What would an American "civil war" look like?

Politics & Elections
101

I disagree. Think guerilla warfare, urban warfare, gang warfare, a spreading breaking down of law and order. It won’t be the Posse Comitatas running around the undergrowth in camo, they will be picked off quickly. My guess is that it will be a breakdown of law and order with various groups attacking each other, but necessarily as pitched battles that a conventional military can tackle with overwhelming force. It will be a repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan, or Somalia. The right-wing gun nuts will be on top at first, until they get outgunned and outnumbered

The US military has never been politicised, and I don’t think that will change. The military everywhere tends to be conservative by outlook anyway. It would prefer to do what it knows and does best - killing people - and let the talking heads do the talking.

Outside intervention? Apart from supplying weaponry, I think not. Neither Canada nor Mexico would want to get involved, apart from humanitarian aid, assistance to the police, and taking in refugees. It will be an American matter and will be settled in the USA, simply because of the numbers involved.

Would the states devolve, either before or after such a conflict? I would hazard a guess that some might break away, but would finally return after the whole setup had been renegotiated and Washington got its wings clipped. The return to a USA possibly as a means to restoring law and order nationally.

Big countries can splinter. China has had periods of multiple kingdoms, and the warlord era in the last century. One scenario is for Russia to split up into a number of pieces, some quite small. Mexico is supposed to be at risk of fragmenting. Well, maybe. But we can say for certain that massive civil unrest, whether o not it becomes a full civil war, will be murderous and debilitating.

102

Nepal, a decade ago.
And what about Afghanistan?

103

False analogy. The Russian revolution was essentially a “stop the war” movement and an attempt by the middle class to shove out the incompetent aristocrats. Money was not an issue. The French revolution was essentially a revolt by the middle class, who did possess more money than the aristocrats.
Further back, the English Civil War went the way it did because Parliament had more people, more money and far more manufacturing capacity at its disposal. (Ditto for the American Civil War, with some name changes.)

Back to the post. If the reds get isolated as described, they will be like the Confederates; damn good soldiers but short of all resources before long, and devoid of any political support from outside. In the end they will just get ground down.

104

Canada and Mexico don’t have nearly enough troops to send to matter.

105

As others have pointed out, the most likely scenario would be Reds losing control due to an election result which their leaders immediately declare illegal or invalid. They revolt rather than accept a duly elected Democratic president or House.

I hope this is nothing more than paranoid fantasy, but considering how in thrall the right is to the alternate reality of Fox News, I can see it happening.

106

The odds of a second American civil war are even with me dating Christie Brinkley in the 1990’s.

You might see a very small fringe group target politicians, and it this happensboth sides need to immediately repudiate the fringe group, with an understanding that any political causality is replaced by the party that lost a representative.

I’d actually like to see that become a law because it would not shock me if this happened and with politics being like it is, partly thanks to the media who fan the flames, a retaliation would be ugly.

107
  1. You’re assuming because conservatives perpetually verbally fellate the military and law enforcement that they would automatically take your side. I think that’s a mistake, I don’t think the political breakdown of either group is radically different from that of the general public.
108

I’d encourage you to review some of the cites I’ve offered in this thread that refute your claim.

109

The next civil war won’t be fought between the political left and right. The actual danger we face is class warfare, the haves versus the have-nots. There will be a tipping point as AI, robotics and automation make more and more humans surplus to requirements. 30 percent unemployment? 50 percent? It’s all completely avoidable, of course. But with “leaders” like Trump and a Congress comprised of corrupt, career politicians? Nah, it’s gonna happen.

110

How’s this for a fun-to-imagine scenario: the New England states secede and apply for admission to Canada?

111

A much better view of what could start a civil war. 30-50% out of work would create desperation.

Luckily un-employment is at a historic low right now and the 2nd amendment is a hedge against a governmental take over.

112

A governmental take over of what?

113

Of, you know, the country. Taking it away from… hmmm.

Okay, I’m stumped.

114

Oh my God, Yes. Tabarnak de cuuuulisssse de criss de osti de yes.

115

The unemployment industry.

116

Google Translate can’t handle that one. Little help for us future Canadians?

117

So you think that the big money backers of the Republican party want a civil war and would support all of the right-wing media in declaring one? Isn’t that going to trash their vast fortunes when cities start blowing up and people leave their jobs to fight in the street?

As I said before, why would the people suffering from high unemployment start a civil war at extreme risk and cost to themselves instead of just voting for someone willing to do something about their situation? It’s one thing to not want to vote for a third party if you think it might let the ‘other guy’ win, it’s another to choose to take to the streets to fight the most powerful army on the planet instead of just voting.

118

For me, my beginning point of speculation would be… how and why would a hypothetical Civil War 2 not be aligned exactly like the first one?

There would of course be differences. However, today’s political divisions are pretty closely aligned the way they were in 1860. As one example, there is a startling alignment of the Alabama counties who voted for Roy Moore compared to the counties with the largest enslaved population in 1860.

It’s also been mentioned that law enforcement and military are proportionally much more represented among conservative occupations. That’s fairly safe to say, but the converse of that doesn’t automatically follow - that is to say, conservatives may be a majority of some military branches, but not an overwhelming majority of every organ of every branch. Let’s not forget that the military since WW2 has served as a workfare program enabling economic mobility for a number of black and latino youths as well. Judging from my own Army experience, it seemed like the officer corps was overwhelmingly conservative. But the fringe white-nationalist conservatism orbiting around Trump was entirely limited to white officers, and to a minority of these. And as you’d expect, the enlisted corps was much more diverse. Again just from my memory these were about 1/3rd white and not extremists.

So the point I’m working towards is that in a Civil War 2 scenario, military fragmentation would be an early and serious development. I could see huge parts of the US Army and Marines simply disintegrating as people mutinied or deserted. Like Robert E. Lee, many Red-State white conservatives would return home and join their state militia (National Guard).

I also expect that many former-military and former-police conservatives would create paramilitary formations, just as Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest formed the paramilitary terrorist group known as the KKK.

This time, I would see the wild-card as being the red-state Midwest and Western states. People would rightly question whether the principles of the American Experiment are worth buying back the South with blood, the South that has caused all this trouble from the beginning, the South that is a net recipient of federal aid. I think a lot of people would express that it’s a good idea, but just not worth it. I expect that the US military, with air mobility that didn’t exist in the Civil War, would heavily defend military installations in the South, if they didn’t fall to mutiny outright. There would be some protracted “Berlin Airlift” situations.

So between north and south, I’d expect a hostile armistice. The real “war” would be a heartbreaking insurgency in the south, broken down largely along racial lines. Here we’d answer the question of who the Air Force would bomb - Southern military formations besieging and attacking non-white enclaves. I can’t guess how the air supremacy war would go down. It would depend which way the Air Force white evangelicals break. Much depends on how white evangelicals align, both in reality and the hypothetical.

The international aspects would be difficult and fun to imagine, but I don’t have time for that today. Enjoy the fruits of my lunch break.

119

I love the Margaree River. No more beautiful place on earth. Can’t eat beauty though, sadly.

120

Meh… the threat of college-educated chemists and mechanical engineers depends on trade and economy. As long as I can get Amazon deliveries, theoretically, potentially, I’m a very dangerous man. But if the economy is diverted to beans and bullets, there’s not much I can do. And I can’t imagine even a state-supported Confederacy or Union would invent anything much worse than the US invented in any given month in the 1960’s.

Who does China like in this scenario? So much depends on this. But even then, does the Navy break north or south?