We tend to think of the US as being comprised of red states and blue states, but in truth, this perception is created from a winner-take-all election process. It’s more accurate to think of it as a “purple America” — there are certainly more conservative and progressive areas, but it’s by varying degrees. From my experience as a mail carrier in one of the most stereotypically “liberal” cities, judging by the mail I see, I can tell you there is no shortage of uber right wingers living shoulder-to-shoulder with the lefty-lefts.
So while it’s possible that the battle lines might look like blue islands battling seige warfare in a sea of rural red, I’m certain that I’m both of those areas, there would be significant guerrella-style terrorist attacks that would impact both “sides.”
I also wonder that while the right would be generally be better-armed — at least initially — if there weren’t groups of lefties clumped together, if the advantage of all those extra guns is lessened.
I suspect that such a conflict would wreak havoc with manufacturing and supply lines for everyone. And that the vast majority of the population would be against armed conflict in the first place, which would only be magnified when the creature comforts they all took for granted became scarce. Think COVID lockdowns x10.
I think it would be a horrible experience for everyone and a benefit only to America’s global rivals.
Whichever side controls the military would just flatten the other. “Guys with guns” would only matter when it came to the right wing death squads that would be massacring anyone they thought was too “liberal” or dark-skinned; not when it came to serious fighting.
I’ve visited the former Yugoslavia a lot, and it always struck me that a future US civil war would look a lot the Yugoslavian civil war: a cultured largely urban cosmopolitan population on one side against largely rural nationalists with lots of guns (and large chunk of the army) on the other. This was long before Trump and Maga but the rise of the American Milosovic hasn’t changed my opinion
Can you expand on this a bit? In a conflict that is not America vs other nation, but American vs American, do you think the officers and enlisted men would blindly follow the dictates of the commander in chief? Given that the populace is so interspersed with one-another, how does the Armed services choose targets? Is it just those actively-firing, or anyone exercising their 2nd Ammendment rights? Or anyone bearing a black / blue lives matter flag?
The problem with this is that the military is also split politically. It may lean somewhat right, but there are enough who’d dissent that there’d be mass mutiny if POTUS told them to round up the conservatives in Wyoming and put them in concentration camps (or, round up all the liberals.)
This is usually the case in civil wars and it’s not an insurmountable problem unfortunately, typically you’ll have local militia working with the regular troops who will be happy to tell the troops which of their neighbors is on the wrong side(or just do ‘the job’ for them)
California, Oregon, and Washington are only ‘blue’ in the urban and (some of) the suburban areas. While these are where the population is most dense, they aren’t geographically the majority of these states. Much of Northern and Eastern California, Eastern Washington, and rural Oregon are as much MAGA country as Idaho.
It will look more like a slow moving trend towards apartheid. Bit by bit undesirable “others” will be denied advancement opportunities by the fascist controlled businesses and cleansed government agencies like the judicial system. They will be denied government medical and social safety net programs because of slights they supposedly made to the party. Good people will just give up and join as low level members of the party just to survive. They want to grind entire social classes down into submission, not outright face them down and kill them like men. The cowardly pussys don’t have the guts for real civil war.
Part of me wonders if it would be like the splitting of India and Pakistan where the Hindus took one country and the Muslims took the other.
Part of the problem is that the GDP of blue counties is far larger than the GDP of red counties. There are far more red counties, but something like 75% of the nations GDP occurs in blue counties, not red counties.
Any civil war would cause the right wing to rethink because they wouldn’t have the urban counties to pay their bills anymore. So I don’t know if the right wing areas would want an actual separation.
I think what the right wing wants is total control on power so they can access the money generated by urban/blue counties, but the urban/blue counties have zero power and influence on politics or society.
The GDP of the NY metro area is about 2.2 trillion. Thats more than the GDP of the poorest 15 red states combined. Something like 70-80% of Texas’s GDP comes from 4 metro areas.
That description implies that the Muslims and Hindus chose to separate rather than having that imposed as a parting shot by Lord Mountbatten and religious extremists on both side that caused mass displacement, violence, and an estimated one million deaths, as well as the current animosity between Pakistan and India.
Absent of a external power to enforce separation, a modern American civil war would be a spastic balkanization of urban centers and vast rural gulfs, incidentally devastating much of the global economy with destabilization of the dollar as a global currency standard. The billionaire techbro contingent will doubtless jump on their jets to fly to New Zealand or whatever island nations they believe they have purchased only to discover that their money doesn’t mean much in the new world economy where the strength and guns of their hired security forces are the new currency.
Do you really think Trump would put that much thought into it? Or would he see losing the Pacific Coast as the Democrats losing
74 Electoral votes
6 Senators
Net 44 Representatives
Read Barbara F. Walters How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. She lays it all out in meticulous detail, starting from the growing underground of fascist militia groups to random terrorism cowing a public who have no one to fight back against.
She also says that the U.S. is only a few years away from this scenario, although she was writing before Trump’s election, which may have made their underground unnecessary and redundant.
The problem with the blue regions generating most of the GDP is that most of them are surrounded by red regions. From a logistical standpoint, if it actually came down to water and food, the big cities would be starved out and desperate in no time. Not that the red regions would fare much better, but the cities would have it worse much sooner. 3 million or 9 million mouths in a city would be a crisis in 200 hours’ time.
As heavily armed and intermingled the population in the US is a war that was truly about the imposition of left or over right or vice versa would be horrifying. Irregular warfare on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood scale would be terrifying and brutal. And the only way to even have a chance of a lasting peace would be the imposition of an exceedingly draconian and repressive police state, regardless of who ‘won.’
So-called color GDP is also 100% irrelevant. What matters is actual fundamental production in that sort of war. Throwing stocks and bonds or financial derivatives doesn’t do much damage.
