Fear?

A civil war over two factions of the same ruling class that agree on 99% of the policies, including the culture war bullshit....

What a Jester of an Empire.

Come on, balkanize already

so 25% fear it? OK, well how many cheer it?

In the last civil war there were was a split in the owning class between the industrial manufacturers, and the slaveholding agriculturalists. These were competing economic models. Without a similar irreconcilable split in the owning class there will never be another civil war. The closest you have today is competition between the rentier capitalists and manufacturers but thats nowhere near antagonistic enough. Can you imagine "our beautiful landlords, their smelly factory owners".

Tell them to calm down and check back in twenty years

Modern Americans are way too chickenshit for a civil war lmao

Over a quarter of Americans have no idea how anything works

i think "civil war" has become a placeholder for violent destabilization. if there's some other word for it when trust in institutions is so low that the default response to "another guy walked into a building and opened fire on everybody" is being unfazed, americans don't know it. everybody who isn't angry is at least on edge, brittle. and the political system that was meant to diffuse revolutionary energy into the ballotbox has only surgically removed the revolutionary focus, leaving us with a rising tide of energy, occasionally foaming and bubbling over into violence in the workplace, at the school, at the club, in the home, and on the streets.

and the elections create swells of this unfocused agitation, which no longer ebb after the election as aggrieved factions now claim "the system is rigged!" because of course it is rigged, not that either faction wants to reform this. they want to manage the rigging and they are bothered by the other faction fiddling with the controller, because its our turn and mom said this was a two player game.

more than half of Americans are so ignorant and coddled they'd starve to death without restaurants

come on, we won't be that lucky.

Another quarter are excited for the civil war.

The most I’m expecting is a short lived ad hoc tacticool “checkpoint” on the way to work to keep out the illegals, despite my town being in the geographic center of a continent.

A civil war takes work and organization. Not expecting the chuds to get out further than a mile before they make a stop at an Applebees and lose interest.