IS A SECOND CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES POSSIBLE?
THE DARK PREMONITIONS
IS IT POSSIBLE?
The idea that a second civil war could take place in the United States was unthinkable only a few years ago. However, as polarization increased in this century, the idea has attracted the attention of serious historians and political scientists—including the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service, which has been conducting a biannual poll on the civility of politics in the United States during the last several years.[1] Among the questions they ask, they include the following:
Do you think democracy in our country is being threatened? 81% believe it is, 72% believe this strongly, and 12% think it is not.
How certain are you that the 2024 election will be conducted fairly? 19% were extremely certain, and 32% were not at all certain.
Would you say you are happy with the way democracy is working in our country? 29% said yes, 68% said no, 48% said it was a strong no.
How worried are you that the 2024 election will result in violent activity? 78% said yes, 37% were extremely and very worried, and 23% said not at all.
How concerned are you about your freedoms being taken away? 77% were concerned, 61% were very concerned and worse, and 12% were unconcerned.
On a scale of 0 to 100, where “0” signifies no political division and 100 represents a nation on the brink of civil war, where do you believe the United States stands? The average response in March 2024 was 70.85, which fluctuated between 67.23 and 76.01 in the ten times the poll has included this question since April 2019.
Other institutions and scientists have expressed their concern that a Civil War may happen. [2] A 2022 YouGov-The Economist poll found that two in five Americans say a civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next decade.[3]
The subject has attracted the attention of business celebrities like Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, who recently published an article in Time Magazine that says in its first paragraph: “Today, I am focusing on why I believe we are approaching the point in the internal order-disorder cycle when you will have to choose between picking and fighting for it, keeping your head down, or fleeing.”[4]
This is scary.
It is worth analyzing the circumstances to see if such a war could occur.
WHAT KIND OF WAR?
Most people imagine this new war in terms similar to the first one, like a rebellion of several states against federal policies or, as in a recent film called “Civil War,” against a caudillo who wants absolute power for life. In this vein, they tend to think that the Civil War would be between the red (Republican) and the blue (Democratic) states or similar combinations of quantifiable political preferences associated with the territory. This was the case in the first Civil War, where all the Southern states fought the Northern ones, and all fought over one single issue: slavery.
This association between political preferences and territory is difficult to establish in the current circumstances. There are indeed red and blue states, but the color is assigned attending to the political leanings of the majority of the population. In all the states, however, there are substantial minorities with the opposite leaning, and they, majority and minority, may live in the same neighborhoods and work in the same enterprises. They may be mixed differently, like Georgia, where Atlanta is Democratic and the countryside is Republican. In the first Civil War, Georgia was all for slavery because the slaves did not count, and, say, in New York, all were against slavery. It was easy to say this was North against South. You cannot say this today. Thus, if there is a civil war today, it would not be states against states but between members of groups extending all over the territory. There would be Texans on both sides.
For this reason, the war could not be resolved as the Confederate States wanted: by splitting the country into two new countries. Winners and losers would have to live together at the war's end.
Moreover, a crucial circumstance was not present one hundred sixty-four years ago: today, the United States is a global power with interests worldwide, which it was not in 1860. The United States dreams of being self-sufficient, and it was in the nineteenth century, but it is no longer so. The American economy is much more than what you see in the United States. It cannot work as we know it if its myriads of connections with the rest of the world are maimed—and this is what would happen if the country goes into a civil war. The enemies now conspiring to dislodge the United States from its global hegemonic position would see this war as the best opportunity in centuries to dismantle the enormous economic, political, and military network organized around American power and presence. China would take Taiwan, Russia at least Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Iran would dominate the Middle East, and these losses would hurt the United States deeply. Americans, thinking they do not need the rest of the world, would understand this only if they lost it. It is like imagining Rome without its empire and thinking that it would be the same, ignoring how the blood of the empire flowed in and out of Rome, interconnected with the rest of the world through millions of life-giving arteries.
Americans should not forget how the Japanese took advantage of the political and economic problems of the West in the 1930s to invade China and Manchuria and to prepare themselves to invade Singapore and all the South Pacific when seeing that Britain was busy with its war against Hitler. This is what Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea would do if the United States engaged in a civil war. At the war's end, the United States would find that it had lost all its possessions abroad to its enemies.
While many people in the United States would not care to lose everything for the sake of sinking their domestic enemies, there are many others in positions of power, especially among the military and associated services, who will understand this very clearly and would not want to lose everything in an explosion of hatred.
If the armed forces retain their sense of purpose, they will become very active if things get out of hand.
Through this path, tyranny could be established in the United States—as a step calculated to prevent the country's collapse into the chaos of social dissolution. The tyranny would be established to avoid the civil war and the subsequent collapse of the United States, in a process very much like that of Julius Caesar in Rome.
THE ROAD TO TYRANNY
People frequently believe that Donald Trump will be the one who terminates democracy. I don’t think he can do it. Not that he wouldn’t want to do it to install himself like Napoleon. But he can’t do it for several reasons. On the one hand, I think that, though weakened, the liberal democratic institutions are still powerful and will resist Trump’s attacks.
On the other hand, he doesn’t have a clear concept of how he would reintroduce order and convince the people to forego their freedom in exchange for order. Much has been said about his plans to dismount what he calls the “deep state,” which he is preparing with the help of some rightist think tanks. But these plans do not go beyond securing the appointment of an adoring bureaucracy to feed his vanity and chastise those who did not believe he should have been proclaimed president even if he had not been elected. Julius Caesar was a military and political genius when commanding millions of people in Gaul. He was courageous in combat. He had all the classical education of a Roman patrician. He was beyond doing things to earn some denarii here and there. He had a perspective of history. Trump does not have any of these. He doesn’t have roots.
I think that Trump will be an agent of chaos, which, through this, will involuntarily invite a true tyrant who will methodically destroy democracy to create a new, tyrannical order.
That is, he is an agent of chaos, not the tyrant emerging to end the chaos. He will accelerate the fall but will not become Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon.
In this task, he will have the involuntary help of the extreme left, who is more capable of introducing chaos through their systematic demolition of social cohesion in the United States. By injecting hatred among ever-narrower identities, they are destroying the only reason for the existence of the United States—its definition of an American as someone who holds the liberal democratic values that the Founding Fathers instilled in the population. In this process, they are promoting hatreds that they said they condemned, only to show today that what they revere is not values but hatred. The extreme right, including Trump, is helping them with their hatred. In their interaction, the only thing they create is chaos.
Neither the extreme right nor the left can turn the polarization they are injecting into a new social order, as Napoleon did when he removed France from the destructiveness of its revolution. Neither the extreme right nor the extreme left would be able to form an army that could face the American armed forces.
So, we will probably not see a civil war with the military organization of the Confederate Army and great commanders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, but only groups with the appearance of military units without the discipline and power of an actual army. These groups will be able to torch towns and cities and generate disorders all over the territory. The federal government, including one led by Trump if he wins in November, could handle this turbulence without much problem. And if they become a danger—as would happen if they get help from Putin or Xi or any other external enemy—the U.S. Army would crush them. At this moment, the absolute tyrant would take over command.
This would be the moment when democracy would die in the United States.
Thus, the destruction of liberal democracy would not pass through a civil war, except in one possible scenario.
THE POSSIBLE SCENARIO OF A CIVIL WAR
Through this analysis, we have assumed that the Army will remain unified and that petty identity problems or political or economic ambitions will not penetrate it. If the armed forces split and turned against each other, a terrible civil war would be triggered, and the country would collapse, internally and externally. But this would be a war between two parts of a professional army, not between this and the vigilante groups of bullies associated with civil unrest.
Such action would be irreversible, as any interruption of democracy would be. We must remember that the assassination of Julius Caesar did not bring democracy back. On the contrary, it sank Rome into the worst civil war in its history. In the end, Octavianus, after defeating all his enemies, crowned himself Caesar Augustus and got rid of Roman democracy forever.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
This is not an exercise in prediction—nobody can know what the future will bring—but an exercise in risk analysis, trying to identify the weaknesses in our processes. Indeed, the biggest threat we face is not Trump, though he is a significant threat. The biggest danger is the weakness in Western social cohesion, which is destroying the fabric of society and its sense of purpose. We should, in the United States and elsewhere, deny our attention to the destructive messages that threaten us with civil wars, tyrannies, and moral collapse.
The foundations to do it are there. The West has been capable of creating the most humane and efficient society in history. This is not bravado. Western civilization has been unique in its creation of a humanistic system of values and in its ability to embody them in solid and effective institutions.
Now, we are facing the challenges posed by a marvelous technological revolution that, despite the advantages it already gives us, requires drastic adaptations to create new societies that embody the latest technologies into a human structure. This is a tremendous and positive challenge we can take rather than creating the petty conflicts now sinking our societies.
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Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was a Division Chief at the World Bank, Minister of Finance of El Salvador, and the Whitney H. Shepardson fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He is the author of four books, the last being In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal a Divided America. His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Battleground 74 Civility, Institute of Politics and Public Service, Field Dates: March 9-14, 2024, https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/krq6u1bmkvirbqjnyyed74lr92w2jsr2
`[2] Robin Wright, “Is America Headed for a New Kinds of Civil War?”, The New Yorker, August 14, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-america-headed-for-a-new-kind-of-civil-war. Bruce Stokes, Could the United States be headed for a national divorce? Chatam House, 20 February 2024. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start, and How to Stop Them, New York, Crown, 2022.
[3] Taylor Orth,Two in fiveo Americans say a civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next decade. YouGov, August 26, 2024, https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/43553-two-in-five-americans-civil-war-somewhat-likely?redirect_from=%2Ftopics%2Fpolitics%2Farticles-reports%2F2022%2F08%2F26%2Ftwo-in-five-americans-civil-war-somewhat-likely
[4] Ray Dalio, The Coming Great Conflict, Time, June 25, 2024, https://time.com/6991271/civil-war-conflict-ray-dalio/
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