Could it happen? Yes. There is a lot of anger in America. Will it happen in the near (10-15 years) future? No. Why? Watch any and all of the January 6th 2021 videos of the Capitol Riots. That looked like a bunch of alcoholic, mentally ill tailgate partiers tried to take over a nation. It got out of hand and went very, very bad. The only reason they did as much damage as they did, was because actual law enforcement reinforcements were not called in on time. They are just violent idiots who are old, out of shape, delusional about their abilities, and they did not have an actual plan. Civil war is not the immediate threat we face in the USA, it’s the fascism of christianity from within our government that needs to be destroyed. We need a return back to sanity, back to a secular government.

Of course it could happen. Do I think it will happen in the next two months as we get through election season? Nah.

I also don’t think a civil war in modern days would look anything like it did in the 1860s. Aside from the obvious advance in weapons and tactics, there’s no convenient clear line between one half and the other like there was with North/South. It would look more like civil wars do in other countries in the 21st century.

I think that the US is primed to have a civil war. Ever since Reagan fucked the fairness doctrine in 1987, we’ve been getting more and more divided. Gonna sound like an old fogey here, but it used to be that everybody tuned into the same news, and watched the same anchors deliver the same updates about the same world events. We had differing opinions on world events, but we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.

We don’t have that now. It’s like two completely separate universes occupy the same physical space. In one universe, climate change is fueled by anthropogenic forces and is causing more and more catastrophic damage, viruses are real and vaccines are effective tools to combat them, and thousands of traitors tried to overthrow the government because their cult leader lost an election. In the other? Climate change isn’t real, and also the Democrats have secret hurricane machines that they are using to punish Florida for being a red state, COVID isn’t real, and also it’s a super virus concocted in a lab in Wuhan at the request of Hillary Clinton, vaccines don’t work, and also vaccines are secretly a government tool to kill people, and Jan 6th was a peaceful protest of patriots, and also it was a violent insurrection by Antifa.

We don’t share the same reality with each other. In one reality, Democrats are basically similar to milquetoast conservatives from any other first world nation, and they care much more about maintaining the status quo than they do about making progress. In the other reality? Democrats are evil incarnate, and they’re waging an active campaign to round up all of the patriots and send them to concentration camps, and they’re also pedophiles and Marxists. In that reality, it’s far more preferable to vote for a dead pimp than it is to vote for a standard, run-of-the-mill Democrat.

And it’s not just the whole two-realities thing. Ever since Obama became president, the brains of a huge chunk of people in this country just broke. Some of the nicest-seeming people you’d ever met instantly turned into vile, hate-spewing racists, and started mass subscribing to every single conspiracy theory feed out there. That was 16 years ago. Their rhetoric has been getting more violent every year since. That’s to say nothing of the huge increase in terrorist incidents since then - according to the CSIS:

The number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined

So yeah. I think that this country is primed for organized, mass violence. At this point, all that it’s lacking is the organization. Thankfully, Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man. I don’t think he’d be capable of organizing people to that level. He can stoke their hatred, for sure. He can inspire the craziest among them to firebomb a mosque or shoot up a Democrat’s office… but he ain’t built to lead people. If someone who had even 1/10th of his prowess as a cult leader, but who was actually intelligent and had a tactical mind came along… hoo boy.

I think the drug addiction crisis that they have is somehow preventing/delaying this to happen. But the elements for a civil war are there: access to weapons, ideological intolerance, economical imbalance, ever-differing state and federal law and policies, corruption in government and the probable rise of a political group that lost the presidency causing the Capitol Attack out of resentment, between others.

Democracy in the USA feels like holding with pins. I see the country as conservative to far-right with very few space for other political ideologies.

Haha no.

A lot of people don’t realise how shit a war can be, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from it. Your local economy fucking TANKS, jobs disappear, workers disappear on the next plane out, and you’re left with a population that’s struggling on all fronts, trying to make a brave face.

America is full of crazy disparity, but war doesn’t care. The one benefit is that the billionaire class would get fucking rinsed by the locals for every shiny trinket they have when suddenly food costs a fortune because your last shipment got shot up.

To think it can never happen here is American Exceptionalism. We are just another country. Nothing special here.

No. Like you say, riots, and of course the ongoing epidemic of stochastic terrorism, possibly with more violence directed against politicians and the government, but it’s definitely not going to look like tanks shooting at tanks, and it’s also not going to look like people crawling through tunnels a la Vietnam. What American simultaneously cares enough about politics to risk their life over it, while also being willing to go live in a trench without their phone for a month? No, as long as it’s an option to live a normal life where you can return to your couch and watch or read the news while feeling righteously indignant and engage with social media however you like, that’s what people will do. Look at the January 6’ers, for example, who fully expected to return home and be able to post all about the exciting event all over social media.

Now, that all goes out the window if some lunatic decides to start WWIII with China and institutes a draft (assuming we don’t all just die in nuclear hellfire). You tell people they’ll have to give up their phones and go live in a trench anyway and maybe some decide they’d rather fight the people making them do that. Americans generally love war, but a lot of that comes from being completely and totally separated from any real life consequences from it. And of course, no insurgency would stand any chance of defeating the US government without foreign support.

Alternate question…

What the fuck is a ‘battleground’ state, and why does the media even have the nerve to use that term? I mean I know what it basically means, they should stick with ‘swing’ state, instead of putting the word ‘battle’ into nutjob’s heads just before an election.

I don’t care what people’s political opinions are, but we already have enough gun nuts out there, and at least a couple attempts on the former president’s life.

You can’t even feel safe sending your kids to school in numerous areas, and can’t even always feel safe in a Walmart these days.

Are you sure we’re not already in a civil war?

I don’t see how you’d have enough parity between two sides, whichever side the military picks would just be the overt over dog and maaaaaaybe you could have some kind of armed mountain resistance or something, but it would be more a rebellion than a civil war.

Nah, people are way too lazy and complacent.

Can? Yes. Contrary to common belief history is not over and white people are not exempt. Will? Maaaybe.

I can’t see the US system self-correcting, but a deeply established democracy like the US coming apart is a new thing (all the past ones were much more ephemeral AFAIK). It could just as easily slide into one dictatorship, like Wiemar Germany, or undergo some sort of slow death as states become more and more independent of the broken national system. It’s also hard to say what the timeline is.

There isn’t really two (or more) sides to go to war at this point. There’s only one military, and while the will to fight may exist on the Republican side they aren’t really organised for it. That could all change if the crisis goes on for many years, though.

Why do you believe what you believe?

No and you should not listen to people who think it could.

A civil war is large scale armed conflict between groups vying for the levers of power. In the case of the American civil war it was over slavery and came to war because there was no mechanism to integrate the south’s elites into the power structures of the north’s or vice versa and the material bases of those two groups power structures were in opposition.

What two groups would fight an American civil war nowadays? Democrats and republicans? They serve the same masters. We are witnessing propaganda bent to the ends of integrating members of one group into another.

Separatist militias? Not only would that not be a civil war, we saw how the fbi handled them in the 90s.

Corporations? Why would they do that? Government already does the unprofitable things they want and does them how they want them.

Separatist states? It’s against the economic interests of the very people who would make up the elite class of the new nation of Texas to submit their borders to taxes and tariffs.

Workers? That’s a revolution, not a civil war.

If someone wants you to fear modern civil war they’re trying to control you.

If someone makes art about a modern civil war they’re trying to tell you about something else on the sly, like with zombies.

So I talked to a PhD who’s work covered civil wars across the world, and asked about this. Turns out there are several signs you need to see which makes a civil war more likely. Most of which we haven’t even gotten close to, because many of them are economic related and right now the US is still the single largest economy in the world where peoples standard of living is still very comfortable.

I asked ChatGPT to describe this and these are the highlights, in order of historical priority?

• Political instability and weak governance are present.
• There are deep ethnic, religious, or sectarian tensions.
• The economy is declining with high inequality.
• Persistent social unrest and widespread protests occur.
• External powers are interfering or supporting different factions.
• There is significant resource scarcity and competition.
• Militarization and proliferation of arms increase.
• Systematic human rights violations and repression take place.
• Society experiences strong ideological polarization.
• Demographic pressures such as rapid population growth or urbanization exist.
• The rule of law and justice systems are breaking down.
• Historical grievances and unresolved conflicts resurface.

Note that the US does have some of these, but not to the evident level that you saw in Rwanda, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Syria, Burundi, Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Myanmar, Haiti, and others. In short, if you look at the indicators, although the US is indeed troubled, it’s not troubled enough for people to hot the streets with more than riotous intent.

Inshallah

We’re not going to survive global warming if there isn’t one.

Short answer: yes

Longer answer: I would argue we’ve already had a few civil wars since the “War Between the States” in the 1860s. Reconstruction was arguably another civil war. The labor rights war of the early twentieth century included federal troops attacking organizing coal miners and federal agents along with private security forces attacking striking workers elsewhere. The violence of the civil rights movement (remember: the president had to call in the national guard to enforce integration) would also qualify as a civil war by some standards.

Listen to the first limited series of the podcast It Could Happen Here for an idea of how a more involved civil war could start. The idea is that there would not be clear battle lines drawn up because our divide now is more urban vs rural, and people in rural areas have opportunities to attack infrastructure that would have significant impacts on urban areas.