The Coming Second U.S. Civil War? No. We are in it.
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
Oliver Cromwell by Samuel Cooper. The English Civil War? .E won it.. That is until posthumously, .e lost it and 'ad 'is 'ed put on a spike over Westminster Palace..
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given) Details Source DMCA
As have many others, I have previously written on the possibility of a Second Civil War in the nation which is currently called the United States of America (see, e.g., "Some Brief Thoughts on the Prospects for Civil War and/or Secession"). I began that column with the following quote:
"Recently, the New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg reviewed several recent discussions of the matter, at least two of book length. To quote (extensively) from her column:
"Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has interviewed many people who've lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn't see it coming. 'They're all surprised,' she said. 'Even when, to somebody who studies it, it's obvious years beforehand. . . .' "
"Two books out this month warn that this country is closer to civil war than most Americans understand. In 'How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,' Walter writes, 'I've seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.' The Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Marche is more stark in his book, 'The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future.' 'The United States is coming to an end,' Marche writes. 'The question is how.' " [Note: I have not read the book, so I do not know whether Mr. Marche gets into "the practicalities."]
"In Toronto's Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar who studies violent conflict, recently urged the Canadian government to prepare for an American implosion. 'By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,' he wrote. 'By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.' . . . "
"[On the other hand], not all serious people [think this way]. The Harvard political scientist Josh Kertzer wrote on Twitter that he knows many civil war scholars, and 'very few of them think the United States is on the precipice of a civil war.' " [Of course, one should note that any contemporary U.S. civil war would be very different from the (first) Civil War in so many ways, geographically, ideologically, militarily, so perhaps a (first) Civil War scholar is not the best person to evaluate the present situation.]
This time around on this subject, let us begin with a consideration of just what "civil war" is.
What is "Civil War?"
First, it should be noted that war of one type or another is common to the human species. Since homo sapiens first evolved and began to organize into socioeconomic groupings that physically controlled spaces where first they could engage in hunting-gathering for the benefit of those particular social groupings, and then engage in organized agriculture, and then move onto into resource-conversion/manufacturing of one kind or another, the human species has been characterized by one major feature that characterizes no other species: continuous-species-self-destructiveness. From individuals fighting over pieces of property to mass fighting over land, resources, and politico-economic control of both, our species is unique. Destructive conflict on a mass basis comes in two forms: between various groupings and within various groupings. It is the latter that, in the time since records of various sorts have been kept, which is characterized as "civil war."
Now inter-group wars have been with our species certainly since humans began keeping records of such conflicts, and presumably since well before those times. Certainly, since the time that written records have been kept of human activity around the world, war of the non-civil sort, that is between groupings of nations, has been, shall we say, ultra-common. That is, one can safely say that since records were being kept of such events, inter-grouping wars have been going on constantly, and they still are.
Second, but civil wars, that is armed conflict between factions within a particular nation-state are rare. Very briefly, what are the characteristics of civil war? They can be over matters of religion. In the Western World, there were the Catholic-Protestant Wars that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. They can be over the matter of whether the economic/physical ownership of one type of human being by another type of human being should be allowed to exist, as in the U.S. Civil War. They can be over controlling the apparati of the state and state power. In England, for example, there the Wars of the Roses in the 14th century and the English Civil War in the 17th. During that time period and on into the early 19th century, on occasion such civil wars occurred within various nations on the Continent as well. They can be, in part at least, over the role of organized religion in the appariti of state power, as in the Spanish Civil War. They can be the military expression of class conflict, for the control of state power, as in the Russian and Chinese Civil Wars.
A common factor among these various elements is that disputes over them, whether minor or major are over matters considered to be irreconcilable. Either an economic-ruling class controls state power or it does not. In the era of direct involvement in the matters of the state apparatus and who controls it, either religious institutions/theologies control it and its policies/operations or they do not. Either the state apparatus is subject to some kind of democratic (that is lower-case "d") control by the broad masses of the population or it isn't. Of course, in every modern "democracy" it is the economic ruling class that has the final say on governmental policy and the use of its power. But in true bourgeois (capitalist) democracies there is some significant element of power sharing.
The Irreconcilable Differences that Currently Exist in the United States
Are very well-known. And one or more of them has stood right at the center of every previous civil war that has occurred around the world. There is the conflict over the role of religion and religious belief in the matters of State, just as in the Religious Wars of 16th century England(!) and 20th century Spain. Indeed, either religion and religious belief have control in the making of laws concerning, for example: the outcome of pregnancy, what material should appear in school libraries, and who should have control over the availability of medical and health services for trans-gender youth, themselves and their parents or the State, or they are not.
As for bourgeois democracy (that is democracy and democratic forms within the structure of the capitalist state), should it be spread as widely as possible within the population or should it be narrowed to the greatest extent possible, so that political control of the state apparatus can be lodged most tightly within a particular sector of the ruling class. (Interestingly enough, although the matter of class control of State Power, as in the civil wars of China and Russia, is certainly present in the United States it is certainly well below the surface of current political conflicts.) Should race and racism and the nature of human sexuality play major roles in constructing the nature of government and that state apparatus, including the electoral process, or should it not.
Now, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties are bourgeois political parties. That is while they both appeal to broad swaths of the electorate, which have different interests in terms of legislation and regulation, the two parties represent distinctly different elements of the ruling class: the element that believes it can best control the levers of state power through having as little power-sharing with the broad mass of the electorate as possible and that element that believes that the best way it can maintain control of the apparati of the State is thought some reasonable degree of power sharing.
In my view, the more we look at these differences in political-economic theory and practice, the more they appear to be irreconcilable. And in the past, in our nation and in others, civil wars have occurred where differences over the matters discussed above, were irreconcilable. As in: the English Civil War (of the 17th century), over the role/power of the monarch vs. that of Parliament. In the U.S. Civil War, over whether the institution of private ownership by one set of human beings of another set of human beings should a) be allowed to exist and b) allowed to encompass the whole nation. In the Russian and Chinese Civil Wars, over which class shall have control over the levers of State Power, with the subsequent authority to institute one system of economic relations between owner and worker or another.
In the United Sates today, there are an increasing number of irreconcilable differences between the two major political groupings in the nation. Which is why I am saying in this column that except for the matter of the use of organized armed force ("Jan. 6" of course being the use of armed force by one side, but fortunately very poorly planned and implemented, armed force), the U.S. in now in its Second Civil War. One can only hope that it can be resolved, that is one side will win, as in say the Restoration of (traditional U.S.) Constitutional Democracy, without the use of armed force.
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Post Note I: Can a nation have more than one civil war in the course of its history? Well, yes, just look at England: first it was the "Wars of the Roses" in the 15th century, then the religious conflicts of the 16th century (without ongoing organized armed conflict), and then the "English Civil War" of the 17th century, which did of course encompass armed conflict.
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Post Note II: For further examples of irreconcilable differences, take today's (6-29-23) Supreme Court decision gutting affirmative action; DeSantis would close (that is CLOSE) four Federal govt. depts.: Education, Commerce, Energy, and the IRS; an earlier version of this Court re-wrote the 2nd Amendment to change its singular focus from "well-regulated militias" to, well, anyone; child labor laws are being re-enacted in several mid- and north-western states. Will the Court reinstate "Lochner" (1905) which allowed child labor whether state law had prohibited it or not? And who is to say that they might not revisit Obergefell (on gay rights) and Loving v. Virginia (on inter-marriage), on the doctrine of "states' rights?"