There might be a bit of violence, but if you think that Americans are going to all out war instead of just accepting the election results and whining about it on twitter then you're mistaken.
liberals picking up a gun isn't a prerequisite for the civil war. biden gets elected, all these militia freaks who are driving biden bus off the road are going to just get more riled up. maybe trump gets his own tv channel and unshackled from his presidential duties can focus on riling up these people even more every waking hour. so they all start fighting the government. as others have said most of the police would be on the side of the angry militias and the state and its forces would be the other side. liberals would stay home and freak out, it would still be a civil war
It depends really. How much is Trump threatening the power of the Haute Bourgeoisie? Is he willing to literally arrest these people like his supporters want? If so, then there are major armed forces that are ostensibly loyal to them. The military leadership aren't libs, but they're all neocons and neocons are on the same side as neoliberals. There are material reasons neocons hate Trump. The odd thing is undoubtedly lots of rank-and-file soldiers would probably be loyal to Trump over their commanding officer.
So yeah, libs aren't going to pick up a rifle for Biden, but the FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF and big segments of the military are on the side of the libs.
Civil war would militarily weaken the USA, making the USA itself and its foreign interests vulnerable to outside aggression.
This is something neoliberals, neocons, and the bourgeois especially would oppose.
It seems plausible to me that heightened cold war anti-China and anti-Russia propaganda are intended for maintaining internal unity, and thus reduce chances of any revolution occurring.I still maintain the most plausible soon to occur revolution in the USA could be a bloodless secession of the West Coast; where the military becomes analogous to the hypothetical EU army.
Conservatives would hate this. Some bourgeois might even be persuaded, in that it would drive right-wing states into even more extreme and exploitable pro-capitalist positions.
It could create in the West Coast a new and comfortable imperial core; moving quickly towards protectionism and the Nordic model.
They made a lot of threats when RBG died and here we are with another scotus filed and yea, some protests
But they barely did shit
I mean we're already in a sort of cold civil war. There will be no defining moment where we all go "yep this is it!" it will happen gradually as more and more acts of political violence become normalized, and if not then we'll just see roaming fascist death squads emerging as more of these militia chuds are let off the leash and it becomes more apparent that the police won't hold them accountable.
How many protesters need to get shot, how many buildings need to burn before it "counts" as a civil war? Police violence is being met with massive protests and those arent exactly peaceful. I cant see this calming down over time, not in the short term
I think opposing factions need to hold territory before we're in civil war mode. Keep in mind civil wars, coups, revolutions, insurgencies, uprisings, and low intensity conflicts all have similarities with each other but differ in a lot of ways depending on power dynamics and who wins/writes the history. I think America is prob gonna deal with mass protests and numerous right wing lone wolf attacks in the short term. Long term is too tough to say.
Keep in mind civil wars, coups, revolutions, insurgencies, uprisings, and low intensity conflicts all have similarities with each other but differ in a lot of ways depending on power dynamics and who wins/writes the history.
Yes, there's definitely political factors at play if something gets called a war officially or if there's euphemisms like "peace process", "intervention" etc. But that propagandistic dimension is entirely seperate from if something is observably a war. Nobody would deny that there's a war in Afghanistan - except for my government, which still doesn't call it that. The most it could concede in almost 20 years was "these are conditions as in war."
When we leave propaganda aside and look at what's actually going on, i disagree that there's a clear-cut difference between civil war and the other conflicts you list. A coup, a revolution, an insurgency or an uprising can easily be viewed as the first confrontations in a civil war if they do not succeed or aren't crushed outright, but develop into prolonged battles. Being a low intensity conflict applies to many civil wars as well. Civil war economies are, by definition, both civil wars and need to be low-intensity to generate profits for the warlords involved. A Protracted People's War is systematically drawn out to wear the enemy down over time instead of seeking a direct confrontation, which reduces the scale and frequency of battles drastically.
If something is still an armed conflict or already a war is a matter of scale. One of the replies here is "A civil war is when people are trying to actively kill each other", but organized sides are also trying to kill each other in fights between gangs and normally, calling these a gang war or mob war is a hyperbolic, dramatizing figure of speech. But there's situations where battles between cartels escalate so much they are more like a war than just a lot of crime. In the drug war in Mexico, more than 200,000 people have been killed since 2006, there's been hundreds of thousands of combattants involved. That's bigger than a lot of conventional wars, there's conflict researchers that rank it as an actual war and i'm inclined to agree with them. But aside from the sheer scale, there's nothing setting that war aside from just having lots of very violent organized crime. People wouldn't consider it really a war simply because it had less casualties.
You're right. I was just about to delete that comment before you responded
While it’s not a perfect metaphor, I saw someone say that what we’d be in for if Biden wins is something analogous to The Troubles in Ireland but more decentralized. A sharp uptick in lone wolf right wing terror attacks which won’t spark an outright civil war, but will create a culture of unease and fear.
Even the IRA had overseas funding and support from countries like Libya. Who is gonna support attacks on the world's financial hegemon?
Hey kids, I heard you liked RBG and also RGB LED's?
Well have you heard of RMB's?
Would chuds take Chinese guns though? I feel like if China came to them with offer of material support they'd say something obscenely racist before telling them to fuck off
The IRA's funding came from private citizens in the US. When that finally dried up they hit the negotiating table.
The US could easily fund its own IRA style groups, it just takes money and some willingness from the authorities to look the other way. The same millionaires that buy elections could decide to stockpile weapons. It's happened in many countries. They just haven't done that yet because they can still get their way through politics.
Again, those multimillionaires have a vested material interest in the stability of the country.
If Trump were to steal the election and try to consolidate power, the financial class would probably fund it. Trump hates them and wants to remove them from power in favor of people who are industrial nationalists. They don't hate Trump because he's uncouth and crass, they hate him because he really does want to purge the "deep state" (agents of financial capital that have permanent positions of power in the state). If he becomes an existential threat to their power, they will definitely fund domestic terrorism against him and his movement. It's not like they've never funded terrorists before lol.
There's a huge difference to that though.
The IRA were way more organized than anything left based in the US right now. They had activists willing to die in prison with hunger strikes and they fought the British for years.
Until we actually have an organized left movement that is willing to do anything like that, we aren't getting anywhere. On the other side, the far right have spent decades organizing and talking about a tyrannical government imposing martial law, gun control and all of that. They're the ones that are going to be calling the shots. They've been waiting for this moment since the 70s and on up and have had plenty of time to organize. The left on the other hand, is too divided with ID-POL bullshit and other petty nonsense that at most, we'll have small groups who are outnumbered by the far right.
It won't be like the Troubles at all and that is a poor comparison. It will be more like Lebanon or Yugoslavia. It will be a civil war that is broken down and divided through everything from race, class, culture and religion. Americans are heavily divided.
The vast, vast majority of people don't need to take up arms for it to be a civil war. If it happens, it isn't going to look like a redux of the first American civil war, with large armies on two well-defined sides meeting in open battle. It's going to look like the bad nights in Portland, or like Kenosha, but in lots of places and on a regular basis. If Americans are regularly shooting and killing other Americans in the streets on a significant scale over political ideologies, that's a civil war no matter what the news calls it.
Yeah, exactly. It'll look more like what we'd maybe be inclined to call "civil unrest" in the West. That's just what civil wars look like in the 21st century, though--small-scale, brief, intense clashes between small minorities of highly motivated people with a wide spectrum of different motivations.
Not even Fallujah, I think--more chaotic than that. In Fallujah, you had "standard" asymmetric warfare, with a relatively normal professional army on one side, and guerilla fighters on the other. I think it's unlikely in the extreme that we'll see anything like that in the United States. That is, I think it's unlikely in the extreme that we're going to have a Red Dawn type situation, where ordinary Americans are resisting an army (ours or anyone else's). I really think the model we should have in our heads is the most violent days of the George Floyd protests over the summer: loosely knit coalitions of civilians fighting each other, with the organized police and military sort of taking advantage of the chaos to fight everyone. A genuine civil war would deepen existing divides, and may even divide the cops and the military. It's not going to be the house-to-house fighting of Fallujah with a disciplined, professional group on one side and civilians on the other. It's mostly going to be civilian vs. civilian, with the "professionals" caught in the middle.
Again it has to be said who the fuck are these right-wing lunatics and militias and paramilitaries are going to fight in a "civil war" situation? And what possible organized force exists to prevent the CHUDs from just killing whoever they want, save for the police (lol)? What violence would happen in a "civil war" would be entirely one-sided, basically just a pogrom against people the CHUDs don't like and are known to them.
But it's far more likely that it'll just be what we have now - loosely-organized groups and lone wolf shooters occasionally shooting up a Wal-Mart, or sacking an IWW meeting hall, or merking a protester, and so on - just at a more frequent rate.
[Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year]
agreed, people here are overestimating how badass most people are. Most people have families and they don't want to die. Are they starving yet? If not, then there won't be a civil war. Im not even sure how one would start at this point. I guess there could be terrorist attacks but i dont think it will be widespread.
Agreed, we're way too placated as a society to even have a small scale civil conflict.
There'd need to be a prolonged national food and/or internet disruption before even any localized conflict would occcur.
Even the most ardent of the chud cohorts wouldn't do anything beyond what we've already seen (isolated violence) unless that happened.
I mean probably not tomorrow, but the underlying conditions are there for sure. I honestly think it will kick off within the next 4 years or as the result of whatever happens in 2024
We're still at least a decade from an actual civil war. We're on pace for either a collapse or full blown fascism taking over. The civil war talk is pretty early. It's not going to happen overnight, but political violence will continue in the next few years as we head closer and closer to that outcome, along with material conditions worsening to the point that people have nothing left to lose and will choose a side.
