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Notes -
Has the shot already been fired?
There seems to be an uptick in worst case scenario chatter, people imagining scenarios spiraling out of control until political violence increases up to the level of civil war.
Ignore whether any of these are likely. Assume a world where the US does descend into some sort of organized violence, the low end somewhere along the lines of the Balkans and the high end a slug-out like the Civil War.
When historians (and just assume historians exist, even if they're AI) look back will they identify something that's already happened as one of the primary inciting incidents? I don't think we've had a Fort Sumter but is John Brown's body already marching?
Alternatively - and again only under the pure assumption that it happens, no implication meant as to the probability - if you think it hasn't happened yet, roughly how long until it does?
The American government apparatus has to actually be broken, not merely wounded but smashed. No rich country with a strong government has had a civil war without extraordinary pressure from outside. Rich countries are stable because the government is so strong compared to anyone else, power is uneven and imbalanced. They have huge security forces and loyal armies. Military coup, yes! Civil war, no! Whereas Nigeria is poor and the central government is very weak, easy to have civil wars there since the country is balanced between different power groups.
Germany at the end of WW1 - mass famine, megadeaths on the front, kaiser has given up, traditional authorities greatly delegitimized. Then you get a brief civil war as the freikorps show up and poleaxe communists. It was basically still an unbalanced country but under extreme stress the communists came out and got demolished by the army. In Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution saw militias fighting in the streets with tanks and heavy weapons but it still wasn't a civil war as the govt retained control. In Venezuela there's massive economic problems but the govt is unbroken, no major alternate power bases.
Yugoslavia is a special case where it's this anomalous composite of various nations who hate eachother intensely, propped up by Tito, a Great Man and the Cold War economics of being a 'neutral' power in Europe, courted by both sides. Yugoslavia was a balanced country with separate power bases. The Balkans were proper wars with armies, not low-level stuff like Northern Ireland.
America is imbalanced, there are no major power bases outside the central government. The state national guard aren't real armies and states don't truly hate eachother. Hundreds of millions of privately owned guns but no organization makes the guns totally irrelevant, they could not matter less. Owning guns didn't prevent machinegun bans or Patriot Act or mass surveillance or anything else. On ethnic lines, blacks are no good at fighting, they're no match for whites in numbers or organization. Hispanics aren't particularly resentful or good at fighting either. Plus there's an extra stabilizing factor of the nuclear forces, the serious players aren't going to start fighting with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, they'll choose restraint and stability. America is also very very rich and that's another stabilizing factor.
1990s Russia - economic depression, illegitimate govt, dubious elections, very unpopular president gets into a power struggle with parliament, president shells parliament into submission, no civil war. Unbalanced country, army and security forces are all united. It's very hard to break the power of a strong, rich government. Yes, Russia in the 1990s was rich. Rich is in an absolute sense of being industrialized, urban, there are televisions and electrification... not a relative sense.
So if a civil war were to happen in America, China needs to suplex the US in the Pacific, smash national myths about American exceptionalism. There needs to be an economic depression, maybe even a famine (Yellowstone going up?) There needs to be a massive, unprecedented economic crisis and delegitimization of old authorities. Somehow the central government needs to be split up or fall into different camps.
Or more likely, some black swan arrives and changes all the rules. I just don't see a civil war happening in the US.
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