America is Already in a 'Cold Civil War'
The next installment of my CIVIL WAR CHRONICLES, my new occasion series devoted to the potential for civil conflict in America, how it might come about, and how we can prevent it.
This piece was originally drafted just before Donald Trump’s decisive November electoral victory, and before the dramatic mood shift across the country favoring Trump and much of he MAGA agenda.
I was unable to post earlier due various personal and professional issues. So I will post now with some minor edits.
Despite the big Trump win, almost half of the country is still left leaning and anti MAGA. While the overt resistance to Trump is absolutely subdued, especially compared to his first term, that left-wing resistance has just be pushed below the surface.
Limp cheers and tiny crowds: March protesting against Donald Trump falls flat
The event billed itself as the ‘People’s March’ yet compared to the crowds in 2017, not many marched at all
And while hope things remain peaceful and quiet, it could raise its head more openly as Trump’s term continues (expect the first skirmishes to be over mass deportations of illegal aliens) or it could just remain simmering.
But don’t expect the fundamental divisions in America to just go away.
While much of the earlier discussion about increasing political violence and polarization in America revolves around whether these trends will push the country into some type of civil war or extended domestic conflict, there might be another reality.
That we are already in a Civil War, maybe a cold one, but a major national political and ideological conflict nonetheless.
The question is how long before it gets hot.
The left-leaning journalist and author, Matt Bai, while extremely misinformed and biased against Donald Trump, and unable to understand any of the far-left Democrats’ many contributions to our current divide, nevertheless makes a good case for this reality.
Of course, everything he notes points at conservatives as the only real factor in his Cold Civil War scenario. Leftists are notably absent as instigators or malignant players. Still the broader picture he paints is worth mention.
He writes in the Washington Post:
…the more likely scenario, I think, is that we continue down the path of what I’ve called a “Cold Civil War”: a standoff without recognized borders or battlefields, but rather where one side controls the apparatus of the federal government and the other resides in a loose confederacy of resistance. A kind of secession has been happening for a while now already. This time it’s not a regional or physical thing, with seized armories and all of that. It’s more of a cultural revolt, where rural or urban communities, depending on which political party is in charge, see themselves as living outside the jurisdiction of a hostile government.
We glimpsed the beginnings of this during the pandemic of 2020, when some conservative states opposed the federal guidelines for masking and even vaccinations. We’ve seen it in the “sanctuary cities” where leftist local governments have declared themselves outside the reach of federal policy. We’ve seen it, too, in this period after the fall of Roe v. Wade, when a loose confederacy of states has aggressively tried to wipe out abortion access within their borders — while liberal parents balk at sending their children to college across the cultural battle lines in Texas or Tennessee.
None of this happened overnight. Historians in the future will point to decades of election maps that grew steadily more bifurcated between blue urban centers and red oceans between them; if you’re in your 30s or early 40s today, you might not remember a presidential election that didn’t feel somehow unresolved, an ellipsis bridging one campaign cycle and the next.
Then there is the analysis by one author who wrote a recent book about a future U.S. civil war. He is interviewed here:
Never mind Trump losing the election, America’s next civil war has already started – this is how it will end
As a new poll shows that more than a quarter of Americans believe civil war could break out after this year’s presidential election – the signs that the next one has already started are everywhere, says Stephen Marche, a Canadian whose book charts what could happen next.
The author explains why Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and how the nation can avoid another violent showdown...
There is a quote near the beginning of his book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, from a retired army colonel who says that a new American civil war would not be like the first one, with armies manoeuvring on the battlefield.
“I think it would very much be a free-for-all,” he said, “neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion. And it would be horrific.”
Meanwhile, Marche details the unrest around the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-government extremist “boogaloo boys” arming themselves to the teeth, and small communities in the Pacific northwest sealing themselves off in communes, claiming they don’t recognize the law.
He describes states like Texas fighting the federal government over laws governing America’s southwestern border, and so-called “lone wolf” terrorists like Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
“That’s what chaos looks like,” Marche says. “And so, a new civil war is the sort of thing we’ve already seen, only much, much more continuous and much more unstoppable.”
It doesn’t seem that far-fetched, Marche says, especially when you consider that a majority of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen. “That’s not a fringe minority. There is already a constitutional legitimacy crisis in the United States.”
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, the military parody and satire site, The Duffel Blog, posted a PARODY piece:
Command and Staff students excited to wargame upcoming civil war
"No one gets to launch tactical nukes at Philadelphia until they’re 100% complete on annual training.”
Stay tuned for the next installment of CIVIL WAR CHRONICLES. And my other newsletters.
Paul Crespo is the President of the Center for American Defense Studies, Managing Editor of American Liberty Defense News, and Managing Partner of SPECTRE Global Risk. As a Marine Corps officer, he led Marines, served aboard ships in the Pacific and jumped from helicopters and airplanes.
He was also a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at U.S. embassies worldwide.
He later ran for congress, taught political science, wrote for a major newspaper and co-hosted his own radio show. A graduate of Georgetown, London and Cambridge universities, he brings decades of experience and insight to the issues that most threaten our American liberty – at home and abroad.