Metaviews: Future of Authority

10/26/2025

What is unfolding across North America is not anticipation of conflict—it is the conflict itself. A hybrid civil war, distributed across jurisdictions, layered through institutions, fought not just for territory but for control of meaning and legitimacy. The appearance of order is the weapon. Chaos is the policy.

When the federal government shuts down, authority unravels. Yet rather than retreat, power metastasizes. Officials continue operations under emergency provisions, contracting loyal forces, bypassing appropriations, leveraging hunger and uncertainty as instruments of compliance. In this phase, the battlefield is procedural: who gets to act, who is recognized when they do, and who is left waiting while others improvise rule.

The hybrid nature of this war lies in its simultaneity. Legal warfare through injunctions and lawsuits. Information warfare through staged briefings and algorithmic repetition. Economic warfare through withheld aid and selective enforcement. Paramilitary warfare through ICE and the selective federalization of the National Guard—units deployed across state lines, against local objections, under ambiguous command. Each domain feeds the others. Together they form a system of coercion without the need for victory.

This is what a dual state looks like when it stops pretending. The normative order—the one bound by constitutions and statutes—continues to issue statements, file motions, and hold hearings. But beside it operates the prerogative order: the chain of loyalty, the network of emergency powers, the armed apparatus ready to enforce directives regardless of law. Both claim to represent the republic. Both believe they are legitimate. The difference is that one still asks permission, and the other no longer needs to.

As social programs come to a halt and SNAP benefits begin to evaporate, the economy of survival turns political. Food banks become sites of authority, where scarcity disciplines more effectively than law. The spectacle of charity replaces the substance of welfare. The hungry are told to be patient; the well-fed are told to be vigilant. The line between crisis management and counterinsurgency narrows until it disappears. How far are we from mass looting of food and basic supplies?