• 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.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      28 days ago

      That’s my impression as well. People tend to think of two organized armies fighting each other, but really it would just be mass civil unrest and social collapse.

  • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    28 days ago

    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.

  • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    28 days ago

    Americans have no idea how states or militarys or civil wars actually work.

    The USA has the most well-funded army in the world. Any real attempt at civil disturbance would be immediately put down by the army. The military would need a significant internal split for civil war to ever be on the table. Even if, somehow, a significant portion of the army was opposed to the current government, nothing would happen because it wouldn’t benefit any capitalists at all to start a civil war.

    The only significant divide in the American bourgeoisie is between democrat-flavoured tech giants and republican-flavoured jetski dealerships, and they certainly can’t be bothered to make a civil war happen

  • HorseRabbit@lemmy.sdf.org
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    28 days ago

    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”.

  • FishLake
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    28 days ago

    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.

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    28 days ago

    I’ve been hearing libs (and chuds too) say this for nearly a decade now and I’m sick of it. Trump doesn’t control the military, if he tried to go rogue he’d just get arrested. Or just ignored. How many of the corporate interests that make up much of the ruling class today would benefit from a civil war? They’ve got a fairly sweet deal going on. I could see the Fed gov fall apart domestically, lose it’s ability to respond to disasters, and see state govs also abandon that responsibility, slowly leading to warlordism breaking out, but that’s really got very little to do with Donald Trump.