Is Civil War Inevitable?

And what would it mean for us?

It is hard to avoid facing the stark reality that the United States is both fracturing and rotting. The Supreme Court has mutated into a monster — an anti-Democratic, Christian, Far Right tribunal that seeks to establish new precedents and recreate old injustices against the will of a large majority of Americans. We all watched this debacle occur in slow motion, starting with the Republican blockade during Obama’s tenure.

Again and again, the tepid, corrupt Democrats proved themselves unable to fight back effectively. We were already in deep shit. Now the shit has gotten deeper.

Seeking to understand where current trends may take us, I turned to The Next Civil War: An Introduction to the Immediate Future of the United States, by Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist. From a relatively safe perch in Canada, Marche offers a convincing analysis as well as a range of possible scenarios for what’s coming next. The interesting thing is that this is no longer an academic exercise for any of us.

I am not entertaining this to make us feel more depressed or fatalistic. Like other theories I have explored recently (for instance, peak oil), I find it helpful to consider the possibilities ahead of us, so we can plan accordingly — or at least, not be completely surprised by what unfolds. If America implodes, it will impact everyone across the world. For those of us living here, a civil war would be especially unpleasant and dicey, if not ruinous or fatal.

America’s social stability has been a long-term article of faith for most of us. After all, in the 1950s, this country controlled half of the world’s wealth and seemed insurmountably strong. Considering our history, the Congressional hearings into Trump’s attempted insurrection on January 6th still seem surreal and fictional — like we are watching events happening in a small, under-developed country, somewhere far away. Most people I know pay little or no attention to them.

In his Introduction, Marche writes accurately:

“American liberals in the major cities retain a kind of desperate faith in their country’s institutions that amounts nearly to delusion. Americans have taught themselves for 250 years that their country, in its ideals and systems, is the solution to history. It is tough, under those conditions, to accept being just another of history’s half perpetrators, half victims… Unfortunately, America appears to have entered a self-defeating loop, in which the collapsing system prevents reforms to the system itself. …One way of reading the current political situation is that Republicans have only come to realize the collapse of the institutions before Democrats. Meanwhile, the window to keep America democratic is closing.”

He gives a useful, shorthand definition for a civil war (from The Peace Research Institute in Oslo) to keep in mind: “A thousand combatant deaths within a year.” There is also “civil strife,” which begins at 25 deaths a year. “In the United States in 2019, domestic anti-government extremists killed forty-two people; in 2018 they killed fifty-three people; in 2017, thirty-seven; in 2016, seventy-two; and in 2015, seventy. By this definition, America is already in a state of civil strife, on the threshold of civil war.” Although we still have a ways to go.

Marche introduced me to a new concept: “stochastic terrorism,” the opposite of organized terrorism. If an extremist culture not only tolerates but forcefully promotes extreme violence toward political leaders or ethnic groups as a legitimate act, eventually some individual — some frustrated, angry “long wolf” — will cause harm out. You don’t need an institutional apparatus for training terrorists or creating terrorist cels. “The background hum of hyper-partisanship, the rage and loathing of everyday American politics, generates a widespread tolerance for violence,” he writes. “Eventually somebody acts on it.”

While Leftist and “antifa” groups have violent and militant factions, the vast majority of domestic terrorism in the US comes from what Marche calls the “hard right," which has grown over the last decade and has a predilection for violence: “A study from the Institute for Family Studies in 2018 suggested that nearly 11 million Americans “share the attitudes” of the alt-right alone. The vast majority of terrorism in the United States comes from the hard right, and the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows the number of terrorist incidents in the United States has tripled since 2013.”

Far right and white supremacist groups have strategically infiltrated US law enforcement and the military. According to a former FBI agent, this has made terrorist watch lists useless when it comes to white supremacism: “The 2015 counterterrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do. Because the police could then look at the watch list and determine that they are their friends.”

The US is flooded with guns. There are more than 400 million guns in the US. Americans buy 12 billion rounds a year. “When it comes to gun violence, the United States is a complete global outlier, beyond exceptional. There are fifty-seven times as many school shootings in the United States as the rest of the industrialized world combined… Nearly 40,000 Americans lost their lives to guns in 2017—12 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 0.3 in the UK and 0.9 in Germany.” Even so, a well-organized militia of “sovereign citizens” would still have no chance against the US military, if it comes to that.