A week ago I wrote a post called The Collapse of Europe? Are We Next? It was 136 words long. I had been flipping through the news, the way I do on a weekend, and I kept catching fragments — protests, fires, police, governments in trouble — and I wrote down the impression the fragments gave me: Europe is coming apart, and it could happen here.

Here’s the problem with that post, and I’ll say it before anybody else does: it named no event, cited no figure, and kept no receipts. That’s not good enough, not for something that size. So I went back and found out what the fragments actually were. This is the first of two posts doing the job properly. This one is Europe. The second one is us.

What was actually happening

The fragments were real. On Saturday, October 17, marches across France over the cost of living and the condition of the schools ended in looting and arson — around 3,000 businesses damaged or looted, some 2,600 people arrested. A week later, on Saturday the 24th, France braced for the second round: 70,000 police deployed around the country, two dozen Paris Metro stations closed, the Louvre and the Paris Opera shut for the day, shopkeepers boarding their windows in Paris and Lyon. The crowd still came — 410,000 by the Interior Ministry’s count, 800,000 by the unions’ — and the day ended with 1,314 more arrests, 53 officers injured, two protesters seriously hurt, and the looting held to 24 shops. The deployment won the damage count. Then the organizers called round three for the following Saturday, and a nationwide strike for November 5th.

Italy had its own version. Students launched what they call the October 17 Movement — demonstrations every Saturday afternoon — and in Milan the first weekend turned into riots: 271 people taken to police stations over that weekend, most of them minors, luxury storefronts looted. By the second Saturday the movement had switched to secret meeting points, announced half an hour ahead, so the police couldn’t concentrate against them — and the government had sent 500 extra soldiers into Milan and passed a security decree expanding preventive detention. The second Saturday in Milan ended peacefully — some 15,000 people marching under the eyes of soldiers — while the clashes moved to Turin, Bologna and Rome.

Spain, for good measure, had protest camps in Madrid over housing, a prime minister announcing a snap election, and the first general strike in fourteen years being called — and on the second Saturday, Barcelona joined the wave: smashed shops, street fires, 128 arrested in one night, over half of them minors.

Now — what did the governments do? Macron sat down with students and promised more teachers. Meloni answered with soldiers and a decree. Sánchez called an election. Notice what none of them did: fall.

What “collapse” would actually mean

Words have to earn their keep, so let’s define the big one. A cabinet falling is not a collapse; cabinets fall in healthy democracies all the time. A snap election is not a collapse; it’s a mechanism. Riots are not a collapse either — they’re a loss of public order, serious and frightening, but a state that can put 70,000 police on the street in an organized deployment has not stopped functioning.

Collapse, if the word means anything, is the end of the line: regime change by force, or the state itself failing — police gone, courts closed, nobody’s authority running past the end of their own street.

By that standard, Europe has not collapsed. Not France, not Italy, not Spain. Governments are strained, streets are periodically on fire, and the politics are ugly — and the states are still standing, collecting taxes, fielding police, holding elections. Ukraine doesn’t belong in this ledger at all: a country fighting off an invasion is not a country collapsing from within, and mixing the two is how a 136-word post gets sloppy.

And yet. I was asked — by my own outline, which is to say by me — whether, having seen the specifics, I’d still use the word.

Yes. Collapse is the right word — for the direction, not the destination. You don’t wait until the patient is dead to name the disease. What I saw in October wasn’t a continent of failed states. It was a continent where the young have concluded the deal is off: youth unemployment around one in five in both France and Italy, energy and food prices grinding families for five years now, schools falling apart — while the safety net their grandparents retired on, some of them in their fifties, is still the most generous in the world. The net protects the old. The young are in the street. That’s not a stable arrangement, and everybody in those streets knows which way it’s traveling.

I should also own this: the fragments reached me thin because American coverage was thin. The wire services covered these events; American television mostly glanced and moved on. If you felt like Europe was burning and nobody was reporting it, you weren’t imagining the second half.

Are we next?

That was the question in the original title, and it’s the question this whole exercise exists to answer honestly. Here’s my honest answer: nobody knows — but I believe we are on the road.

Not in six months. Not next year. The tell is 2028, and there are two of them. The first is the presidential campaign itself: what this country argues about, and how, when the turmoil is the backdrop. The second, and bigger, is what happens with Iran after the midterms. The president has promised no attacks before November 3rd, and the reporting says plans for after are already drawn. If that war drags on and energy prices stay where they are — and energy prices are food prices, and rent prices, and everything prices — frustration is going to build in this country the way it’s built in France, and the protests will grow: aimed at our government, and at Israel too, fairly or not.

I have seen this movie’s first reel. In 1968 I was a teenager, and I watched the Democratic convention in Chicago on television every night as it happened — the cameras out in the streets, the protests during the day, the chaos on the floor at night. I lived it. I was there. I witnessed it. Vietnam was at its height, and the turmoil inside one party handed the presidency to Richard Nixon, because a country watching disorder on its screens votes for the side that isn’t visibly falling apart. The lesson of 1968 isn’t about 1968. It’s that turmoil decides elections, and the side in disorder pays.

If it comes here, it won’t be only college kids. It’ll be high school kids, and older people who are just sick and tired — of prices, of a war that won’t end, of being told to wait. It could be unrest like we’ve never seen.

But we’ll survive it. That’s not a hope; it’s a reading of the same history. What turmoil decides is who governs afterward: how Congress and the White House respond during it will determine who owns Congress and the White House after the 2028 election — Democrat or Republican, nobody can tell you today. That, I guarantee.

Which leaves the harder question, the American one: if the road leads here, what do we protect, and how? Tomorrow’s post — Part Two — takes that up: what American citizenship should mean, why it should mean one country and one only, and what the melting pot I learned about in school has to do with any of it.