The Next Civil War

It has been suggested for some years now, at least for the past decade, that this country is in the midst of a “cold civil war.” Disagreements of both policy and principle between the progressive left and the conservative right have reached a fever pitch. Factions are marching in the streets and attacking each other with bats and chemical sprays—although the fighting hasn’t reached the stage of firearms yet. Friendships are breaking up, sides have formed, and the lines are drawn on social media. I even know of one Facebook friend who seems ready to divorce her husband over his political views.¹

We’ve been here before, back in the late 1960s, when I was at the university and the young people in college and the radical activists were protesting against the Vietnam War and in favor of civil rights and free speech. Back then, we had campus demonstrations, protest gatherings on the Washington Mall, and rioting in the streets—most notably outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The difference between then and now is that in the ’60s the radical view and its hard-line conservative response were both on the fringes of the political spectrum, while the two main parties could still conduct business in a relatively consensual, bipartisan fashion. Today, the two parties function in lockstep with their most radical elements. Discussion and votes in the Congress and decisions on the Supreme Court are divided along party lines with almost no crossover. The White House and the top echelon of the Executive bureaucracy swing back and forth with whichever party captures the Presidency.

On the one side, we have people who want to create and celebrate a “fundamental transformation” of the country’s political, economic, social, and environmental relations according to a perceived “arc of history.” On the other are those who don’t mind moving forward into the future by evolutionary steps but resist being pushed bodily through revolutionary action. Frustrations abound on either side, and with them come name calling, social shunning, brick throwing, and tear gas.

Some people are even speculating—myself among them, and mostly since the upheavals of the 2016 election—that the cold civil war will eventually turn hot. That our political and economic differences, our social and environmental positions, will reach a point where they can no longer be resolved by discussion and bargaining, by yielding on some points and advancing on others, to arrive at a national consensus. That the political crisis will demand a clear-cut winner and loser. That internal peace will only be achieved when one side or the other can no longer stand up for its position because its politicians and their supporters have—each man and woman—been economically subdued, personally incarcerated, or rendered dead. Or when the country has been divided by physical partition and personal and familial migration, as occurred between India and Pakistan in the late 1940s, with each party maintaining its own new national government.

The first American Civil War of the 1860s was a dispute between cohesive regions, North and South, Slave State and Free. But many people think the current differing viewpoints are too intermixed for the country to break and go to war along regional lines and across state boundaries. This view says that the coming hot war will be more like the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, with neighbor fighting neighbor for control of the cities and the countryside for each party.

I can see the reasoning for either approach. In many ways, the opposing sides in this country reflect a divergence between urban progressives and rural conservatives. We keep seeing that map comparing the votes cast in Los Angeles County—which is just the urban core of the big place we think of as “LA”—and those in the seven states of the Upper Northwest, from Idaho to Minnesota. And really, even California is not a homogenous polity, because the feeling in communities of the foothills of the Gold Country and in the Sierra is more conservative than the progressive politics of the big cities in the Central Valley and along the Coast.

But I can also see a breakup between regions. The states along the Pacific Coast, in the Northeast, and across Upper Midwest are typically progressive, while the middle of the country is typically more conservative—with a few isolated exceptions like Colorado and New Mexico.

The question of how the country will break apart if and when war comes depends, in my mind, on what incident, what spark, finally sets it off. If the decisive point is internal, say, an election that fails to satisfy one party so greatly that it simply revolts, then we might see a piece-meal collapse as in the Spanish Civil War. But if the incident is external and the shock is to the whole country, then we might see a response that takes shape along regional and state lines.

The latter is the picture I painted as a leitmotif to my two-volume novel about life extension through stem-cell organ replacement, Coming of Age. There, the incident was the repudiation of the national debt.

When I was in college, my economics text book said the national debt was irrelevant because it was just money that we owed to ourselves, financed by Savings Bonds held among the citizenry. No one was going to call in that debt; so the government could just keep financing it by issuing more bonds. As recently as 2014, however, almost half of our publicly held debt in the form of U.S. Treasuries, and a third of our total debt, is held by other governments and offshore banks. The biggest holders are China, Japan, Ireland, Brazil, and the Caribbean banks.

If these external holders wanted to collapse this country—which, given that our global economy is so interconnected, would be a foolish thing—they could simply sell off huge blocks of the U.S. Treasuries they now hold. The federal government would then have to scramble to make good on the sales, and so would likely impose massive economic restrictions and additional taxes on the American public. In my book, this prompts many of the states in the central part of the country—whose residents don’t feel they are well represented in the federal government’s spending decisions—to renunciate the debt and along with it their allegiance to the Union: either secede from the union or go broke by staying in it.

Under those conditions, many of the National Guard units would side with their home states. And many U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force bases located in these states might weigh their allegiance to the national government against the conservative political instincts of their commanders and troops. The split would not be uniform. The choices would not be pretty. And once initial blood was spilled in the breakup, it would not be much more of a step to spill blood in establishing either national dominance or domestic partition.

In my novel, the breakup along these economic lines came in the year 2018. Of course, that year has now come and is mostly gone. But the weight of the national debt and the simmering divisions of our domestic politics still hang over us all.

I don’t look for war or want it. But my novelist’s ear listens to the rhetoric that is now splitting the county along its fracture lines, and I cannot discount the possibility of a shooting war coming to these United States sometime soon.

1. My late wife and I had opposing political views: she an old Berkeley liberal Democrat, me an unreformed Eisenhower-era conservative Republican. But we fell in love and married in an earlier time, some forty years ago, when political differences were treated in the same way as differences of religious doctrine and practice: a private, personal matter that did not touch on the essentials of what made a good person. My wife and I shared the same values about honesty, integrity, kindness, education, and fair dealing—and that was what mattered. For the rest, we joked about making sure we each went to the polls on election day so that we could cancel each other’s vote.