The thought of Civil War has been in the
minds of many people lately, on both sides of the political and cultural
divide. This is not a thing to be wished for, though no one should kid
themselves into believing it’s impossible either. Let us take a sober look at
what such a conflict might entail.
To begin with, it would not look like the first American Civil
War, which was essentially a war between two regions of the country with
different economic interests. The divide created two separate countries, both
initially contiguous, intact, and relatively homogeneous. The lines of
demarcation now are only somewhat regional, and tend to correspond to
differences between urban and rural populations, as well as differences of race
and class. A second American Civil War would be much more similar to the
Spanish Civil War, with the leftists dominating the cities and conservatives
controlling the countryside. Conflicts of this nature, with enemies mixed
geographically, are a formula for spontaneous mass bloodletting. India-Pakistan
during the 1947 partition comes to mind as another modern example. Given an
absence of legitimate government and the friction of proximity, ordinary people
can be moved to settle grievances by killing one another without the need for
governments to egg them on.
Some dimensions of a future civil war would be, I think, largely
unprecedented. When lesser countries have imploded in violence in recent times,
they have done so with most of the world around them still intact. There were
other nations to offer aid, assistance and intervention, welcome or unwelcome.
There were places for refugees to go. The collapse of the world’s remaining
superpower would take much of the world down with it. A global economic crisis
would be inevitable. The withdrawal of American forces from bases across the
world to fight at home would also create a power vacuum that others, even under
economic strain, would be tempted to exploit. Whichever side gained control of
our nuclear arsenal, our status as a nuclear power would probably persuade
other nations not to interfere in our conflict militarily, but the collapse of
trade alone would produce crippling effects that would be hard to overestimate.
Many components for products our manufacturing sector makes are globally sourced.
Add to this the breakdown of our transportation system, dependent on oil and
transecting one new front line after another. The internet would fail. It is a
frail enough now. Financial systems would fail. What happens if the banks find
half their assets suddenly in hostile territory? All Federal government
functions, including Social Security, would fail, many of them losing their
very legitimacy to one side or the other. Food production, heavily dependent on
diesel fuel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, not to mention a steady
supply of genetically engineered seeds, would slump alarmingly. In short, most
things we depend on are now held together by a network of delicate and complex
connections. Without those connections, would you have a job? If so, in what
medium of exchange could your employers manage to pay you? What would there be
for you to buy? Does your town, your county, or even your state have the
ability to marshal its resources into a viable economy? How many people in
those entities could deal with anything worse than a weather disaster, in which
they count on the fact that help is coming soon?
From an economic perspective, I think it is fair to say that the
left would have a bigger problem than the right. Cities cannot feed themselves under
any conditions, and what food could be grown on America’s resource-starved
farms would be gobbled up by people nearer and dearer to the farmers. Leftists
would have to both secure vast territories around their urban
strongholds and relearn from scratch the generations-lost art of food
production. Liberal enclaves stranded in the hinterland would simply be
untenable. We, on the other hand, would be critically short of new Hollywood
movies. Without a steady supply of the works of Meryl Streep and Matt Damon,
millions of conservatives would instantly drop dead from boredom – that is,
according to Meryl Streep.
Up through the middle of the 20th century, cities were major hubs
of industry, but liberal preoccupations with environmentalism have driven much
of our surviving industry into rural areas. The domination of the South by the
sheer scale of Northern industry that happened in the 1860s would not repeat
itself in a future war. Both sides would probably have the means to manufacture
basic military essentials, but producing sophisticated items like fighter
planes would be simply too complex for the remaining economic base. It would be
a war of soldiers, not of million-dollar robots. Were the war to stretch into
years, the left would likely destroy their own economy with unfettered
socialistic policies. This actually happened to the Spanish Republic in the
1930s. I can image their modern counterparts struggling to make eco-friendly
weapons and organize culturally-sensitive, politically-correct collective
farms.
Militarily, the left has other problems. They have saddled
themselves with a longstanding disdain for military history and thought. A mob
of whiney, untrained Antifa or BLM protestors doth not an army make. In recent
decades, the left has sought not so much to co-opt the military as to rot it
from within. When your idea of a military hero is Bowe Bergdahl or Bradley
“call-me-Chelsea” Manning, it is evident that you’ve planned to fight your
battles exclusively in the movies. The officer corps, or the part of it that’s
worth the name, is ours. Although the left probably has a certain pool of
minority ex-soldiers to draw on, I doubt they have a single general officer
that still has his original issue genitalia. I’ll take a Texan and a Tar Heel
against a metrosexual and a social justice warrior any day -- while admitting
that the latter might conduct a far more colorful parade. Much would depend on
how the military happened to fragment, but even if one side or the other got
the lion’s share of it there simply aren’t enough soldiers in the armed forces
to garrison the entire country. More troops would have to be raised, equipped,
and trained.
The right would probably win a real war, for all the reasons I
have sketched above. I suspect it wouldn’t take the three years to decide the
issue that it took in Spain, but predicting a short war has usually proven to
be a fool’s occupation. Long or short, tens of millions of people would likely
starve to death before war and reconstruction were over -- far more than would
die in actual fighting. Having seen a person starve to death, it is not a fate
I’d wish on friends and family members -- or even on my enemies. It might be,
after all the legal shenanigans are done, the necessary cost of keeping western
society alive -- but it would no heroic action movie. Utopian ideologies die
hard. War is hell.
