A Nation Divided, Is Civil War Possible?

Illustration by Thuan Pham

The first time I heard someone seriously suggest that we are headed for a civil war, I felt an actual shock. It was similar to the shock I felt in March of 2020 when I heard that the powers that be were shutting down schools, gatherings, and essentially the entire economy. In both cases my immediate thought was “We can’t do that. They have no idea what damage they will do.”

The kind of military clash that occurred during the war between the states is simply not possible, or at least not survivable for our nation, in this age. There are no neat geographic lines in this current war to delineate which side we are on. There is no “territory” to take to indicate victory. There is another glaring difference. The Civil War was fought over states’ right to separate from the Union, not to take control of it.  If those who would promote civil war in our time would propose another confederation of states, how would that look on a map or in any view? How could it coexist with the remnant United States? Or would their intent be to take over the government? To take the nation’s capital by military means would mean the end of our republic in a real way. The United States would then be no different than those countries run by military regimes that we have long despised. And that is not even to consider the opportunities that such internal strife would create for malefactors in the world to extend control and solidify their grip on many countries around the globe.

It would be simplistic to believe that in 1861 all citizens who believed in states’ rights and/or slavery lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line and all those who opposed those beliefs lived in the North. Ideological divisions are even fuzzier in today’s United States. California is a good example, where geographically a large majority of the state is conservative but control of state politics is in the hands of the liberal coastal strip. In that example, who would fight whom, and how? Would the state’s National Guard be ordered to kill its own citizens? If the president of the US should choose to federalize the national guard, or use US military forces, which states would he command them to attack, and would they follow his orders?   

I believe we are already in a civil war. The civil war we are fighting must be fought in the way it is currently being fought if this republic is to survive. The battle is obviously over who will hold ultimate power, the federal government or the people, individually and through the power of the individual states granted by our Constitution. While we are dangerously close to federal takeover of virtually everything in our lives, we must resist the idea that we must destroy our political system to save it. President Trump’s brief success in rolling back much of the federal takeover shows that it can happen. The immediate reversal of many of those changes by the Biden administration demonstrates how tenuous any progress always is.  Recent Supreme Court decisions and changes in public opinion as to the current administration offer hope that there is much more resistance to federal usurpation than general news reporting would have had us believe for the last year or so. The upcoming midterm election may very well indicate which direction we will ultimately head. If the majority of our voters do not comprehend the idea of personal freedom or the real cost of giving it up, then no war can save us.