What would a modern left/right American Civil War look like?

Great Debates
61

I once imagined a scenario, following some sort of unprecedented armed conflict of short duration (such as @Mops envisions), whereby the warring factions would realize that their country had been split more or less 50-50 for generations, and that the only peaceable solution was for them to form two countries. I drew up a map of where the borderlines would be, making both “countries” equally unhappy. Basically, this map shows the East coast from coastal Maine down through roughly Wilmington NC aligning itself with Canada, and also the northern part of the country also joining Canada, roughly from Buffalo through Minnesota. The entire West Coast would also join with Canada with an arm of that coast sweeping through to some big cities, perhaps Phoenix through parts of New Mexico and bending as far north as Boulder CO.

The rest of the country would be a contiguous odd-shaped agglutination of southern, mid-western, and far western states, still with some big cities intact (sorry, Omaha, Houston, and St. Louis—also, sorry Denver and Albuquerque if you get left behind too.) The guiding principle for being able to join one country or the other is connection to the main body, the principle being “No isolated cities, towns, counties, villages—everything must have a physical path to the main body of the country it belongs to (except for actual islands off the coasts).” The two states that are outside the contiguous U.S. to begin with, Alaska and Hawaii, can make their own decisions—pretty sure we can predict how those choices will go.

There will necessarily be large-scale repatriations of left-wing Democrats trapped in rural Iowa, of course, and right-wingers stuck on the west side of Manhattan, but no dual citizens. You would declare your loyalty to one country or the other. No pledge of loyalty, no citizenship at all.

Repatriation is key. Those of you complaining that you’re being forced to choose between your core values and the part of the country you love, your family, your job, your culture, the weather you like, et cetera, you’re absolutely right. You have to suck it up. Are you better off living where you live or living in a society that supports you on immigration, abortion, separation of church and state, and a few dozen other major issues? You’ll be supported by the government seeking to repatriate you but if you refuse to move, you’ll spend the rest of your life as a marginalized quasi-citizen who never comes close to winning an election (or perhaps to having an election) again in your lifetime.

It will take an awful lot to get us there, but I think that’s where we’re heading, in another 50 or 100 years of this shit.

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The Right would never willingly submit to that, one of their core values is that no one but themselves is allowed to be alive and free. They’d kill dissenters before letting them escape, and as soon as they were strong enough invade and exterminate or subjugate the “left wing” country.

And if the left/middle was powerful enough to force them to submit to that, they’d be powerful enough to not have to compromise at all. Since they’d have to be overwhelmingly powerful.

63

You forgot the part where they eat babies and torture puppies.

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It’s not puppies they want to torture. But but people who aren’t straight white Christian men? Oh, yes they want to, and they do so when they think they can get away with it. With rape thrown in for the women.

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It would likely look like the Troubles on a continental scale.

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Only if the Democrats were in charge; I’ve seen Italy’s Years of Lead also used as an example. The Democrats wouldn’t be willing to attack the public with all-out military force.

The Republicans on the other hand would delight in doing so. So expect entire towns and neighborhoods flattened or incineration with bombs and artillery, or slaughtered with poison gas. The sort of thing you often see from dictators against rebels and dissenters.

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That has been my own take in it. The “official” military will do its enforcing and in the course commit its own crimes, sure, but it will be mostly local irregulars who’ll take most of the truly extreme actions, and it will not be pitched set-piece battles.

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One difference between a “Troubles” scenario in Northern Ireland and one in the US is that in NI the two sides lived in distinct neighborhoods, while in the US they tend to be intermixed. For example, my next door neighbor is so far down the MAGA rabbit hole you can barely see the top of his head, while the neighbors across the street have a yard sign proclaiming that marriage equality and health care are inalienable rights. So the kind of violence that NI experienced would be difficult without risking harm to one’s own side.

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If you assume a pattern like the N Irish Troubles, you’d have a period of intercommunal ghettoisation (a.k.a. “Burn them out!”) in some predominantly working class areas of major cities, with local paramilitaries/criminal gangs throwing their weight about wherever they can and government troops trying to keep a lid on it. Middle and upper classes would try to carry on with politics-as-usual. But are you assuming that that would no longer be possible?

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Right now, in 2025, you may be right, @derTrihs, but I’m foreseeing a future time of everyone being dissatisfied with the 50-50 status, of hard-right/Democratic centrist Presidents coming in to overhaul what the previous (h-r/D c) President did (optimistically assuming we’re ever going to see another non-hard-right POTUS elected again), and AFTER some limited violence breaks out. I truly see this as a viable solution to forestall another Civil War, allowing what the last Civil War was fought to prevent, the formation of a new confederacy and the breaking into two separate nations.

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That would be suicidal; such a new confederacy would not tolerate the existence of the more “liberal” America; given that both would be nuclear armed the result would be nuclear war. They’d rather all die than let anyone but themselves exist.

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You might be overstating it slightly, my friend. I’m specifically talking about a future scenario when both sides would be so disgusted that they’re making zero progress for so long that they change their current positions to commit to an agreement to split the country into two entities. In other words, a scenario where even the most extreme hateful types would say “We’re getting nowhere–but this gives us the chance to oppress all the minorities who choose to stay within our borders, force all the women to obey our anti-abortion programs, outlaw all religions except our brand of Christianity” etc. Even hard-core Nazi types might see that taking free rein to enforce their laws is preferable to needing perpetually to negotiate with bleeding-hearts like you and me ever again.

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Hey, I actually (mostly) agree with this.

Virtually 100% of the strife in the US is due a certain strain of people who don’t want a pluralistic, multiracial democracy. IOW, they are choking on modernity. The thing is that this is all surface-level strife that has almost nothing to do with the fundamentals of governance, the economy, or daily life, for that matter.

Compare this to the original Civil War, in which one side truly was dependent on slavery and had built up a whole infrastructure and culture to support and defend it.

So one side is frothing at the mouth for no good reason, and the GOP pols, and Trump especially, have learned how to stoke the frothing for their own benefit. The other side, our Liberal side, wants peace, normalcy, and prosperity with, you know, some extras like justice and fair treatment for all.

The thing is, a Civil War is not good for any of the power centers of the country. Certainly not Big Business, which would lose its shirt. Not the military. Not even the grifting GOP pols, as they would lose the foundation of their grift: downscale white rage, which must be stoked but never sated.

Thus, the path of least resistance, once anything like a Civil War seems to be starting, would be for the power centers to shut it down. I think simplest thing would be for the military to stage a coup and hold power until “order” could be restored.

The existence of the world’s most powerful military also makes a “national divorce” based on geography impossible: neither side would trust the other to take over the military completely, while splitting it in two or whatever would be extremely impractical while going against the military’s own interest (remaining whole means retaining all its power, while being split in two would result in each side having even less than half of that total, since many efficiencies would evaporate in the split).

Further, by the same logic, in the event of Civil War 2.0, the splitting of the military into factions even enough to form opposing sides in the conflict seems unlikely. The US military is so big with so much kit, that, even, if they wanted to divide it up cooperatively, the logistical challenges would be formidable. Granted this fact, in the event of factionalization within the military, the faction with the right assets in terms of quantity and quality would be able to take out the others before the factions could support specific regions in the burgeoning Civil War 2.0. Then, at that point, the path of least resistance would be for the military to take power for itself instead of supporting one civil faction over the other.

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I dunno; partitions haven’t worked out particularly well.

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What I hope happens is that America fractures during the coming global war, that some blue state governments refuse to go along with our invasion of Canda and that the forces fighting the America/Russia axis seek to promote Americas internal division by offering seceding states the chance to join the fight against the axis as independent states and/or becoming part of Canada. Essentially, northern US would become West Germany.

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I have my doubts. My home state of Minnesota among many others is “blue” in the sense that the predominantly Democratic population of the big cities outvotes the conservative Republican rural areas. But in an actual shooting war territory counts. I know people who unironically refer to the Twin Cities metro area as a “U.N. enclave”, and who postulate (look forward to?) that if it came to civil war the cities would be blockaded and collapse into savagery once “the welfare payments stopped”. A slanted worldview to be sure, but the ability of the lawmakers in a state capital to speak for the whole state is precisely what would be called into question.

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Yeah. The whole reason the R party has any political power is that under the US political voting system, square miles of terrain matters more than does local headcount or per-capita income or economic productivity.

The Rs control most of the dirt. The Ds control the vast majority of the actual productive capacity of the country. Which of course relies on being able to move goods through the terrain controlled by the Rs.

The Rs can successfully vandalize the USA into something resembling Syria or Somalia or Yemen. What they cannot do is form a coherent county out of the result. Neither can the Ds.

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Yes, if a shooting war starts, individual state governments may take a side, but most states have too intermingled a population. Internal rebellion would break out in most states. I can’t offhand think of any that wouldn’t.

That’s down the list of what I hope for. It’s closer to what I fear.

There are a lot of possibilities before we get that far gone. And there are possibilities that preclude that situation. That could be the long term outcome after other types of conflict.