IMHO, the true threshold for what it would take to trigger a real civil war in America today is far, far beyond what most people casually say on the Internet.
Prior to the election last year, many people said, “If (opposing candidate/party) steals this election, it means civil war!”…and nothing of the sort happened. Sure, there was January 6, but that was nothing compared to an actual civil war. (I also believe that even if Trump had outright stolen the election, all we would have seen from liberals would have been a few weeks of violent protesting but not much more.)
“If they take our guns, civil war!”…no, I don’t think it would.
“If they impose (restrictions on freedom), civil war will ensue!”…no, we saw many such restrictions in Covid and no civil war.
“If such-and-such a candidate wins the presidency, civil war!”…no it won’t.
Fundamentally, people have inertia by nature. We don’t want to be jostled into action until there are extreme circumstances that compel it. IMHO, 99 percent of all “civil war” talk is hot air. I’m not even sure that Texas or other states seceding would necessarily start a civil war.
So with all that…just how bad an event would it take to trigger a true, full-blown civil war in America today, as real as the one in the 1860s?
It should be noted that our last civil war wasn’t a mass uprising of disgruntled citizens but an action by political leaders of Southern states to secede (specifically started by the state legislature of South Carolina). I don’t think US state governors or legislatures would seriously consider secession today regardless of political bent or fiery rhetoric because they are way too dependent upon the federal government for funds, trade relations, et cetera, and the supposed economic impetus of maintaining the institution of human slavery is no longer an issue.
This does not mean that we could not potentially see large(r) scale insurrection should one extreme feel exceptionally marginalized, and as we saw on January 6 there are certainly a group of people who feel entirely justified in interfering with electoral processes (or are sufficiently obtuse that they don’t even realize they are committing insurrectionist acts), but an actual civil war with organized movements with sufficient military power to threaten civil authority seems unlikely just because it is to no ones’ advantage, and unless the economy degrades to the point of collapse most people will embrace their material comforts over sustained violent confrontation. The demonstrations of the summer of 2020 were certainly inflamed by racial and social injustice, but they were fundamentally fed by economic uncertainty; the same goes for “Trumpism”, which is fundamentally not stupid walls and murderous immigrants but fear of change and uncertainty of economic stability.
A few years of extreme weather leading to massive droughts and complete crop failures, however, are another story entirely. Comfortable, well-fed people do not engage in revolution even if they’re upset with the system; hungry, fearful people, on the other hand, will do anything for a better life.
Though that sounds more like a revolution than a civil war to me. At that point, I can’t imagine who’d be fighting for the other side. The “Trumpers” or their equivalents would either be dead or starving just as bad as everyone else.
People love to talk about civil war.
But the real danger for 21st century America is not civil war—it is civil chaos.
A war is when two sides have guns and shoot each other .
Very unlikely to happen,
But chaos–well, that’s not impossible in today’s political climate.
If Biden wins re-election over Trump in 2024, I expect to see some riots and a few drive-by shootings of Democratic Party offices… But I don’t think it will last long…
This is the more realistic danger.
If McDonald’s can’t supply enough hamburgers,…the chaos will begin. And once it starts, it may be unstoppable. But it won’t be a “civil war”, fought until one side wins.
Everybody will lose.
If Trump had actually stolen the election, the worst case (best case?) wouldn’t just be a few weeks of liberals violently protesting. Lets imagine a world in which 1/6/2021 succeeded, and the protesters / insurrectionists / traitors got to Pelosi, Schumer, and numerous other Democratic senators and representatives. Let’s say that McConnell and Kevin McCarthy then declared Trump the winner. In that scenario, it could very well have turned out that the next step would be General Milley coming out and saying that the Armed Forces would only take orders from Biden, mobilizing the military, and using active duty troops to arrest Trump and any of his supporters that stand in the way, up to and including secret service, US Marshals, ATF agents, etc.
I imagine that if you want concrete answers, like you need a threshold of controlling at least 30% of the military to engage in a successful civil war, then wargaming would be one way to get at them.
If I were to scratch out a plot for the next civil war on a cocktail napkin, the outline would look roughly like:
Some crisis emerges in a city. Perhaps a state government discards a legitimate slate of electors, perhaps in retaliation a city or county government declares itself not bound by a state government that has shown itself to be lawless and illegitimate.
Street violence occurs between pro-state and anti-state forces. Liberal mayor issues a controversial policy to pacify the situation. Police end up killing a members of numerous pro-state paramilitary rioters.
Nationwide outrage ensues, some city police quit, but most remain to enforce orders.
Governor issues ultimatum to mayor and police to suspend the order and stand down. They refuse.
Governor declares the city police to be summarily fired, mobilizes NG to arrest the mayor and police and occupy the city.
President issues an order federalizing that state’s NG, orders them to stand down.
State governor declares federalization order to be null and void, NG leadership remains aligned with governor
President sends in the 82nd Airborne to capture or destroy rebellious NG units
Follow-on forces of MP and leg infantry occupy the city.
Process repeats in other states. Majority of large cities are occupied/under martial law, most other cities fend for themselves and break whichever way best reflects their will and ability to fight.
It’s a stalemate. Feds lack the manpower to pacify the rebellious rural areas, rebels lack technological and logistical networks to project large-scale force into cities.
Rural areas, with a lack of fuel, parts, and inputs for their industrialized farms, begin to starve and revolt.
A quarter of the US Army deserts. The Marine Corps goes rogue and intends to march from coast to coast, liberating the cities.
The ultimate outcome depends on which way the US Air Force breaks. Air supremacy alone isn’t sufficient to win a war, not without destroying resources that both sides need, but ground conquest can’t happen without it. It will be revealed that the Air Force’s command structure is heavily infiltrated by racists and religious zealots who, for differing reasons, are agreeable to watching the country tear itself apart.
How does it end? You’ll have to buy my book when it comes out.
The urban areas would be receiving supplies via air and sea. Think Berlin Airlift. It wouldn’t be ideal, you wouldn’t enjoy it, but it would work for quite a while.
The rural areas would effectively say goodbye to imported supplies, internet, electricity, pretty much everything. The farcical belief in the rugged, independent backcountry would come grinding to a painful halt. For them it would be a return to 1863, but they’d be facing an adversary that’s only been set back to 1950 or thereabouts. And they’d be doing it in conditions of famine not seen since Stalin’s time.
I expect, in some scenarios, some troops(National Guard or Army or whatever) will go AWOL rather than fight fellow Americans. How many is up to debate. It could potentially be a huge factor if a majority reject the chain of command and refuse to fight.
“Refusing to fight” isn’t really my concern with AWOL troops of whatever branch. It’s the ones who go AWOL because they don’t like which side they’ve been told to fight, and so they become the core of a partisan/terrorist insurrection that’s far better trained than the usual “Militia” “Gravy Seals” types.
The mostly shitty civilian militias we see these days would lose against proper troops pretty quickly. But if the militias gain a significant number of AWOL troops, that could change. They probably still wouldn’t win, but they’d do a lot more damage in the process of losing.
In the modern US military, most personnel are like ants… they become useless when separated from the colony. There might be some combat effectiveness if you got an entire brigade or division to defect, but those size units need enormous logistical support. Very thirsty for gas, hungry for food, desperate for parts.
I’d be more concerned about the individual capacity to spy and sabotage. IED’s and similar terrorist bombings would become a routine fact of life for a really long time. Maybe forever.
They certainly wouldn’t be a large mechanized force like the proper US military is. What I’m mostly thinking of is small unit tactics directed against relatively soft targets like police stations, churches, or public gatherings. Places that could be hit quickly, with a large number of casualties, that would produce significant public panic and demands to “Do Something!”, which would likely hamper a proper response.
Picture, instead of lone-wolf attacks by the typical incel types we see, a coordinated attack by a platoon-sized group of riflemen, maybe with grenades, IEDs, or blackmarket RPGs. The Gravy Seals types would probably drop their weapons and run as soon as the actual shooting started, but properly trained and experienced troops would be far more reliable.
A series of quick hit and run raids in several places around the US, with significant casualties, could set off a more general civil war.
As I said, I’m sure they’d still lose, but since they would have the initiative in choosing when and where to attack, and have good knowledge of operational security, and planning for both the attack and the escape afterwards, it would be pretty hard to stop them.
What would have happened if Pence had gone along with Trump on 1/6? He simply announces, “I have counted the votes and the winner is Trump (and Pence).” The partisan Supreme Court refuses to intervene. Now what happens?
I hate to say that I respect Pence for anything, but I do for this.
Maybe I am really cynical about the American public’s inertia, but I think even this would not lead to a civil war.
It would lead to weeks of violent protesting and rioting, maybe months - but I still think the blue half of America would suck it up and eventually more or less accept it, albeit with a lot of hashtags about #stolenpresidency and TrumpisHitler.
And I think the same of red America, too. Even if Biden blatantly rigged the 2024 election and stole it in some way, I think 99 percent of the gun-owning Trumpers who brag about looking forward to civil war wouldn’t actually do anything.
People are really, really, hard to motivate to get off their couches.
Well, here’s a question: How many people would it take to “Have a civil war”?
I was googling the size of the US Army earlier. There are less than 500,000 uniformed personnel in the regular army, which is about 0.17% of the population of the United States. But if they all started throwing bullets around, I’m sure we’d all agree that the US would have a very bad day.
So you don’t need to motivate all that many people, relatively speaking.
The Berlin Airlift supplied one city, in all the world. All or nearly all the urban areas in the USA, all at the same time? Ain’t gonna happen.
That’s going to depend on where you are.
The largely depopulated areas monocropped by a small number of people using very large tractors controlled by GPS? You’re right about those. [ETA: Of course, they’re growing a large percentage of the calories being eaten in the cities. So another problem for your supposed airlift will be that if those farms are nonfunctional, so is the beginning of the supply chain.]
The increasing number of areas occupied in large part by Amish and Mennonite farmers? To a large extent they’re already somewhere between 1863 and 1940; and even if their farms are (relatively) specialized, their kitchen gardens aren’t. The cities are going to starve long before they will.
Except, of course, that people starving in the cities won’t stay there.
There is no scenario of this that comes out well for anybody at all. I don’t know what the true threshold level is; but I sure as hell hope that we don’t find out.
We’ve already had that.
There weren’t enough of them to pull it off. This time. But the attempt was certainly made, and elected agents of the state and of the states were certainly involved.
I find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court, even packed the way it is, will go along with what would be factually demonstrable electoral fraud. It isn’t as if the Electoral College votes are a secret or there is any question of alteration, and even major GOP figures who are trying to cover up the mess of the insurrection now aren’t going to go along with such a transparent ruse. Mike Pence didn’t bravely stand up against insurrection; under the watchful eyes of the public he slunk back in and did his legally required duty, and then even tried to pander back to Trump. That guy has so little backbone that if he were a fish he would be classified in the Chondrichthyes.
Now, give another ten years or so of GOP diddling with the Constitution and democratic norms, as well as a couple more radical appointments to the Supreme Court, and…
