This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found here.
In the first part of this series, we considered the prospect of civil war in the West — the formal breakdown of authority resulting in two armed factions competing for control of the state — and discussed the barriers that the social conditions of late modernity present to the kind of revolutionary action that would usher in such a collapse. Conditions that began to emerge during Europe’s entry into modernity, and which have only intensified since, have atrophied not only the capacity of European peoples for the kind of violent action that revolution requires, but also, ultimately, their conceptual horizons — the ability of individuals to imagine an alternative vision of life and society which might motivate any such activity.
We closed with the acknowledgement that hyper-specialisation has created new vulnerabilities for praetorian states. Insofar as it makes sense to describe a group within society as having particularly pronounced political power, it is as a conceptual shorthand for the kinds of particular leverage that that group may hold over the wider whole as a result of its dependencies upon them — think of lorry drivers as an obvious example of a group upon whom society depends in a way that can be easily exploited to political ends. These vulnerabilities create the possibility of something less than civil war, but still on the continuum of political violence, as groups within society attempt to exercise leverage to extract concessions from the state on any number of issues.
Ostensibly, modern states have an unassailable advantage against the mass of the population. Where once the mob could reasonably threaten to tear the king from his castle, today the state has overwhelming military superiority against the disarmed population. Speaking in terms of leverage, the state seemingly has the winning hand: it is the sole provider of security, public goods, infrastructure, and the enforcement of contracts — and every member of the public is dependent upon it for these services. A truly praetorian modern state, therefore, should possess a kind of escalation dominance which guarantees its victory in any standoff.
The state’s position, however, is weaker than it might first seem. The sheer size of modern states precludes the possibility of true praetorianism, which requires not only that the state, as an organisation, be technically independent from the population, but also that the people who make it up have a coherent and separate identity which preserves that independence at every level of its operation. An organisation consisting of millions of people cannot achieve this kind of unity, and indeed the vast majority of people who deliver the state’s capabilities at the ground level do not see themselves as parts of a defined organisation, but simply as people like any other who collect a paycheck that happens to come from the government. Such de-corporatised agents of the state cannot always be relied upon to favour the interests of the institution over those of dissenting factions within the population, with whom they may share certain identities or even personal connections.
This disunity is also reflected at the organisational level, where divergences in interests between different parts of government create internal factionalisation. This can be seen very obviously when one compares the competing desires of, say, the NHS and the Treasury, but it is also the case even between different parts of the security state which one might assume have a stronger unity of purpose. Dissatisfied factions within the state can break rank in a critical moment, siding with dissenters external to the state and offering accommodation in return for support, giving the latter the power to bring the complex social-economic machinery that keeps the gears of state power turning to a halt — so long as they are able to coordinate their disruptive activities sufficiently.
Those activities will look something like what Albert O. Hirschman described as ‘Exit’, the historical uses of which we explored in the last essay. As hinted above, the greatest challenge for such actors will be achieving the required level of co-ordination, especially in the face of the modern state’s unprecedented ability to pre-empt and shut down such organisation. The Southport riots proved hard to contain precisely because they were uncoordinated, yet this also meant that they did not present any opportunity to leverage concessions from the state. More recently, Danny Tommo’s success in concentrating a smaller number of protesters towards more politically potent action has shown the power of organisation — yet his arrest has demonstrated the weakness that the single points of failure inherent to coordinated efforts present. Nonetheless, dedicated cadres seeking to exploit a ‘shock use of Exit’ in tandem with mass disorder, state unpreparedness and the presence of potentially accommodating forces within the official mechanisms of democratic politics have found increasingly fertile ground in recent years.
‘Civil war’ proper — with two factions in violent struggle for control over the state — remains highly improbable in every Western country. Yet these new dynamics make a more simmering form of civil unrest imaginable in ways it has not been for many decades. The background hum of protest, riots, and directionless violence that we have witnessed emerging in Britain and elsewhere in recent years indicates the fragility of the present moment.
This second essay will examine what the exploitation of this fragility might look like under present circumstances, and what the likely outcomes of such activities could be.
The tools of rebellion
David Betz’s essays, though they neglect the organisational challenges for direct action, illuminate some of the possibilities. For our purposes, he makes three relevant points.
Firstly, the conditions underlying domestic tranquillity and the basis of political legitimacy in democratic countries — homogeneity, and the resultant identification with a shared national project — have receded. For a once-comfortable majority population, the prospect of minoritisation is particularly incendiary, especially when it coincides with economic stagnation and the imposition of disprivileges, and is prone to cause serious and potentially violent unrest. Secondly, the state’s lack of ability to police increasingly ‘feral’ cities and the vulnerability of critical national infrastructure create openings for direct action which, if pursued, could bring political legitimacy down to irrecoverable levels. Finally, the symbolic contestation over power is already in full swing: on the left, in the form of iconoclastic vandalism and the destruction of historic cultural infrastructure; and on the right, in the mobilisation of national symbols to signify allegiance to a pre-existing moral and political community against the state (more on this later).
Spasmodic episodes of civilian violence, occasional political assassinations, and the growth of ‘feral cities’ (often referred to as ‘no-go-zones’) in which states are unable to enforce their monopoly on violence are already the reality in most Western countries. In the United States, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the earlier murder of healthcare executive Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, as well as the various attempts on the life of Donald Trump, have thoroughly broken the dam in this regard. As a matter of fact, political violence is no longer off the table in Western democracies. In the first two cases, the symbolic contestation (over the memory of the victim and the martyrdom of the perpetrator respectively) was won decisively by the aggressing party, whilst the most notable attempt against Trump produced the opposite result — by Trump’s own demonstration of his vigour.
Similarly, Northern Ireland has seen a series of race riots and pogrom-like communal violence each summer over the last three years against Roma and other migrant groups in Ballymena, Belfast, and County Antrim. Several of these episodes saw rioters achieve their desired ends, in this case directly rather than as a result of accommodation by the state: approximately three-quarters of the Roma population left Ballymena for good in the aftermath of unrest there. The riots across the country in the aftermath of Southport have not been remembered as a brutish assault on foreigners or an ugly expression of rank bigotry, but rather as an understandable (if regrettably forceful) outpouring of frustrations based on entirely ‘legitimate concerns’. Despite failing to secure direct concessions, the rioters therefore achieved a symbolic victory — and it was only luck on the part of the state that limited it to this, given the apparently complete lack of contingency plans beyond ‘drafting in the military’ when rumoured mass demonstrations in Walthamstow and elsewhere were to have come about.
These events, taken together, begin to sketch the outlines of the civil conflict to come. Betz describes how these conditions may escalate in the near future:
‘the major cities and environs become ungovernable, even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasizing intercommunal violence… these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.’
Betz raises the following as an example:
‘In Britain, for example, there are 24 gas compression stations, all in semi-rural environs, two of which serve London. None are hidden or more guarded than any normal light industrial facility. Attacking one requires no more than being able to plough through a chain-link fence. Likewise the network of Major Accident Hazard Pipelines (MAHPs – the clue is in the name) is intrinsically vulnerable.’
The individual components of the electricity grid are just as exposed as is the communications network and, crucially, transportation infrastructure, which in both Britain and America has already been in a state of degradation for some time even without efforts to disrupt it:
‘New York [is] a prime example – accessed by bridge or tunnel which constitute known bottlenecks that are easily attacked.’
Over the last century, the ability to control or disrupt transportation and communications (whether this is done before or after the symbolic centre of executive control is taken) has been the critical factor for the success or failure of attempted coups and revolutions, at least in those cases where the pre-existing regime attempts to resist its displacement. Railway control or disruption in particular was integral in the Russian, Mexican, and German Revolutions and the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the 1910s. Likewise, the British state managed to avert the 1926 General Strike spiralling into what could have been a government-ending event by mobilising volunteers set against socialist aims to maintain control of critical infrastructure from strikers.
More recent cases demonstrate the possibilities. This is now a forgotten episode, but in 2000, the British fuel tax protests led the Blair government to make major concessions in the face of an obviously extra-legal form of political action. Decrying increasing fuel prices and endorsed by the Conservative Party, a relatively small but well-organised group of lorry operators created blockades to disrupt petrol supplies. So effective was the disruption that 75-90% of petrol stations ran out of fuel in several parts of the country. Public bodies, including the NHS and Royal Mail, and major retailers warned the government that their supply chains — including those that provided food to major metropolitan areas — were endangered. To avoid further escalation, Blair chose not to physically clear out the protesters, and no emergency legislation was passed. Instead, he made a series of concessions to satisfy their demands. Having beaten the elected government, the strikers went home — and one of their leaders (Brynle Williams) even went on to become a shadow minister for the Conservative Party in the Welsh Assembly. The Home Office was later forced to admit that it was entirely unprepared for this kind of mass disruption, and that no contingency plans existed to deal with such events in future.
The importance of logistical control is tacitly understood by those who operate these systems. In the aftermath of the 2020 US election, there was talk of a national truckers’ strike in solidarity with President Trump’s efforts to Stop The Steal. Properly organised, a national strike could have frozen freight, and with it the supply of essential goods, food, and medicine to Democratic cities and coastal power centres, bringing the entire economy grinding to a halt. What choice would the occupants of Capitol Hill have had but to negotiate?
Of course, the truckers’ strike went absolutely nowhere, which was not for lack of support or interest. Truckers on Reddit and other forums openly discussed plans but expressed scepticism over the organisational constraints. In this case, the structure of the industry and the dominance of independent contractors and non-union carriers made the exercise of organising an independent strike borderline impossible. Could a single, perhaps even vague, word from Trump have made the difference as it did on January 6th? What if the strike had operated in tandem with protests in Washington?
Since 2000, British governments have placed greater emphasis on ‘national resilience’ and continuity planning for critical national infrastructure failure, as well as emergency logistics (particularly for fuel). Nevertheless, the vast majority of critical national infrastructure remains without any physical protection against assault. Rather, just-in-time arrangements and contingencies exist to give governments leeway to respond should certain nodes of CNI be taken down by weather, cyber attack, accidents, industrial action or malicious interference. The tax protests showed that small numbers seeking disruption do not need to physically destroy infrastructure to cause a national crisis – simply disrupting the ordinary flow is more than enough to cause panic. Even with contingencies in place, systemic fragilities are visible everywhere; one only has to look at the news over the past few months to see them. The combination of several disruptions at once would present a potentially disastrous challenge.
Territory & Control
It should be noted that the state is increasingly planning for a showdown of this kind. Present attempts to directly challenge state policy meanwhile remain firmly in the realm of democratic opposition and ordinary protest– i.e. the ‘Unite the Kingdom’, January 6th, Euromaidan. Danny Tommo’s Patriot Platform is arguably an innovator in the anti-migration protest space, utilising face coverings and presenting a physical block against migrant arrivals, but a single effort to create networks of this kind is relatively easy for the state to intervene in and disrupt. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 was officially framed as part of the Government’s ‘Safer Streets Mission’, which apparently seeks to tackle knife crime and violence against women and girls, yet it contained provisions in Sections 157-159 which created an offence of concealing identity at protests, and gave the police powers to designate an area where that offence applies or is likely to apply for up to 24 hours. These powers were recently deployed in Gosport. But because the frog is boiling slowly, the state’s responsiveness to these crises — both in terms of acquiring these new powers for itself and deploying them — is also piecemeal.
Increasingly, resistance to the state’s mass migration policies has taken a ‘territorialised’ form. An essay by The Westering Sun outlines the shifting nature of this pattern in Britain:
‘Operation Raise the Colours involved campaigners and local groups displaying the St. George’s Cross and Union Jack on lampposts, street furniture, kerbstones and mini roundabouts in towns and white, suburban parts of the cities as an act of patriotic reclamation of public space. The St. George’s Cross long carried associations of the distasteful form of nationalist expression and was treated with suspicion by the left. What was new was the use of both the England and Union flags detached from any institutional authority – an allegiance to a pre-existing moral and political community. The ‘flagging’ episode revealed a turn in the British people, indicating a fealty to a political community whose relationship to the official state had become increasingly ambiguous.’
What is most interesting about these developments is the way in which the symbolism of territorial control — for example, the conceptualisation of especially illegal migration as an ‘invasion’ — becomes concretised as the primary mode of political contestation. The battle for control of abstract political territory thereby becomes a struggle to assert dominance over a defined physical one, in a manner reminiscent of the establishment of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. Flagging itself represents a middle ground between the symbolic and the real. So far, we have only seen brief glimpses of the fuller transition — most notably in the establishment of ethnic checkpoints at intersections in Birmingham during the Southport riots — but we should expect more of that to come as these modes of action become ingrained.
As the territorialisation of political action progresses, Betz’ forecasts become far more plausible. Today, the forces opposed by protesters remain for the most part abstract. Yet as the public (or large parts of it) increasingly come to see political distinctions as questions of territorial control — versus hostile occupation — the targeting of particular localities becomes a more conceptually obvious move. For now, few people see ‘London’ as a coherent political target (other than in the metonymic sense that the word might be used to refer to central government), but, as that begins to change, it becomes easier to imagine the scenarios that Betz describes in which the city as a whole is contested through attacks on the critical infrastructure which sustains it.
A wider outbreak of this kind of physical territorial contestation would test the limits of the state’s ability to assert control, judging by previous indications of the need to rely on military support. Although a larger portion of police forces have now received specialist public order training, overall police headcount has decreased since March 2024, further shrinking their capacity. Were those capabilities stretched to their limit, bringing in the military may not play out quite as the state desires. Whilst the police are, by and large, a praetorianised force with strong loyalty to the state and its political aims, military rank-and-file are far less comprehensively ideologically selected and far more likely to hold sympathies for the very people they would be asked to hold the line against. Military enlistment straightforwardly selects for those of a vaguely nationalist persuasion, and, unlike the police, the military is overwhelmingly staffed by white men (as shown by the oft-cited statistic that more British Muslims joined ISIS than the army during its peak). If forced to rely on these forces to maintain order, the state may well find itself less able to resist making concessions as its internal unity weakens.
Resistance & Concession
It is often asserted by online pop ‘elite theorists’ that a ‘peasant revolt’ (a popular uprising without support from within the governing classes) can never bring about regime change. This, however, relies on a circular definition of what constitutes an ‘elite’ opinion vs what is ‘popular’. Especially in times like ours, there are always factions within the governing classes who are open to collaborating with popular discontent to advance their own interests, or even groups which sympathise directly with popular grievances. ‘Grassroots’ action can therefore often summon elite support after the fact, and it is difficult to ascribe causal agency to one part or another when that coincidence results in political change.
Elite interaction with the ‘peasants revolt’ can take another form. It has become common to refer to the growth of civil unrest in Britain as a whole as ‘Ulsterisation’, referring to the emergence of community violence along ethno-religious lines. There is another parallel, however, which those who have deployed this terminology have as yet refused to draw. The violence of the Troubles was utilised on both sides by political actors seeking power and office within the official electoral system, and it was this interplay between legal and extra-legal political activity that gave figures like Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams the ability to assert themselves both into and de facto against the rest of the state. The earlier example of the lorry operators demonstrated how dissatisfied factions outside of the state can leverage concessions from hostile actors within it; but when politicians directly side with those factions and wield them as tools, they can be all the more impactful.
As yet, examples of this kind of collaboration have been minor and fleeting. No politician has truly sought to replicate the spectrum of relationships and alliances between formal and informal actors seen during the Troubles, and, for now, anyone who did would likely incur substantial political costs. In the context of long-entrenched and deeply felt divisions, conflict seemed inevitable; the relevant question being who could defend your side and win. Today, much of the public still hopes to avoid the slide into civic strife, and will punish politicians who too openly embrace it for their own ends. Yet that attitude can only persist for so long against the reality of increasingly common violence: eventually, people realise why everybody can’t just get along.
One might also expect that any adoption of this strategy would be met with a harsh response from the state, which has proven keen to tie dissenting political voices to extra-legal forces as a tool of delegitimisation. The re-election of Donald Trump, however, as well as the now likely election of Flavio Bolsonaro in Brazil (both of whom have or are associated with others who have at least flirted with this approach), have shown that most liberal states are actually rather flaccid in their lack of ability or willingness to strategically disempower their opponents once they have amassed a large enough body of public support. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise — after all, it is not clear how a state could meaningfully suppress political tendencies that attract the support of up to half of the population, especially when such suppression is likely to produce an intensification of their support. Whilst no politician in Europe has yet even gone as far as Trump in crossing this particular Rubicon, there is little reason to believe that European states will be better able to prevent future political entrepreneurs from doing so.
Neither is the state especially ruinous to established dissenters. Many of the most prominent extra-institutional political actors and protest leaders in Britain, for example, have undoubtedly broken the law under a strict definition, and some have been arrested as a result; none have faced particularly serious legal consequences (excepting Tommy Robinson, whose imprisonment has largely been for non-political crimes). In fact, such figures often relish the prospect of being thrown into the back of a police van screaming about the liberation of England for the inevitable publicity that mild repression brings. Insofar as the state brings down the hammer on anyone, it is chiefly ordinary people who take the blow: figures like Lucy Connolly who have limited notoriety and little recourse, nameless protesters who step just over the line, and of course young white schoolboys persecuted by Prevent for browsing naughty websites.
This precarious balance means that political actors will be able to walk a tightrope, harnessing the power of extra-legal activity whilst maintaining their distance from it. As political figures tentatively extend protection and endorsement to these activities, they will increase in frequency and intensity, an inevitable consequence of which will be the regular arrest (and, quite possibly, police brutalisation) of ordinary participants, generating martyrs who further radicalise the cause.
In a moment of strained legitimacy (for example, another sequence of summer riots following an inevitable sequel to the Southport massacre), this process could easily create new political possibilities. Imagine that such disorder was accompanied by a solidarity strike in the style of 2000 by lorry operators, farmers, or, of course, the white-vanned Proletariat. Imagine relevant voices in the opposition, instead of the usual calls for calm, made loudly the argument that the government had clearly lost control and called for its resignation and fresh elections — something which they could do easily even while distancing themselves from the worst of the unrest. Protests which began as directionless expressions of anger could easily be reoriented around this goal, and protests with a clear demand that can be met or denied naturally become stickier than those representing nebulous concerns (see the longevity of the Gilets Jaunes, or even the London pro-Palestine protests, vs the Southport riots). A government forced to concede on such terms would undoubtedly enter an election as the weak horse, whilst allowing the opposition to run on a ‘return to normalcy’ and a restoration of order, despite their engagement with the unrest itself.
The Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 were perhaps the most pronounced instance of these dynamics witnessed so far in the West. Much of this period has now fallen down the memory hole, but it should not be forgotten that rioters came remarkably close to storming the White House (having broken into the grounds, prompting the Secret Service to move the President to a secure underground bunker) with the tacit encouragement of figures such as James Comey and General Milley. Democratic Politicians did not go quite so far as to provide vocal encouragement, but remained deafeningly silent, having previously been loudly supportive of the ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ protests — a clear example of the tightrope being walked.
Whilst there are various ways that political actors and parts of the state itself can work alongside the extra-legal political activity of dissatisfied elements in the population, there are also many ways it might resist their demands. Modern states do have unprecedented repressive capacities. Post-war developments in counter-insurgency, and more recent innovations in counter-terror, have given the British security state powers and tactics that the late-Imperial Russian secret police could only have dreamed of. This includes not only the legal ability to proscribe organisations and curtail their activities, but the ability to disrupt and surveil them comprehensively. Much of the institutional apparatus for managing internecine conflict of this kind was itself derived from the experience of Ulster. But it is crucial to note there are key flaws in attempting to extend this model naively: for one, the British state could rely fully on the loyalty of its troops in Northern Ireland given that (no matter how much the British right may wish to believe otherwise) Ulster was a genuinely alien society to which they felt little connection. Many soldiers have said as much in their own memoirs. Deploying the same forces at home will bring unexpected complexities.
The ability of the state to disrupt anything resembling Northern-Irish-style paras-cum-local stakeholders, especially when this kind of grouping lacks the political and social entrenchment that they had in Ulster which was established before the emergence of the British security state, naturally imposes an evolutionary pressure on dissident organisation which selects for a hydra-like structure built on memetic communication and organic WhatsApp group networks with no clear central leadership. Whilst certain figures (including the likes of Orla Minihane) emerged as prominent representatives of the 2025 summer protests in Britain, there was no ‘organiser’ per se. Instead, gatherings arose spontaneously, advertised by ordinary attendees in Facebook groups and text chains. This form of organisation is far harder to disrupt or contain, because there is no central node to attack.
Modern states, abstractly conceived, have near-total power to direct, or if necessary, discipline the various interconnected parts of the complex social machine that exists beneath them. In reality, however, a state is itself a complicated web of relationships that is upheld by the ordinary functioning of the whole. Taken individually, any attempt at a shock use of exit is likely to fail. Yet at a crucial moment, when public demands coincide with divisions in the state and a willingness on the part of certain political actors to provide support and direction, there is good chance that these tactics could be decisive.
Conclusion
In the first essay of this series, we outlined why civil war ‘proper’ has become impossible in the West. Yet, whilst that question raises a series of philosophically interesting discussions on the nature of modern society, the point itself is perhaps irrelevant: the trajectory we have found ourselves on despite this remains one of increasing, if only simmering, violence and disorder. So far, our discussion has been purely analytical - but it is worth offering some reflections on this course, even if there is little that can be done to avert it.
The core issue raised in this series has not been whether a relative ‘return to normalcy’ in democratic politics is possible, but rather the narrow horizons of Western peoples in a moment that should be utterly transformative. The issues underwriting present political conflicts could and should have been resolved by established politicians at many points over the past several decades. That our political system has been unable or unwilling to deliver this outcome, such that the kinds of extra-legal action described above become imaginable given the extent of discontent among the population, is regrettable not just because it is likely to give rise to violence, but also because it demands our attention be dedicated to a series of issues which are, ultimately, banal.
It is obvious to any person willing to trust their lying eyes that mass migration has been a disastrous mistake, that the effective abolition of policing and the dramatic loosening of criminal justice has failed, and that a state which funnels 40% of the productive economy towards subsidies for idle clients will collapse any possibility of growth or prosperity. As the early 21st century gives way to the mid, the very phenomena which we discussed in part one created a society gripped by ennui (indeed, this is partly the reason that discussions of coming violent catharsis are so intoxicating to so many) and exhausted of vitality and cultural productivity. As the West drifts into this uncomfortable slumber, our power in the world shrinks, and our position at the forefront of technological civilisation recedes relative to our competitors. It is these questions of what our society is for, how we wish to live, and how we will remain competitive and generative in the future that should occupy our minds, rather than endless debate on whether to continue our national suicide.
Continuing these circular conversations with fists and fires rather than words is hardly an improvement on our situation. Those who hope that an intensification of the modes of political contestation might result in a heightening of political concerns will find themselves sorely disappointed. The strikes of the future will demand lower petrol prices and cheaper rent, not a revolution in moral sentiments or a new kind of man.
In fact, this detour into chaos will delay the one truly revolutionary process which holds open the possibility for broader horizons to open once again: the coming liberation of humanity from participation in the productive process as a result of artificial intelligence and robotics. Whatever challenges this transformation (and the transition period it entails) brings, developments in technology have opened for the first time the possibility to escape the pressure of economic incentives and reverse the trend towards specialisation (and the sociological and political dynamics it engenders). To bring us back to where we started, the culmination of the forces championed by Smith may prove to be the ultimate vindication of Ferguson after all. What comes after that is a question for another time.
This article was written by Francis Gaultier, Commissioning Editor, and Harry Jee, Managing Editor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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The quality of people who are propping the regime up has declined, particularly the Police and even (people I know) in the intelligence services.
I work with lots of young men who understand they will never own a house and have not much to lose at this stage.
It's only going to get worse before it gets even worse.