Large scale riots,
Home invasions,
Arsons,
Looting,
Those sort of things.
The Left won’t be organized for a civil war.
But you know, you never know...
It will start when you have to kill your dog to eat dinner.
Ping for later.
The next civil war has already begun. Voter fraud and vote counting fraud is flipping elections in Florida and likely Arizona. California is defying federal law on many fronts. The courts are out of control and the borders are wide open. People say the military is securely in civilian hands and they will only take order from civilians, which civilians. The legitimacy of the government has been undermined. That is the point at which civil wars start. We could stumble along for a few years this way, maybe 5 but in the end it will only be resolved by force.
It is much higher than most people think. A police action against certain elements in America is growing greater and greater daily.
One possible path. Leftists continue to push and up the ante with more overt violence towards conservatives and more false flag operations used to justify it. Eventually some on the right have had enough and actually do run a few ops against the left. These are far more brutal, better conceived, and better executed than any of the BS the leftists have managed. The rats finally have their excuse, push for martial law and draconian measures. These are too much for a much higher percentage of freedom loving patriots who organize far more quickly and thoroughly than anyone on the left anticipated. Emboldened by a few key refusals to accept orders regarding arrests and or detention of American citizens by law enforcement and military personnel, the new American patriots take direct action to oust the growing leftist cancer at *all* levels. Violence breaks out nationwide. While the top tier leftists are reasonably well protected by well paid body guards (mercenaries in all but name) leftists at the local and state level suffer tremendous loss of life. Replaced by real Americans from the ground up, the leftist masters topple and flee their failed experiment. The cost is still measured in double digit thousands of lives.
I think the Lefties are going to continue to make unreasonable demands and it seems as though they are really unhappy about a large turnout of voters who don’t enact their wishes. I think that they have nowhere else to go than to attempt to disenfranchize voters and to suppress the vote. Tactics with these ends are nothing new to the Left but what may be new is that it is creeping out into the open. If the average voter scents the blatant hypocrisy in the wind, I don’t think it will go so well for the Left.
I don’t think it will be a civil war because there are too few Lefties. I do think that the GOP had better have a heart-to-heart with the Libertarian contingent because they are going to have to address a lot of privacy issues that Silicon Valley would just as soon ignore in pursuit of power.
The Lefties apparently have no problem trying to intimidate people into shutting up or doing what they want. NOBODY is going to willingly put up with this bunch of hectoring wet blankets running their lives. The thing is that they are apparently exceptionally well funded and flush with lawyers. Since we rely so much on precedent law, anyone without a lawyer is at a disadvantage that is so great it is pretty much like two standards of justice. One for the people with lawyers and another for people without. Most people are pretty decent and they don’t really want to make the streets run red with blood. The people who actually could get into that sort of thing are in the minority that would likely not come off well in such a confrontation.
I don’t see a civil war. I see the Lefties being systematically deprived of the privileges they take such pains to abuse and lord over the rest of humanity.
I think we’re already in it would just not in the shooting phase
I’d say the chances our pretty good that some snowflakes are going to be destroyed before all this is settled.
e. At both times, the country divided geographically, with more urban and educated regions leaning one way and more rural and less educated regions the other. In both periods, highly partisan media inflamed passions, sometimes brazenly peddling “fake news”; and at both stages, the country was recovering from a severe financial crisis.
It is all very alarming — but that does not put us minutes away from Fort Sumter. In the nearly four years that I have been writing columns for Stratfor, I have repeatedly drawn attention to a distinction that logicians like to make between “formal” and “relational” analogies. A formal analogy involves finding similarities between a case about which we know a lot (such as what happened in the United States at the end of the 1850s) and one about which we know less (such as what is just beginning to happen in the United States at the end of the 2010s), and extrapolating from them to variables that cannot be observed in the less well-known case — concluding, here, that if polarization, sectionalism, financial problems and political violence produced civil war in the 1850s, they will have the same result in the 2010s.
The problem with formal analogies is, of course, that no two cases are identical. The modern rage over globalization and its discontents does not come close to the moral intensity of the 19th-century arguments over slavery, while the consequences of the 1857 financial meltdown were nowhere near those of the 2008 collapse.
Even more striking, the forms of political violence in the two periods are very different. The 1850s experienced nothing like last month’s pipe bombs, the 2017 shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and three others or the 2011 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others; and the 2010s have seen nothing like U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks’ near-fatal 1856 attack on Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate, let alone the “Bleeding Kansas” insurrection of 1855-56 or John Brown’s raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
The devil is in the details, which means that differences are just as important as similarities when we try to learn from the past. But how do we weigh up the pros and cons of comparisons? This is where the second kind of analogy comes in. Rather than cherry-picking convenient similarities and either ignoring or arguing away inconvenient differences, relational analogies begin from broad patterns in multiple well-known cases and proceed by understanding how a less well-known case fits into the larger structure. So, rather than wringing our hands over how much 2018 resembles 1860, we should be looking at how civil wars began in a wide range of different contexts, and then asking how well the late 2010s fit into that pattern.
Sufficient and necessary causes
The most obvious point is that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package is not just shared by 1850s and 2010s America. It was also common in many other eras that ended in civil war. The English Civil War of 1642-51, for instance, was preceded by decades of comparable disturbances. The population split into “court” and “country” factions (nowadays more familiar as “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads”). Each had its own geographical base and religious affiliation, with High Church Royalists and Puritan Roundheads literally ready to mutilate and burn each other over their differences.
Distrust of institutions was even worse than in 2010s America: Royalists accused Parliamentarians of blasphemy and corruption, while Parliamentarians replied that Royalist corruption was even worse, and was magnified by the royal court’s sexual deviance and willingness to sell the country to foreigners. Throughout the 1630s, financial crises paralyzed government and political violence mounted. Pro-Parliament mobs murdered bishops and besieged royal favorites in their mansions, and, in the 17th-century equivalent of sending anthrax spores through the mail, a leading Parliamentarian received a package containing a rag soaked in pus from the sores of a plague victim. He suffered no ill effects — then as now, biological terrorism was difficult to do well — but within a year, the two sides would fight their first pitched battle.
The Roman Republic provides another classic case. In the 50s B.C., the political elite was deeply divided between what Romans called populares — men such as Julius Caesar, who presented themselves as champions of the masses — and optimates such as Pompey the Great, who claimed to stand for virtue, tradition and the nation as a whole. Webs of patronage and debt bound much of the population to one faction or the other. Escalating financial crises ruined cities and regions, and entire provinces lined up behind strongmen who claimed to be able to save them — Gaul with Caesar, Italy with Pompey. Politicians fortified their homes against mob violence, street gangs regularly stopped elections from being held and assassination became almost commonplace. The civil wars that began in 49 B.C. would leave millions dead.
However, although England and Rome provide alarming formal analogies, things get more complicated as soon as we start looking for relational analogies. While the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package regularly leads to civil war, it does not always do so. In Rome, for instance, the package was in some ways even more prominent in the 130s B.C. than in Julius Caesar’s day. Tiberius Gracchus, usually seen as the first popularis politician, tried to cancel the debts of poor farmers and redistribute elite properties to them. A constitutional crisis ensued, splitting the ruling class. To conservatives, Gracchus seemed to be rallying the impoverished peasants of Etruria against Roman urban interests to make himself king. In political violence going far beyond Brooks’ assault on Sumner, a meeting of the Roman Senate in 133 B.C. ended with conservatives breaking up the wooden benches on which they sat and using the pieces to beat Gracchus and 300 of his followers to death. Twelve years later, his brother Gaius also died in political violence over much the same issues. Yet civil war did not erupt in either case.
Similarly, following Henry VIII’s break with the Roman church and dissolution of the Catholic monasteries in the 1530s, England experienced just as much polarization, regionalism, financial crisis and political violence as it would in the 1630s. However, it did not tip into civil war, although it came close. The United States was arguably almost as divided and haunted by political violence in the 1960s as in the 1850s, yet it too escaped civil war. We can only conclude that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was not a sufficient cause for civil war in Rome, England or the United States.
Nor was it a necessary cause. In Rome and England at least, civil wars broke out in the absence of polarization, regionalism or financial crisis (although political violence is, by definition, always part of civil war). In A.D. 69, which became known as “The Year of the Four Emperors,” multiple civil wars convulsed Rome, but they were driven almost entirely by generals’ ambitions to seize the throne. Similarly, between 1135 and 1153, England was torn apart by such severe civil wars that the period came to be called “The Anarchy.” The violence was so extreme, one chronicler recorded, that “Men said openly that Christ and his saints slept”; yet the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was largely absent in the 1130s. A royal succession crisis and fragile state institutions were all it took.
The polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package that 2010s America shares with 1850s America can be present without leading to civil war, and civil wars can break out without the package being present. We can only conclude that these forces are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for civil war. The dark prophecies of a second Civil War within the coming decade might well be nothing more than bad scholarship.
It’s the Army, stupid
So, the obvious questions: Why do the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package and civil war sometimes go together and sometimes not, and will they go together in America’s short-term future?
Fortunately, the answer to the first question was worked out long ago, by the Roman historian Tacitus. Looking back on the Year of the Four Emperors some 50 years after the event, he recognized that “Now was divulged the secret of the empire — that emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome.” What he meant by this was that although the empire’s political institutions were all concentrated in the city of Rome, if the armies out in the provinces decided to intervene in the political process, they always had the final say. Rome lurched into civil war in 49 B.C. because Caesar and Pompey each had armies to back their political ambitions. It did so again in A.D. 69 because no fewer than four rivals found themselves in this position. It did not lurch into civil war in 133 B.C., though, because its mighty armies remained aloof from politics.
England stumbled into civil war in 1642 because it had no standing army at all. When relations between the Royalists and Parliamentarians broke down, each could safely set about raising its own armed forces with no fear that Leviathan would intervene and stop them. This was Thomas Hobbes’ central point in his 1651 masterpiece Leviathan; only a powerful government with terrifying armed force can scare people straight and deter them from using violence to pursue their own ends. Things had been even worse in 1135, because in addition to there being no strong central army, dozens of barons had their own private armies, which they gleefully unleashed on rivals. In the 1530s, by contrast, despite the mass uprising in defense of Catholicism known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the barons largely remained loyal to Henry VIII and civil war was avoided.
When relations between Northern and Southern states broke down in 1861, the United States had more in common militarily with England in 1642 than with any of the other cases discussed here. It did have a professional army, but it contained just 16,367 men, and 179 of its 197 companies were stationed west of the Mississippi, so far from the initial areas of fighting as to render them irrelevant. In any case, one in five of the U.S. Army’s officers promptly resigned their commissions to join the Confederate states and thousands of noncommissioned men simply deserted and followed them. The government in Washington effectively had no army to enforce its will, and both sides — like King Charles I and the English Parliament in 1642 — had to set about raising forces almost from scratch.
Nothing could be less like the United States’ position in 2018. It has the most powerful and professional armed forces the world has ever seen, and there is absolutely no doubt about their loyalty to the legitimate government or commitment to the principle of civilian command. American soldiers, sailors and airmen do have political opinions, but they currently can be relied on to put their duty first. The United States therefore has far more in common with Rome in 133 B.C. than with any of the other cases. Even if U.S. senators start killing each other with chair legs, the armed forces will not take sides, other than to implement orders — so long as the orders are legitimate and legal — from their elected commander-in-chief.
When we look at the recent civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, or at places such as Egypt where civil war has been averted, nothing matters so much as the stance and strength of the armed forces. We have to conclude that the American Civil War Doomsday Clock does not stand at two, or even 52, minutes to midnight. The very idea is ridiculous. So long as the armed forces remain true to their highest traditions, it will not matter how angry the American people get or how badly their politicians behave. There will be no second Civil War.
Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist. He is currently Stanford University’s Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and serves on the faculty of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has published 12 books and has directed excavations in Greece and Italy.
This article was published with the permission of Stratfor.
Trump is the only one I could even imagine accepting reality, and taking the risk involved to fight back, but he needs to step things up in the time he’s got left. We can talk tough, but without leadership and organization, we won’t stop anything from happening. We know the left will use extreme measures to destroy everything good this nation was built on, but most elected republicans are either weak, or just unable to accept the reality of what's happening in the country, and what it would take to stop it.
There are way too many conservatives who are too stupid to understand that there comes a time where you must suspend the constitution in order to try and save it. They will never accept that reality no matter how bad it gets, and will be screaming about what the Constitution says in the final days of the nation they gave up without a fight.
I would not want a shooting civil war to decide it, but I would welcome the formation of the Conservative States of America. Then libs can name their nation whatever they want. I would predict the Progressive States of America.
If I read his assumptions and conclusions correctly there would have been no war of independence.
It’s quite evident that neither side likes the other. How about a friendly separation instead of a civil war.
US Civil War II
Soros and deep staters and globalist dream. But I repeat myself.
We have leftwing groups of weirdos committing violent acts and being shielded by the government. It’s only a matter of time before right-leaning people start organizing to fight them in the streets in reaction. It’s already happening some. We live in Weimerica.
Slightly higher than zero. But not much.
When people think Civil War, they think about military groups fighting each other with military weapons. We are already in the civil war (small letters). It is Antifa. It is elected representatives telling people to be uncivil to the opposition. It is threatening crowds around people’s houses as happened with Kavanaugh and Tucker Carlson. It is riots where the police stand down and rioters loot.
There may be terrorist bombings but there won’t be any large scale assaults to take territory. Both sides have their territories and the last thing liberals want is more territory they can’t support. Instead, they want a tax base which they get by stealing elections that they can’t legitimately win.
The weakest, yet most visible to the average person of the assaults against liberty are the virtue signaling famous people. They have declared themselves on the side of “The Rebels.”
I don’t see an end to this war as “The Rebels” never lose any actual people. But, they do, by their actions, achieve notoriety and “satisfaction.” The end will come only when it becomes uncool to be a rebel; when Saturday Night Live plays the Star Spangled Banner and every cast member salutes. (I will be long in my grave by then.)
“I keep Hopeing,,”
Civil War is already upon us. there will be a great struggle in the next 50 years, a return to Democrat Slavery and Jim Crow Racism and Violence, or a return to the Republic and the Rule of Law.