Eliminate All the Libtards

Our democracy is teetering on the brink. The consensus is that it will "sleepwalk" into authoritarianism, unnoticed by most Americans until it is too late. But there is a darker possibility.

THIS POST BEGINS on a happy note, but trust me, that note soon disappears.

Although I’m trying to shift my political posts to this Substack, I still have an exponentially larger audience on Facebook (1.7K FB friends v 45 Substack subscribers as of this writing). They are something of a captive audience, so I post far more funny memes than political posts, and I have “No Politics Friday,” a day on which political posts are verboten. Not that there’s anything special about Friday. It’s just a way to signal that I don’t let myself get carried away with politics.

On June 17 I composed a post, thanking my friends on the left and the right for their support:

I thought I’d raise a metaphorical glass to all of you out there who have been supportive of my political posts. And I define “supportive” in two ways.

First, there is the obvious kind: friends who leave reactions to posts, encouraging comments, and so on. These friends are mostly though not entirely on the liberal side of the political spectrum.

Second, there is the less obvious but arguably more important kind: the friends who disagree with me—or find political posts disagreeable. The friends who disagree with me are mostly though not entirely on the conservative side of the political spectrum. The friends who find politics disagreeable are all over the map. If there is one thing on which many Americans can unite, it is a profound sense of exhaustion with our political culture.

Although my politics are liberal (center-left, to be precise), I have many more friends who identify as conservative rather than liberal. They could dive bomb my posts with objections or choose to discard me, but what they mainly do is simply understand that this work is important to me, respect that, and—I like to think, on a day-to-day basis are glad to see that I am setting my mind to it even as they glide right past the political posts and wait for one of the funny memes. The same is true of my friends for whom political posts are as welcome as fingernails scratching on a chalkboard. (I deliberately maintain a 10:1 ratio between funny memes and political posts, by the way.)

The tragedy in this country, which I feel to my core, is the way that hyper-partisanship has sorted us into what seems like two armed camps. And the reason I feel it so deeply is that I have friends from so many different backgrounds and so many points of view who would heed any call I might make for help.

I can’t think of a good way to bring this post in for a landing. So I will relinquish any attempt to commit literature and just say to all of you: THANKS.

The post received 109 reactions and 20 comments. They were uniformly positive. I particularly appreciated those who wrote that they like my posts because they consider me fair-minded rather than nakedly partisan. That was the perfect compliment. Fair-minded is my ideal. Nakedly partisan is my nemesis.

I say “uniformly positive.” That was true except for one late arrival. It came from a colonel who was one of my students during my two years as a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—which were, incidentally, among the two best years of my entire academic career. My students—a mixture of American officers, foreign officers, and high-ranking civilians in the federal national security community—were a wonderful bunch: intelligent, motivated, and a pleasure to be around. It was an honor to be in their company.

This attitude, it turns out, was not universally reciprocated—although I suspect that it had to do with the colonel’s political journey after graduating from the War College rather than something he thought of me at the time. The colonel apparently thought that I still worked there, presumably because the pic that accompanied the post showed me wearing an Army War College ball cap while hoisting a brew.

Here is what he wrote:

Grimsley, my beliefs are far RIGHT. The fuck wad’s who want to destroy our country need to be eliminated. TRUMP destroyed the nuclear facilities in Iran and if you or any other libtards don't think that was a grand national defense success, then maybe you shouldn't be teaching warriors in the Army War College?!

I thought this was one of the dumbest things I had read in a while. (Well, a week, anyway.) Because of his hard right political beliefs, the colonel a) viewed it as a litmus test to uncritically accept Trump’s “assessment” of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities—before any assessment had actually been done; and b) considered me to be among the “fuck wads in this country who need to be eliminated” because I took seriously the evidence of the preliminary bomb damage assessment; and furthermore, that I was a “libtard” who had no business teaching “warriors” at the Army War College.

So far, so stupid.

BUT THE OFFICER’S COMMENT contained a darker component that merits being taken seriously.

I was a member of a group that needed to be “eliminated.” The colonel didn’t pull this term out of thin air. It is redolent in much with what one encounters in the MAGA-sphere.

One might suppose that this is mere rhetoric. Barbara F. Walter, a professor of international relations at UC-San Diego, suggests otherwise. The United States just might plummet into another civil war.

In her book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (New York: Crown, 2022), Walter identifies two main factors that place a country at risk for civil war.

The first is “anocracy,” a halfway point between autocracy and democracy. In either type of system, the risk of civil war is low. The danger arises when a country is in the process of moving toward or away from democracy.

The second is that this period produces new “winners” and “losers.” In the shift away from autocracy, she explains, “formerly disenfranchised citizens come into new power, while those who once held privileges find themselves losing influence.”

Because the emerging government in an anocracy is fragile, those who perceive themselves as losing power are not sure that the new government will be fair or that they will be protected.

Until 2000, most anocracies occurred when a country was in the process of shifting from autocracy to democracy. These have produced the bulk of the civil wars—which have taken the form mainly of terrorism and insurgencies. But since then, countries have increasingly shifted the other way: abandoning democracy for authoritarianism.

HUNGARY IS A MAJOR CASE IN POINT—and, not incidentally, the leader most responsible for this, prime minister Victor Orbán, is much admired on the American political Right. This form of anocracy has so far produced fewer outright civil wars because their populations don’t notice the transition from democracy to authoritarianism until it is too late. But the period of anocracy is still there, and with it, according to Walter, the risk of civil war.

If you look at the American political Right today, you find an odd paradox. On the one hand, the Right controls most of the political power. On the other, it perceives itself to be a besieged minority: a “loser” rather than a “winner.” Increasingly, it no longer believes that democratic government will furnish it with protection against newly enfranchised groups, and it deeply resents the fact that it is losing its historically dominant position in American political, economic, and socio-cultural life. It urgently needs to recover this.

And since democracy no longer works for this purpose, authoritarianism is the obvious alternative. Anyone who does not see the shift on the Right from democracy toward authoritarianism is either willfully blind or simply not paying attention.

SO WHO IS THE ENEMY HERE? Who is the group or groups that pose threat so dire that the guardrails of democracy must be discarded? The question is often thought to be framed in terms of white racism against the rising power of African American or Hispanic groups, but this explanation is incomplete. The Right has made inroads into both demographic groups.

No. The threat is a contrived version of “elites,” defined mainly by their supposed cultural hegemony. It is the group that opposes “real American values,” whose defenders the Right fathoms itself to be. The people in this group are the “fuck wads who need to be eliminated.”

To repeat, “eliminated” is by no means a term invented by this colonel. And don’t kid yourself that it is mere rhetoric.

---

The photo is a screenshot from Civil War (2024; directed by Alex Garland). As of July 7, 2025, it is available exclusively on Amazon Prime.

The verb “sleepwalk” is borrowed from Kim Lane Schepple and Norman Eisen, “Are We Sleepwalking into Autocracy?” New York Times, January 15, 2025.