Fort Sumter 2.0
The Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 made many Americans – myself included – feel we were living in a banana republic. The preceding Trump presidency was a four-year exercise in pure demagoguery but the threat of far-right extremism erupting into violence in the heart of our federal government had, until Jan. 6, remained just that: a threat.
The images captured that day are not as violent as those of 9/11 but they are equally surreal. They convey the same sense of democracy and modernity being violated; the ghost of medieval bloodlust returned to haunt the present. This kind of madness does not happen on this scale in the developed world, we kept telling ourselves, and continue telling ourselves, because it remains so at odds with what we understand our civilization to be.
As a seven-year-old child, 9/11 definitely affected my worldview, but I still grew up thinking of largescale bloodshed on American soil as a thing of the distant past. Americans could not still be so racist that a second Civil War could erupt, not when every American schoolchild for generations had been educated about the evils of slavery and Jim Crow, taught to idolize Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Admittedly, I also grew up in a Republican family where, from an early age, I was exposed directly to American bigotry, but this did not make blood in the streets seem likely. The people who raised me, and their social circle, could never be so insane as to embrace armed insurrection in pursuit of a vain, futile, nationalistic political agenda.
Now, I’m no longer so confident. My certainty started slipping when I perceived the vitriol these same people felt toward Barack Obama for no clear reason except the most, ahem, visible. Most Americans do not want civil war. But there is a growing minority of gun-toting, far-right radicals with the potential to launch an insurgency. On Jan. 6, insurgents literally penetrated the halls of the federal government in an attempt to overturn the results of a legitimate presidential election. Their capacity to sow further chaos should not be underestimated.
The Specter of Betrayal
T.S. Eliot once said, “The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.” Intrastate conflicts inflict deeper wounds than international conflicts because, when they are over, the winners and losers still have to live side by side, continually reminding each other of their bloody past. We fight friends, family, and neighbors more fiercely than outsiders because the sense of betrayal runs deeper, forcing us to battle our own cognitive dissonance as much as anything.
Americans of every persuasion feel betrayed by their government, and by each other. State and federal policies bear increasingly little resemblance to the preferences of large majorities or large minorities of their constituencies. Left and right keep finding new ways to blame each other for their problems, even when neither, or both, are responsible, and even when both are equally affected, or unaffected.
Betrayal is a key emotional factor in the erosion of central authority. Betrayal is associated with all the factors that William Gale and Darrell West of the Brookings Institute cite as making civil war possible: hot-button issues (racial equity, gun control, abortion, election legitimacy, climate change, vaccine mandates, etc.), high levels of inequality and polarization, winner-take-all politics, belief that the other side doesn’t play fair, prevalence of guns, and the rise of private militias. These factors do not necessarily make civil war likely but they represent significant threats to the social order.
The original American Civil War has been cited as creating a new national consciousness in Americans. The political scientist Stephen Skowronek, in his regime theory of American presidential politics, categorizes the era between the Civil War and the New Deal (referred to as “Republican Nationalism”), incorporating Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Depression, as the longest-lasting American regime. To some extent, this demonstrates how deeply America’s foundations were pulverized and reconfigured by the Civil War, but it also demonstrates the limits to what that war achieved.
Reconstruction reintegrated the South into the United States, necessitating considerable concessions in return for the Southern states accepting the outlawing of slavery. Basic rights for African Americans were severely curtailed and have still not been entirely instituted. States with smaller populations (which lean more conservative) remain disproportionately represented in the Senate, the most powerful legislative body in the United States, and therefore also in the Electoral College. Both 21st century Republican presidents were elected to office once without winning the popular vote.
It is not reassuring that these qualities were all present in the system in 1861. The Constitution explicitly protected the rights of slaveholding states: “States were able to count enslaved persons toward their populations without giving them the right to vote (or even counting them as full people) and […] the process gave the country a ‘pro-slavery tilt’; for 32 of the country’s 36 first years, a white slaveholder from Virginia was president,” writes Tara Law of Time. That “tilt” was not enough for the Southern states when the winds turned against them despite their advantages. Being spoiled by the system does not seem to make citizens more compliant: distant history and recent history both demonstrate the opposite effect. Entitlement is an addictive substance whose hold over the entitled only becomes stronger with use.
When the Southerners fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, igniting the Civil War, they were striking back not at an oppressor but at an overindulgent parent who had finally put their foot down. The Jan. 6 rioters embody a similar phenomenon in which otherwise mostly law-abiding citizens with a higher standard of living than most other human beings (albeit with some legitimate grievances) find their circumstances intolerable and gleefully embrace insurrection for the sake of a counterintuitive, egocentric vision of what “their” country should be.
Will history repeat?
As Gale and West note, there are still compelling reasons to doubt a civil war will actually occur, specifically: most of the organizations talking about civil war are private, not public entities; there is no clear regional split (“The lack of a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to confront other areas, organize supply chains, and mobilize the population.” There will be no second Robert E. Lee, who supported neither the Secession nor slavery but whose first loyalty was to his home state of Virginia.); and America’s long history of working through the ballot box.
Still, civil conflict need not involve specific states or regions independently taking up arms against each other. Many civil wars occur in countries lacking a federal structure. Mohamed Nagdy and Max Roser, citing the research of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, suggest the likelihood of civil war (since WWII) increases in proportion to certain opportunity factors, for instance: availability of finance, opportunity cost of rebellion, military advantage (“Population dispersion increases the risk of conflict because it provides the rebels with military advantage.”), population size (“A large population increases the risk of conflict [which] may reflect increased opportunities...”), grievances, and time (“Time since the last conflict reduces the risk of new conflict, suggesting time can heal the wounds of civil war.”). Of these factors, only the last seems to mitigate the likelihood of a civil war in the United States.
Nagdy and Roser also refer to the work of James Fearon and David Laitin, which emphasizes the role of insurgency in civil conflicts. Insurgency, defined by revolt and guerilla tactics, is a form of asymmetrical warfare. “The fundamental aim of asymmetrical warfare,” writes Toni Pfanner, “is to find a way round the adversary’s military strength by discovering and exploiting, in the extreme, its weaknesses.” In internal conflicts, insurgents “melt into the civilian population and rebels disclose their identity as combatants merely by the fact that they engage in offensive operations.”
Bearing in mind that there are more firearms in the possession of American civilians than there are American civilians, the potential for an insurgency on American soil becomes much more frightening. Most Americans, even on the Republican right, would probably never take up arms against the government (brief militant revolts have occurred but never came close to snowballing into a larger movement, not even Jan. 6), but a core of armed resistance could easily find protection and support among civilian allies. The vast majority of civil wars end within a few years but some have lasted decades.
To reiterate, an American civil war is unlikely, but many of the necessary pieces are in place. States, regions, and other cleavages are growing more divided by ideology as Republican legislatures continue retracting abortion rights, as the conservative-majority Supreme Court becomes more politicized, as democratic norms and processes continue to erode. The threat to American democracy should not be overstated, but neither should it be understated, much less ignored.
