Foretastes of a new American civil war
If a new civil war comes to the United States of America, it will not come in the form it did in the 19th Century, with two large intact geographic blocks—the Confederacy and the Union–each with their own military locked continuously in armed conflict. It’s likely to take one of two tracks: (1) a coup attempt, like the January 6 insurrection; or (2) it will look more like the late 20th Century convulsions in Northern Ireland, known as “The Troubles,” marked by scattered and sporadic acts of violence inflicted by loosely networked paramilitary groups. In Northern Ireland, more than half the 3,500 people killed were civilians, in a conflict that spanned about 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.
We are getting foretastes of something similar, now largely committed piecemeal by individual right wing “lone wolves” terrorizing racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, LGBTQ communities, and increasingly school board members, electoral officials, businesses that openly support progressive causes, law enforcement, and members of the judiciary.
The overall effect is to sow fear and mistrust broadly among citizens, citizen groups, and institutions. The intent of each violent individual is narrow, but the cumulative impact is wide, and deep. If paramilitary groups like those in Northern Ireland grow in strength in the U.S., the cumulative impact will be all the greater. What’s more, horrifically lethal weapons and ammunition now widely available in the U.S. and being stockpiled by extremists make individuals and groups far more powerful than those in Northern Ireland of the 1990s. The death toll from a low-level but widespread civil war in the U.S. would dwarf the numbers in ‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland.
Partisan divisions and proliferation of weaponry make for a combustible mix that threatens a breakdown in the institutions that so far have kept America relatively stable.
The attempted coup on January 6, 2021, the attempt by a militia to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan in 2020, and many individual hate crimes—mostly associated with white supremacy—are symptoms of what social scientist and historian Peter Turchin calls “political disintegration.” The conditions and causes for disintegration follow a pattern seen many times before in history among various states, and more often than not the outcome is bad for democracy.
One of the more common outcomes is civil war. The objective of the Michigan militia was expressly to start a civil war. Likewise, that was the express hope of Dylan Roof, who shot nine Black parishioners in a church in 2015. These are just two of the highest profile evildoers among many extremists who have sought, or advocated for, a civil war.
In his recent book End Times, Turchin illuminates the patterns of social and political disintegration from the past that closely resemble what is happening around us today. Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War”