Modeling civil unrest in the United States: some historical cases

Greetings from the United States holiday of Labor Day. I took a day off yesterday with my wife to explore Fredericksburg, a nearby Virginia city with interesting historical and general stuff. Being an America, I couldn’t take the day really off, and managed to work whenever I could: in the car, in the hotel.

Continuing to teach myself photography.

Labor Day is a contested day in American history, although modern celebrations show few signs of it. We tend to celebrate with outdoor relaxation, a genial nod to summer on its gradual way out the seasonal door. We often forget that historical labor movements preferred the date of May 1st for its international and radical charge, and that conservatives succeeded in hauling it to the calendar’s either end precisely to neutralize that meaning. Or, as Eugene Debs put it, “We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day. The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day.”

So struggle and opposition in American culture is today’s theme, instead of grilling and loafing. I’d like to look ahead to where such turmoil might take us, and in ways not always focused on labor.

I’ve been modeling potential civil unrest in the US for a while, as some of you know (in terms of polycrisis, neonationalism, recent…