People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image).
Highly unlikely this is what the civil war would be like. It’s not a state v state thing necessarily although that might be a small part of it. In the first civil war, the south unified and its people largely supported the war, except their slaves. It’s unlikely something like that will happen again. It’s not impossible but unlikely.
What is much more likely is rural v city. Even in red states, cities are blue and will often vote for blue policies. Rural areas are where things get dicey. They’ve been largely left behind by the surge in industry and general expansion of the capitalist economy we currently have (they’ve had a lot of businesses (including grocery stores) close because more people are leaving, and their rural towns are frequently having their hospitals close leaving large swaths of areas where the nearest hospital is an hour away). As such, they’ve got a grudge against the cities. What’s likely to happen is rural counties and their local governments trying to cut off their food supply, starving the cities to win the battle. There’s tons more possibilities, but this one I think is the one that’s got the highest likelihood.
Another possibility that is scary, but is highly dependent on the party of the people in power, is the government using their power to actually strike the cities, like in Syria where Assad bombed and used chemical weapons on his own people. Syria is actually a pretty good example of what more modern civil wars are like, or can be like. Governments v rebels and militias, and cities v rural (although there’s much less rural land in Syria).
If you’re interested, the podcast It Could Happen Here has a great first season where they go over possible disasters including a civil war and a pandemic (it was actually made in 2019 so before covid). It’s really helpful and can teach a lot, especially for an outsider from across the pond. It also does a lot better job giving an explanation and actual sources.
Hope this helps since it didn’t seem like you were getting a real answer.
I had to stop listening to ICHH it gave me way too much anxiety and was just too stressed back when i listened in 2020. I’ve since taken up to instead listen to BTB and cool people who did cool stuff off the same network. Monsters that are usually dead and people who kick ass make me feel better.
Another thing the world ought to know is that the folks who are identified by “red” and “right” in America are in the minority.
Significantly so.
However our voting system uses geography / land as a modifier so while there are less of them they occupy a larger land mass and have an outsized vote strength because of that.
When total votes in a state can be split 45-55 but the delegates go 90-10 there is a problem
Another fun thing about that is that most folks who identify “red” or “right” actually aren’t paying enough attention to know that. Go ask them, they think people like them make up 70% or more of the country. If they do try to activate their little civil war they are going to find themselves very quickly surrounded by folks who do not like them at all, as their expected 200-million strong army ends up actually only being 1.5 million people spread out over 30,000+ square miles. Watching the realization dawn on them might actually even be fun if it weren’t a herald of Troubles for America.
The geographical separation of slave states by an actual border allowed the first Civil War to take place on a stage perfectly suited for traditional warfare. North/South division and the formal joining of the Confederacy by state governments kept it all straightforward. Point South and tell the generals “Go.”
“Fuck yeah, secession!” Says the Texan from the comfort of their lounge chair, beer in hand.
These people are too comfortable to ever be willing to die for their stupid ideals. All it took was one MAGA idiot to get blasted on Jan 6th and then they all scattered like roaches. As soon as their lives were on the line, it was no longer a matter of grave importance. They all firmly believed that democracy was at stake, but were unwilling to fight for it to the death because they somehow must have known that it was bullshit, somewhere in the back of their pea-sized brains, they knew.
By the time Texas starts asking people to show up to mustering fields, rifle in hand, the facade will fall apart. Biden doesn’t need to do anything. This sideshow of bluster and saber-rattling will fall apart on it’s own.
And the economic powerhouses of the state (Dallas, Houston, Austin) all lean democratic. This will just make skilled, educated people leave the state and accelerate the brain drain that’s been happening since the 40s.
You’re thinking first civil war. This civil war is going to be about bombing and terror. And it will be MAGA idiots bombing govt facilities. But they’ll start first with places like gay bars and libraries.
THEN the federal govt will get involved and it will devolve into a shit show from there.
The federal government is already involved. The FBI has been a thing for decades. Are we really going to compare the pathetic levels we have now to the 1950s with the KKK?
Here is the truth to any wannabe terrorist: none of you have gotten smarter but the federal government has. You are one guy, the government is a whole mess of guys spending decades studying ways to stop you. No company has any incentive to help you and has a big incentive to report you. Everyone is tracked now, every transaction recorded, every internet post, heck our very movements.
Random acts are going to happen and it is awful but any kinda coordinated resistance will fail.
Plus you know we are all fat now. Successful resistance movements are led by poor people who can live off the land. That Bundy Ranch ordering takeout thing really illustrated it well. Who do you know in your life that is capable of living in the woods as a revolutionary? Do you really see someone like Hannity or Ted Cruz sitting in a cave somewhere to lead his forces?
It’s not a totally unreasonable impression, but no, this will not turn into a second civil war. The Guard units of each state can be called up for federal duty. The National Guard is part of the US Department of Defense and thus ultimately answers to the DoD and the US president as commander in chief. The US military has multiple components, including regular services (eg the full time Army), reserve components (eg US Army Reserve) and National Guard components. The latter two are part-time military with one weekend per month training duty plus an annual training. Guards members and Reservists hold regular full time jobs.
The Guard units are deployable by the governors of their respective states, and so can be used in emergency situations like natural disasters. They have also been deployed against what have been perceived as riots that threaten lives and properties of the individual states.
However, they are subject to activation by order of the US president and they fall under the national command authority. Guard personnel take the same oath to the constitution as other military personnel, and cannot legally refuse federal activation. Guards personnel would be subject to courts martial and face potentially extreme penalties including being discharged from service under criminal conditions, being stripped of rank and benefits, and jail time in federal prison. This would be what we call a career limiting rule.
So, if push comes to shove, Biden can activate the NG and order them to stand down or to implement policies to maintain order. Thinking the NG units and in particular their commanders would disobey a presidential order because they just love their state governor and hate the president so much is getting into Turner Diaries levels of right wing apocalyptic fantasy.
The forming of the Confederacy wasn’t “legal” either.
We can handwave away concerns about mounting threats of violence by citing regulation and law, but none of that actually addresses the underlying issue that if these people want to start shit, they will find an avenue.
And let’s also not sit here, in 2024, and assume the institutions, norms, checks, and intended safeguards in our system will always work when they need to. We’ve seen far, far too many breakdowns and failures in our system over the last decade to believe otherwise.
That’s what frustrates me so much about the framing of the situation we’re in right now: most people - and the vast majority of major media organizations - are fully intent on presenting this as “normal”, but it’s very fucking clearly not. It’s assumed by so many that the rules will simply be followed… and then they turn around and cover Trump, whose whole bit is to not follow the rules because he doesn’t feel like it and wants to stay in power forever. It’s like being unconcerned about standing 3 feet away from an uncaged, unleashed siberian tiger because someone once told you at one point that it had been “trained”.
You have to understand that the US military today is a very different organization than it was in the 1860s. I know - I served and majored in military history for my first undergraduate degree, and studied the civil war in particular. I also come from a military family with a father, grandfather, and uncle who served as officers until retirement age.
Far right domestic terrorism is a real and developing threat coming from both former military personnel and from civilians. The election of a far right government that shreds the constitution is also a major threat to American democracy. But if the shit does come down, it’s not going to be because some Guardsmen decide that they’d follow DeSantis over Biden.
Military justice is no joke. Falling on the wrong side of it can end people. The military is also very integrated and has political as well as ethnic diversity. I’m not saying you couldn’t find an Army colonel who wouldn’t want to engage in an armed rebellion, but the country today is very, very different than it was mid-19th century, and so is the military.
Please do note that I do see the rise of American fascism as a real threat. It’s just not going to manifest because state Guard orgs decide to disobey orders.
Since you studied the Civil War, I got a book from my grandfather before he passed, Don’t Know Much about The Civil War, by Kenneth C. Davis, and was wondering if you’ve read of heard of this book and if it would be a good resource or not to read about the Civil War? Or if you can recommend another book or author that is great for learning about the Civil War, I’d appreciate any helpful insights as I’m curious to learn more about the Civil War, thank you.
Thank you for sharing this insight! It’s frustrating to hear everyone everywhere speculate about how easily the active military would turn, not considering…well, everything you wrote.
Yeah, ex-military of course is part of the brainwashed; nowhere else in the civilian world (outside of mercenary work) is warfare conducting knowledge of direct use.
Add that our Government has not always done even the bare minimum for our vets, and you got a recipe for the radicalization of the “disenfranchised warriors” (quotation because I don’t consider oathbreakers worthy of any title).
They’re gonna fall and listen to the honeyed words of Fascism in a different, harder way than your average civilian. That’s a call to something they amongst the rest of their group are genuinely and tangibly valuable for–until they aren’t.
Please do note that I do see the rise of American fascism as a real threat. It’s just not going to manifest because state Guard orgs decide to disobey orders.
Same, and I do still worry for the death tolls. That “theirs” (the civilians, who can be said to not know better) would be orders of magnitude higher than any on the military’s side doesn’t mean I’d like to see deaths on either side.
I hope you are right. I am sure there are some Guardsmen who see themselves as Texas soldiers over US, and I am concerned that the number is growing. After all, someone voted in these state politicians who are laying deadly traps intending to kill brown people.
Robert E Lee famously didn’t want to fight the North but didn’t think of himself as a traitor for doing so, because his loyalty was to his state first, to the US second. And that was a common mindset at the time.
I think it’s possible that there will be resentment, but those with rank would be risking everything for zero gain. It would be determined by the people who wear the birds and the stars, and although there have certainly been high ranking officers who have engaged in conduct we might consider treasonous, it’s simply not going to be a common enough occurrence.
A Handmaid’s Tale scenario, where the US goes down the path of a Christian theocracy, is a possibility that concerns me,
it’s simply not going to be a common enough occurrence.
Again, I hope so. I do not have strong confidence in this statement.
If you look across the entire US political spectrum and distribution of different beliefs, you are going to find very similar distribution within the military, if not edging slightly more right/Republican compared to the general US population. It takes one high-ish ranking officer engaging in rebellion for any like-minded lower ranking person to see that as permission and justification to do the same.
You also have to factor in the fact that the military today is not a bunch of guys with rifles. It is carrier battle groups, fighter jets, sophisticated artillery systems, and other platforms that require massive supply chains to deploy and maintain. That’s just what modern warfare is. US aircraft carriers alone are crewed by 5000+ people.
Raytheon, Northrop, and Lockheed are not going to side with Ohio against the US government. The question is about civil war, not about a single military unit going rogue until the members are arrested or killed. Keeping planes in the air and tanks running requires a lot more than Ohio can do. The Feds spend about a trillion dollars per year on the military, and some Confederate missile battery is going to be in trouble once they run low on things to shoot and when their vehicles start to break down.
I’m not a fan of the military industrial complex, to say the least, but it’s an absolutely necessary part of warfare today.
For sure. Any rebellious splinter faction would be low tech guerillas for a while. Now would they eventually open up to weapons from Russia or China? Interesting. I am sure Putin would jump on the opportunity. I think Xi would be a little more sensible and not openly cross the US.
The difficulty with that scenario is that the US is bound by two oceans and has a navy more powerful in some estimates than the rest of the navies in the world combined. Ukraine can be supplied because they’re contiguous with Western Europe. North Korea could be supplied by China, as could Vietnam. To supply the neo-confederates, Russia or China would have to cross an ocean and get past the US Navy, as well as the navies of other allied countries. Then they’d have to bring in the systems via either Mexico or Canada, both of which would be allied with the US.
I think you could imagine a scenario where they smuggle in small arms, but not artillery or other modern weapons systems.
A lot of you all must be too young to remember. This isn’t a new thing for Texas to do. They threatened to secede at least once (maybe twice) while Obama was president. Once it was straight out of the North Korean playbook, claiming a training exercise the military was conducting was a cover for a military invasion of Texas.
The Dollop did a podcast on Jade Helm as it was happening. Definitely recommend listening to that one if you like American history podcasts. It’s episode 100 I believe
And thats why I’m not worried about them doing anything other than what they’re already doing. They know they would be fucked if they leave.
And if they do? Well then we deal with it when that time comes. Hopefully a bunch of left leaning people leave, including my brother and his wife, and a bunch of MAGAts can go there and talk about how much they love America while also leaving it.
The older I get the more I eyeroll at the political posturing. It’s definitely worse than when I was younger, but also it’s all happened before. It’s just loud people trying to be loud to keep us all afraid and obediently going to work, then every 4 years it gets loud again so we vote for who they want us to.
Real convenient the border is such a huge issue a few months before the election.
Of course we still have to take it seriously, the minute we let our guard down they start implementing stuff, look at roe v wade, but even then they didn’t know what to do after that. It’s all about staying in power for them
I get what you’re saying, but at some point we have to admit that there really aren’t any adults at the table. A direct example is the governments covid response and another more recent is the emergence of the so-called freedom caucus. Basically I subscribe to the depressing notion that all these fuck head fascists that came before have sewn their seeds and now there is an alarmingly large amount of the populace who have drank the koolaid, made from those seeds, and even worse is a lot of the original sewers (heh), have lost the thread and are drinking their own koolaid…
Texas has made an issue over their independence and God-given right to be Texas, in defense of their the right to own chattel slavery since their first secession. From Mexico. In 1836.
Texas reconfirmed their desire to die on the hill of their divine right to own people, by seceding from the US in 1861.
After the civil war, Texas was a haven for the Confederates - and their ideology has been fomenting ever since
They’ve been talking of secession openly since at least the 1990s.
I think this is the first time since the civil war that other states have involved their national guards in support of a hotbed issue that could lead to a secession.
Most Americans aren’t interested or even capable of fighting in a civil war. When you live paycheck-to-paycheck, you’re not going to abandon your family to fight on the front lines.
And a huge percentage of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Bingo. If Texas tried to leave, a HUGE chunk of the population would revolt against the State of Texas. Many more would just leave. Very little good would remain.
You’re wrong though. The general public is more likely to engage in civil unrest when they’re struggling. The reality though is that while many Americans might be living paycheck to paycheck, they’re not poor and not struggling. They are just bad at managing their finances and they have a lot to lose.
If you have more to lose than to gain, you won’t participate in a civil war. But when you’re a slave working in a cotton field, you have nothing to lose, only something to gain.
The idea that your average American is so poor is just laughable.
over half a million live on the streets. flat out homeless. and then, the working poor, which you are if you live paycheck to paycheck. also, if you can’t live unless you work, you’re the working class.
Either you’re being purposefully deceitful, or you have a horrible understanding of macroeconomics. But please, let’s just continue to ignore the elephants named record-inflation, rent records and housing crisis in the room.
There is a term for this called the “Valley of revolt” basically a people need enough empowerment to revolt but not enough to feel heard.
Also it’s not necessarily just “bad with finances” it’s that our expected standard of living doesn’t match our actual standard of living. Rising cost and stagnant wages and all that.
At current, this is all posturing. If Biden does engage the military to stop them. Perhaps lock up the governors for treason, maybe it could escalate somewhat. If something did happen that was in the line of being more serious, it wouldn’t be a long incursion as long as the military obeyed the commander in chief. The national guard is absolutely no match for even a small slice of the might of the US military.
If something does happen, hopefully they’ll shut it down quickly and bloodlessly, maybe finally gather enough strength to enable some Germany type of anti-fascism laws.
We need to fix gerrymandering, we need to fix people screwing with elections. We need to put some strong protections against the propaganda and opinion pieces flowing out of all the news outlets. We need to force free non-political basic education to the entire f****** country so people can make some informed decisions about s***.
I’m tired of everybody looking at politics like it’s a f****** football game.
And if Trump gets in again? All the people not crazy going to along with him, or will he be to deploying the army? At what point does the apparatus of state start to split as people within it don’t all go with crazy orders?
If I was Putin, or CCP, helping the crazies is the best money spent.
Us, never. Just like with China you can’t win a land war over here, and a home attack has a greater risk of uniting is against a common enemy.
Taiwan possibly. Though I don’t think so. Taiwan is much more useful as a political chess piece that China can beat their chests about. They can invoke the island and be offended about support for it whenever they need leverage right now.
Not to mention it isn’t just the US alone that needs Taiwan and movement there risks a global response.
We need to put some strong protections against the propaganda and opinion pieces flowing out of all the news outlets.
Something tells me this one is a non-starter, as any new laws will slam up against the Constitution, over and over again.
Having said that, I would love to at least seen a real-time label, in a large font size, on any monitor/tv that specifies that what’s being shown is an opinion piece, and not a factual article/show.
If we go into a civil war, the Constitution’s going to slam up against a lot of changes.
GOP is ignoring the shit out of the Constitution already why should it protect them? They already tried to dismantle the executive branch and turn the presidency into a dictatorship. Now they’re going after the judicial branch. Nah, they’re going to game the Constitution until the US is forced to change it. It’s either going to happen slowly over time, or quickly after a pretty substantial bloodbath.
We can’t just sit here and go oh look It’s Hitler incarnate, but you know first amendment, oh damn, they ignored some laws and found some loopholes I guess we had just better conform to oppression by the minority. We better all get some swastikas.
This country isn’t going to go quietly into dictatorship for fear of failing to make everyone happy. The Democrats are weak because they try to follow the rules, They try to give breaks to the people that f*** them over because they don’t want to hurt the other people, but like everything else there’s a line. When Americans are shooting each other over propaganda, The propaganda’s going to have to f****** go.
Something tells me this one is a non-starter, as any new laws will slam up against the Constitution, over and over again.
The first amendment states that congress shall not abridge freedom of the press. In reality it needs to be strengthened because speech and press isn’t free anymore, it’s overwhelmingly controlled by interest with huge amounts of economic power. The reason for freedom fo speech and press is that dissenting ideas and thoughts are heard in order to have accountability. Which the current interpretation is doing the opposite of.
For example you could pass laws that any journalist has the right to voice his own opinion and not be fired or discriminated against by his employer (as long as he doesn’t discriminate himself or uses hate speech). That would not abridge the freedom of the press. Basically give the journalists more freedom from their owners.
Or you could make a law that forces owners to sell their media empires into trusts that are democratically controlled by the journalists / workers, and finance it through a bank. This would not abridge the freedom of the press (which is not the same as the owner).
Of course this is unthinkable and the current supreme court would never allow it. But we shouldn’t accept the degenerate view that freedom of the press is the same as turning speech and news into a commodity that is owned by the elite. And especially in a plutocracy that basically is state owned media.
You could appoint a 100 young people as new supreme court judges and then pass these modern laws and election reform also limiting the future excesses of the supreme court. There isn’t really anything stopping the Democrats from doing that.
Can we just have a normal, boring year for once, please? I’m so tired…
I’m right there with you.
But at least you can think of this to console you: You’re not actually fighting in a world/civil war, down in some troops trench somewhere, reading this (at least that’s my hope for you).
Other generations have had to go through major wars, but so far we’ve been dodging that bullet, for the most part.
Seems to be a distinct possibility. Posturing prior to the election, rattling sabers, they’re spoiling for a full-on shootin’ war contingent on losing the election, in my opinion.
edit: I dare say, it might even be strategically advantageous for them to intentionally try lose, claim it was rigged, and use that to go live with the 4th riech.
My take on it is that the Republicans will do their best to drag this out until the election. No compromising or middle ground. Just make it out to be the crazy Democrats fault. This stuff gets to be very predictable after all these years.
Of course, they will drag it out until the elections. It is only being done because of the elections. It is all a performance to rally their base and get them to vote. Too many Republicans are tired of, or at least too embarrassed by, Trump and the other crazy fuckers, like the Freedom Caucus. While nothing is great, nothing is also so bad that they can really shit on Biden, at least not enough to rally around. Even his support of Israel isn’t something they can use against him since they are 120% pro Israel too. They also seriously need a smoke screen for the shit show that is the impending government shut down.
It’s all for show, a way to get the very poor but very racist core to take time off of their jobs to go vote for a states right to murder brown children while at the same time diverting attention from the fact that the reason that those poor racists aren’t getting their social security and other government support is due to the Republicans massive incompetence.
It’s not even a new civil war. The last civil war only ended technically. In reality it went cold and has still been being waged all this time. It turned from a war of the rural South against the industrialised north. To a war on the industrialized from the rural.
No this is all Republican division. It’s their only playbook to rally their base. The take home message for everyone is VOTE, VOTE, VOTE. Before the election started up we had a nice quiet 2-1/2 years. This kind of shit only appeals to those that love the chaos that Trump will bring back.
It’s very tiresome. This also feels a lot more agro than interrogating a president about getting a BJ.
Why are your lunatics so energetic, crazy and numerous? They seem to be getting worse. Some BJ obsessions in the 90s. Then tea parties in the 00s. Now it’s full-blown inssurection with Texas wanting to secede.
Now that all the crazies have joined their “god army” and trundled down to the border would it be a good time to nuke them? Just wipe out all the lunatics in one go. Problem solved.
Why are your lunatics so energetic, crazy and numerous?
Simple, Russian and Chinese bots on social media designed to foment division, anger, and the destruction of western democracy. It’s the exact same thing that led to Brexit and the election of Trump. And it will get worse until we get a handle on blocking bad actors on social media.
Those states are going to be in a rude awakening when they realize they are broke because the blue states are by far the largest contributors to federal funding. When they cut that off, the welfare state will come crawling back quickly.
The welfare states regularly turn down federal funding because they do not care about the lower income portions of their state. Alabama will just have fewer people able to feed their selves.
It all seems quite a bit overblown to me. There’s legal precedent for the President to take over a state’s national guard and use federal troops to enforce a court order (see Brown v Board of Education):
“In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas Army National Guard to block the entry of nine black students, later known as the “Little Rock Nine”, after the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by asserting federal control over the Arkansas National Guard and deploying troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell to ensure the black students could safely register for and attend classes. […]” (Source: en.wikipedia.org/…/Brown_v._Board_of_Education)
The current wording of the Insurrection Act provision (which has been amended a few times since initial adoption), according to Wikipedia:
<span style="color:#323232;">"Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion."
</span>
Just my $.02 but I’d guess either the feds back down or Texas does. Hopefully nobody gets trigger happy.
The aftermath of racial desegregation court victories are some of the most interesting things in recent US history. A law would be struck down and sort of left like that… and people would take it upon themselves to organize and challenge the new law, often in the face of violent opposition. Freedom Riders taking busses down to the south to challenge desegregation of public transit being met with mobs and put in jail.
The reference to Little Rock Nine suddenly made me realize that Forest Gump was 38 at the time of Forest Gump.
I’m 38 now. As tired as I am of Hollywood reimagining films from the nineties, I would appreciate a Forest Gump born in the 80s. The whole concept could really be repeated every 30 years or so.
I don’t think the conservatives are sufficiently unified to form a single opposition army. The problem with basing your appeals on hating “outsiders” is that you end up with a lot of internal hatred too. There’s also a strong undercurrent of “no one can tell me what to do” that makes central control unlikely.
What seems more likely are terrorist incidents, carried out be individuals and small groups, without any overall communication or strategy. We’re already seeing some of that. The lack of coordination won’t prevent it from happeing, but will prevent it from achieving anything.
I don’t think there are very many people within the MAGA movement who honestly want to resort to violence, whatever they tell themselves. The ones who are actually willing are the ones who wanted to hurt someone anyway. Politics provides them with an excuse, not a motivation.
I think we’re going to have a nasty time for a while, but I don’t think a right-wing takeover by violence has any chance of happening. I’m much more worried about a political takeover that then turns into an authoritarian coup. The left-wing has a much better chance of organizing as a whole, but I don’t think there are that many people ready to fight from that side either, but that could change as conditions get worse.
The right has been used, and steadily intensifying stochastic terrorism for a while now. You’re right, it’s not a strategy for a military takeover of the US. It’s just one step in the political takeover.
At the same time, if we can get the 14th figured out the “pledging troops in opposition to the federal government” seems like the things insurrectionists do.
Its a meaningful and new escalation. This dismissive attitude is exactly why there will be a war. These governors should be removed and charged with sedition.
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