I guess I’m being literal in that i dont think Americans in general have the appetite for the kind of violence that comes with a literal revolution.

I agree, but I think this is typically the case. Good people characteristically aren’t looking for an excuse to commit gratuitous acts of violence. Revolutionary violence usually takes the form of self defense, rather than a spontaneous righteous crusade against the status quo. Consider Minneapolis in 2020. After Derek Chauvin executed George Floyd on camera, people did the “proper” Liberal thing and assembled non-violently to pressure the government to bring criminal charges. For three days, they were surveilled and assaulted with batons and mace and “less lethal” munitions. Without this egregious overreaction from the state, the situation would have never advanced to the point of acute physical skirmishes between activists and police departments reinforced by the National Guard across the country. Within the span of a few short weeks, the situation transformed from the uneasy calm of the Covid quarantine, to the largest domestic uprising seen since the assassination of MLK. The largest Millennials have ever seen in their lifetime, anyway.

This is the pattern I expect to continue playing out. The government is losing its finesse and is reacting with brutality to political forces it was once comfortable ignoring completely. More recently, the crackdown against anti-genocide protesters on college campuses has been another example. Another case of tens of thousands of people applying the “proper” Liberal methods, non-violence, free speech, assembly, and being attacked with lawfare, expulsion, surveillance, SWAT teams, skirmishes with vigilante mobs, chemical weapons, imprisonment, and deportation. While this didn’t advance to the same level of acute crisis, it did transform a handful of largely academic and self-gratifying (for lack of a better term) encampments confined to university grounds into a continuous series of national headlines and much more mobile and chaotic wave of demonstrations.

We saw this again with the skirmishes between anti-ICE activists and “Operation Metro Surge.” We’re still not at the point where we’re just wasting pigs in the street, but acute physical confrontations between the state and the public are becoming much more regular. People are getting killed in these skirmishes. Doctors and mothers. We are already catching visceral glimpses of the battle to come.

We’re far away from having a people’s army, but I think people in general are much more prepared for a rapid pivot to “Plan B” than they were 10 or 20 years ago. The fantasy that any of our problems can be fixed with a march on Congress is thoroughly dead. There is a unanimous inevitability to it. It is only unclear what will be the spark. Which will be the situation that gets totally out of hand?