oligarchy — a society ruled by the rich. Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this system, defined by the ongoing presence of supposedly democratic processes concealing a government which is functionally ruled by an unelected elite, inverted totalitarianism. The population has either been propagandized into believing we’re free, bribed into a state of what Wolin calls “civic demobilization,” or beaten into compliance with violence and surveillance.

The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, opens with the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Words are cheap.

I’m reminded of the words of James Baldwin who, writing in The Nation in 1966 about police brutality towards black children, said “I can’t believe what you say… because I see what you do.” By 1776, Europeans had already been engaged in a genocidal project of profit-driven settler colonialism on this continent for centuries, and a system of elite domination was firmly entrenched.

The Declaration of Independence goes on to state that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”

This, I agree with.

We are already living in a time of civil war. The United States government and the elites that run it are waging war against the people and the planet. They are killing people in the streets, abducting families, conducting illegal wars and genocide, strengthening a system of police state surveillance, and enriching the already wealthy to ever-more-obscene levels via systems of patronage and legalized corruption.

Meanwhile, the climate descends into chaos, pollution proliferates, cancer and disease multiply, the planet is destroyed further every single day, and more and more people die deaths of hopelessness from addiction and poverty. Those killed by factory discharges, a lifetime of toxic industrial food, climate chaos, lack of basic healthcare and societal decency, and afflictions of despair are just as much casualties of the class war.

It’s not just the current administration. The same has been true for my entire life, with different factions of the ruling class engaging in the push-pull cycles of minor reform and counter-revolution that make inverted totalitarianism such a resilient, effective, and convincing system of oppression.

The civil war is already here. The question for us is, do we still believe in the mythology of the benevolent US government enough to be pacified, or are we prepared to throw off these rulers who have shown themselves time and time again to be leaders of a death cult?

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Max Wilbert is Co-Coordinator of Community Resistance & Resilience and Publicist for CELDF. He is the author of two books, writes the newsletter Biocentric on Substack, and has been part of grassroots political movements for 25 years.

If you’re new here, this is Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

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