Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state
Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish.
These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, but it also seems to suddenly be everywhere.
Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a “cold” civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state tosecede from the Union.
The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be “time to split the country.”
Researchers have found such downbeat assessments of America’s democracy are especially prominent among the young. Last month, the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School published a poll that found half of voting age Americans under 30 thought our democracy was “in trouble” or “failing.” A third also said they expected there to be “a civil war” within their lifetimes. And a quarter thought at least one state would secede.
The more one hears this particular drumbeat, the louder it becomes.
Late last year, the University of Maryland and The Washington Post produced a poll saying that one-third of Americans thought violence against the government was “sometimes justified” — a belief they found even more widely held among Republicans and independents. According to the Post, just about 1 American in 10 held that view in the 1990s.
Do the respondents in all these polls fully realize what these terms mean, or their answers imply? Possibly not.
What do people even mean by “civil war”?
The American Civil War cost the lives of at least 600,000 Americans and contributed to the deaths of many thousands more. It devastated the South economically and left most of those in the region who had been emancipated to lives of misery.
Moreover, it did little to settle the constitutional issue of “states’ rights,” a problematic point in our national conversation ever since.
Stephen Marche, Canadian novelist and author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, states, “The United States is coming to an end.
The only question is how.” That pretty much tells the reader where he stands – and it is hardly coincidental that the aforementioned book was published on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol “insurrection.”
Marche theorizes, “you now have another situation like in 1860 where you have two legal statuses of people in different parts of the country, and it just can’t hold.” But this idea of “two legal statuses” existing in different regions of the country is nothing new. Every American is subject to two legal statuses.
On the one hand, there are those laws the United States Congress has the authority to pass, limited to what Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution permits, and, on the other, there are the laws passed by the states.
When the Supreme Court struck down the federal government’s over-reaching protection of abortion, that was simply federalism at work – not a revolutionary threat to federal power.
In fact, as Liberty Nation Legal Affairs Editor Scott Cosenza points out, “It’s only when some states wished to exert their will over how things went in the other states that we got to civil war. Devolving power from the federal government to the states is an anti-civil war measure.”
If federalism were respected as the Founding Fathers originally outlined it, there would be almost no discontent with national policies because few would exist.
There would be no far-reaching executive orders, massive debt, spiraling inflation, or an alphabet soup of federal agencies.
Associated Press by David Goldman
“We already are seeing ‘border war’ with individual states passing major legislation that differs considerably from that in other places,” says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and William Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies, who have written a pair of articles on the fraying of the American social and political fabric.
They note that conflicts between entire states are not the only way civil war may emerge in our time, or even the most likely. When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home. As West and Gale write:
Today’s toxic atmosphere makes it difficult to negotiate on important issues, which makes people angry with the federal government and has helped create a winner-take-all approach to politics.
When the stakes are so high, people are willing to consider extraordinary means to achieve their objectives.
And what do these careful scholars mean by “extraordinary means”?
“America has an extraordinary number of guns and private militias,” they write. How many? They cite the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s estimate of 434 million firearms in civilian possession in the U.S. right now. That would be 1.3 guns per person.
“Semi-automatic weapons comprise around 19.8 million in total,” they add ominously, “making for a highly armed population with potentially dangerous capabilities.”
The geographical divides in our time are different from those of the 1860s.
But the most meaningful geographic separation in our society is no longer as tidy as North and South, or East and West. It is the familiar divide between urban and rural, or to update that a bit: metro versus non-metro.
Thus a “blue state” such as Maine has populous coastal counties that voted for Biden and sparsely populated interior counties that went heavily for Trump, enough to tip the majority to him in one of the state’s two congressional districts.
Conversely, in ruby red state Nebraska, one congressional district anchored in the city of Omaha went for Biden.
We have the same problem. St. Louis and Kansas City voted for Biden. Rural Missouri voted for Trump.
So now I must ask the question, would America survive a civil war?
https://unherd.com/2021/11/would-america-survive-a-civil-war/
Historically speaking, empires on average last for around 250 years, after which they tend to either slowly — or very, very quickly — fall apart due to overreach and internal conflict. Somewhat ominously, the 250th birthday of America is coming up in 2026.
2022 is a different world than 2015. Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill. It’s entering the fringes of polite society.
Some support this ‘national divorce’; others are opposed to it. Others claim they would actually prefer to declare war on their wayward countrymen rather than let them go their own way unmolested.
None of this morbid interest in civil conflict is irrational, given the times. The year 2022 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another.
Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.
Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order.
Still, the question to be answered at the end of the day is quite simple: how likely is civil war, or national divorce, or a ‘troubles scenario’ really? To answer this question accurately, a few misconceptions about it being impossible have to be dealt with.
One of the most worrisome aspects of contemporary American political discussion is the sense one often gets that many participants are possessed by a thinly-veiled bloodlust.
Following a wave of destructive riots that tore through many cities in the United States last year, this turn toward open celebration of equally useless violence when it is visited on the enemy team speaks to a dangerous sort of polarization.
From this sort of bloodlust flows another very common assertion: that a civil war, if waged on American soil, would be over quickly, and lead to a fairly effortless massacre of any insurrectionists in flyover America.
The idea here is that the US military is so advanced, and has so many tanks, gunships, fuel air bombs, and drones, that the federal government is simply assured of victory.
As such, a civil war is an unlikely or impossible scenario, given the dramatic imbalance of power between the state and even a numerically large, dissatisfied internal population.
But this is a dangerous misconception. While the US military is indeed powerful and lavishly funded, it is a military designed to fight other countries.
Warfare between countries is bound by rules and regulations; it is based on consent.
This might seem a strange assertion to make, given that a country cannot just decline a war declaration from an enemy, but it holds true. There’s a formal or informal understanding of who is an actual combatant and who is not.
In contrast, warfare in primitive or tribal societies does not make any distinction between a civilian and a soldier. There are just enemies; ambushing and killing a 12-year-old girl drawing water at the creek is seen as normal as killing an adult warrior.
This is where the European habit of calling uncivilized peoples “savages” comes from; rather than merely being an expression of racist chauvinism, Europeans were in fact oftentimes shocked by the habit of Native Americans and other peoples to ‘not play by the rules’.
But playing by the rules is a fool’s game. An insurgency in America has about as much reason as the Native Americans once did to follow the rules of their enemies; they are under no compulsion to wear blinking strobe lights to make themselves easier for the drones to target. And that simple fact means that a counterinsurgency effort in the US is almost certainly doomed to fail.
In counterinsurgency warfare, everything that makes the US armed forces great — high-tech weapon platforms with immense destructive power — are not just useless, but counterproductive.
A tank parked outside a shopping mall in Idaho will either spend its time shooting at nothing or be at a very high risk of killing innocent American civilians for the high crime of ‘looking suspicious’.
Droning American weddings, like Afghan ones, does very little to advance the goals of a counterinsurgency. If anything, it only makes the relatives of the dead more likely to fight.
The US armed forces are also at least an order of magnitude too small to do the job effectively.
During Operation Banner, the British military deployed at most 20,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland to keep a lid on that wayward province.
The US armed forces consist of about 1.3 million active-duty personnel, but this is spread out over five branches (Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard), and only a small minority of military personnel are actually combat troops.
It is thus very unlikely that the armed forces could scramble more than 100,000 regulars willing to do the job of holding an M4 carbine and patrolling down the main street of Anytown, Texas. To put that into perspective, Northern Ireland is about 2% the size of Texas.
Then there’s the fact that the most significant political split in America is between rural areas and coastal cities, and the armed forces are reliant on the very areas it would be tasked with policing as far as recruiting soldiers goes.
Red America is overrepresented within the armed forces, and this won’t change. As such, the US doesn’t just have too few soldiers, it has potentially unreliable ones, and the more brutality is used against unruly red states, the more these soldiers will be ordered to fight and kill their own friends and family — a recipe for serious mutiny and disobedience.
Finally, there is an even greater elephant in the room. In the case of an American drone pilot accidentally blowing up a wedding in Afghanistan, the Afghan relatives of the slain have very little recourse.
If an American drone pilot blows up an American wedding, however, that drone pilot and his or her family lives in the United States. Given the likely unreliability of some significant parts of the armed forces, the names and addresses of the most hated butchers are unlikely to stay a secret for long.
In Northern Ireland, for example, the provisional IRA not only attacked soldiers; they made a habit of assassinating the officers, commanders and politicians both for revenge and as a display of might.
From Lord Mountbatten to a near-miss against Margaret Thatcher herself, to a score of less well-known targets, the IRA illustrates just how difficult it is to protect against an enemy that can simply choose to not wear a uniform before their enemies visit.
Now, with that all that said, how likely is it that there will be some sort of civil conflict in the near or mid future for the United States?
Unfortunately, the correct answer here may very well be that it is not terribly unlikely.
What is significant about America today is not that it’s nearing its 250th birthday, but rather the clear and advanced signs of sickness in the body politic.
The ranks of America’s military are now brooding and battered after 20 years of failed nation-building, while its higher officer corps is increasingly alienated from the world of its grunts, mirroring that same cultural, economic, and social divide that is currently poisoning civilian life in the US.
Folks, if a civil war were to break out, we here in Missouri would be in the same mess we were during the last one.
Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis would all side with the Federal Government and its forces. Martial law would be declared.
Citizens would be forced to choose a side. Those opposed to Federal control would challenge that occupation and fight a long, and extremely bloody, guerrilla war.
Bear in mind, during the last civil war, the Union had to station 80,000 troops in Missouri to fight guerillas like, Quantrill, the James Boys, and the Younger Brothers whose forces numbered only in the 100’s.
Why? The federal government waged war, not only on the guerillas, but on the citizens of Missouri as well.
I pray it never comes to a civil war because all you must do is look at our history.
More US casualties were suffered in our civil war than in any other conflict in our history, including WWI and WWII.
The said thing is, despite those losses, we find ourselves fighting today over the same issue. Federal vs. State power.