America at a Crossroads: Is Another Civil War Possible?

Will America’s Extreme Ideologies and Rhetoric Lead to a Civil War?

By Joseph Sullivan, Senior Advisor, The Lindsey Group and Andrew Blinkinsop, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

What America’s Next Civil War Could Look Like

By Joseph Sullivan – Senior Advisor, The Lindsey Group

Imagine if “oil vigilantes” surround Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California after tracing the hack that destroyed pipeline infrastructure, exchanging gunfire with Federal agents backed by the California National Guard. On social media, the Republican Governor of North Dakota says that the President, a Democrat, intends to choke off federal funding for the state if its militias continue.

Or if IRS agents with support from the FBI lay siege to a self-declared “sovereign city” in New Hampshire, replete with veterans and firearms. The Governor, who created the incentives for crypto activity that lured many “sovereign citizens” to his state, has declined to authorize using the National Guard, so the President invokes the Insurrection Act. 

While neither of these two scenarios are imaginary, they illustrate very real risks of conflicts that could result in America’s next civil war. Each situation illustrates how emerging technologies and partisan ideologies can collide and lead to future armed conflict in the United States. 

Ideologies and Sympathetic State Politicians

Given the rhetoric of the environmental movement, it would be surprising if climate action does not turn into violence in the 21st -century United States. Climate organizations with footprints in the U.S. have names like “Extinction Rebellion,” yet the United States government seems unlikely to stop fossil fuel production. If your true belief is that fossil fuel production will cause human extinction, then the moral case for violent action to stop it will look overwhelming.

Another trend worth monitoring is the nascent anti-state movement that has accompanied the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The culminating concept behind this set of ideas is the “network state” that contrasts with the territorial state that we recognize as a country. Many people within this movement possess both technical expertise and a genuine belief that governments based in physical territory, like the U.S. government, are something of an atavism. It does not take much imagination to see how conflicts with federal law enforcement over taxation could erupt.

If We Can’t Imagine It, We Can’t Prevent It

Neither North Dakota’s oil vigilantes nor New Hampshire’s sovereign citizens appear in any films about America’s next civil war. Counterintuitively, that’s why groups like them would likely appear in one if it did happen. An official who oversaw parts of the financial system in the leadup to the 2008 economic crisis said that every financial crisis has its roots in the inability to imagine how a blow-up like it could transpire. If regulators could have imagined the crisis, he reasoned, they could–and would–have prevented it from happening. It’s a lesson worth considering as America wonders whether it could experience an armed civil conflict. If it happens, it will likely begin in a way that eludes the popular imagination of how a civil war would start in America.

Ideologies Won’t Lead to an American Civil War

By Andrew Blinkinsop – Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

A civil war in the United States is extremely unlikely and, if it did emerge, would not look like Mr. Sullivan’s fever dream of environmental vigilantes and libertarian crypto rebels. The reality is the U.S., despite a coarsening of political discourse and hand-wringing about the end of democracy, possesses structural advantages that inhibit the emergence of the kind of violence that would qualify as a “civil war.” And if it did come to pass, more salient trends in American society would define its contours, not bespoke ideologies like radical environmentalism and cryptocurrency fantasy.

Political scientists generally define civil wars as violent political conflicts between two or more organized groups within a country that result in more than 1,000 battle deaths per year. That’s a scale of political violence that requires serious organization on the part of would-be rebels or revolutionaries.

The U.S. Has Survived Past Political Upheavals 

History is not always a guide to the future, but it’s all we have for making predictions. History shows us that for wealthy democracies such as the U.S., the risk of civil war is negligible. Civil wars need soldiers, which means they need a pool of desperate and frustrated young men. The crisis of alienation afflicting American society has produced stochastic terrorism in the form of mass shooters, but not organized groups committed to violent rebellion.

The U.S. has seen periods of intense political upheaval and political violence, but only once has it fallen into a civil war. The 1960s and 1970s saw high-profile assassinations of political leaders, violent action by revolutionaries of The Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Panthers, and riots in major cities during the “long, hot summer” of 1967. Yet we don’t refer to this period of U.S. history as a civil war. While intense, the scale of violence didn’t meet the threshold for that designation.

Many factors in U.S. politics today, from deep polarization to the wide availability of guns, herald a potential return to the political violence of the 60s and 70s. With the recent assassination attempt of presidential candidate Donald Trump, we may be in the early stages of such a resurgence. However, then as now, the U.S. is an extremely wealthy country without the structural foundations for civil war.

The Necessary Ingredients for a U.S. Civil War

Mr. Sullivan points to radical environmentalism and anti-state cryptocurrency enthusiasm as ideologies that could inspire a civil war. But ideology alone is insufficient. Nor are these ideologies new. So-called “ecoterrorism” was more prevalent in the 1980s than today; anti-state ideologues have tussled with the FBI from Waco in 1993 to the Bundy Standoff in 2014.

It’s not the radicalism of an ideology that determines the likelihood of war; it’s the ability of the ideology to create organized groups committed to and prepared for sustained violent action. The only type of group in the U.S. today that could conceivably meet that bar is the right-wing militia movement. Even then, a major exogenous shock would be needed to turn militias into forces capable of carrying out large-scale organized violence.

Rhetoric Is Making the Unfathomable a Possibility

By Joseph Sullivan – Senior Advisor, The Lindsey Group

History has inserted itself into the debate between myself and Mr. Blinkinsop. On July 13, 2024, two weeks after I submitted my draft for this debate, a bullet fired by a twenty-year-old’s rifle came within inches of assassinating former President Trump. If anything, this has raised the specter of civil war. 

A Civil War Unlike the Past

Mr. Blinkinsop and I agree that if civil war breaks out in the United States, it will not look or feel like the type of civil war seen in history textbooks where warring militaries divide territory and partition a country under new flags.

However, Mr. Blinkinsop’s definition of civil war is an armed conflict that causes 1,000 or more battle deaths per year. The United States had around 25,000 homicides in 2022. Would it be hard to imagine President Trump’s assassination causing a rise in homicides of 4 percent or more, creating 1,000 additional homicides over the level of 2022 (the last year with the relevant data from the CDC)? Not at all.

Homicides increased during the pandemic by 5,500 (over 20 percent) from 2019 to 2020, and by 1,500 (6 percent) from 2020 to 2021. If Trump had been assassinated, might it have raised political tensions and frayed the social fabric as much as the pandemic and associated lockdowns, causing a similar rise in murders? The answer seems far more likely to be yes.

Would these deaths qualify as the “battle” deaths that constitute a civil war? Interpretations would vary. But it would be hard to dismiss an answer of “no” due only to the absence of a battlefield that looks like Syria in 2014 or Yugoslavia in 1991.

A Series of Missteps with Serious Consequences

The novelty of the attempted Trump assassination may, however, demand that political scientists introduce a new concept for civil war that includes the origins of the violence. Consider that a series of avoidable errors on the part of the Biden Administration’s Secret Service, including denying the Trump campaign’s requests for additional protection, might have resulted in the death of the President’s main political opponent, after a litany of political and legal attempts to remove Trump from the race. A generous interpretation would be that Biden’s party mismanaged the government’s resources, but more radical interpretations would accuse Biden directly, claiming he caused the assassination of the candidate poised to defeat him at the polls, triggering large-scale violence.

On this, Mr. Blinkinsop and I disagree: the July 13th assassination attempt underscores the likelihood that armed violence comes from the Left, which increasingly uses apocalyptic language to characterize its political opponents. The Biden campaign paused ads to this effect after July 13th, in apparent recognition that its attempts to paint Trump as an enemy of democracy contributed to the climate that produced the assassination attempt.

Unless the apocalyptic rhetoric stops, the apocalyptic scenario of a civil war, or something like it, will continue to be as fathomable in the United States as it was on July 13th.

Organized Political Violence Is a Necessary Ingredient for Civil War

By Andrew Blinkinsop – Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Mr. Sullivan highlights the recent attempted assassination of former President Trump as evidence for two main assertions: that the social landscape of contemporary America is fraying, brittle, and prone to explosions of political violence, and that it is the political left with its “apocalyptic rhetoric” that is the prime culprit in these trends.

On the first point we agree, though we disagree about how to classify the violence. On the second point, we disagree.

Investigations are ongoing, but thus far the evidence does not suggest that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the teenager who attempted to assassinate Trump, was motivated by left-wing ideas. His phone revealed searches for both Trump and Biden rallies, and he left behind no obvious political justification for his act.

Rather than an example of dangerous ideological currents on the Left, the attempted Trump assassination exemplifies a different pattern: stochastic, or “lone wolf” terrorism. Crooks was not participating in organized political violence, he was acting alone and without a discernible ideological motive.

Politically Motivated Deaths in the U.S. Are Uncommon

Stochastic terrorism and wider violence are a problem. Compared to other high-income countries, the U.S. is a more violent country, with seven times the homicide rate and 25 times the gun homicide rate.

But murder is not civil war. Mr. Sullivan’s imagined hypothetical, in which the homicide rate jumps by over 1,000 deaths after a successful assassination, would also not constitute civil war. Crime rates are complex outcomes, and pinning down a specific cause is no easy task. Mr. Sullivan’s hypothetical could be cast as civil war only if the deaths could be traced to organized political violence.

Such politically motivated deaths remain very rare. In 2020, the year of the largest street protests in U.S. history, 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest. The infamous Unite the Right rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville in 2017 resulted in one death. The assault on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was linked to several deaths. The Antifa-Proud Boys street battles in Portland and other cities have resulted in at most a few deaths. These numbers are not anywhere near the 1,000-per-year threshold.

Both Sides Are Guilty of Extreme Rhetoric

I share Mr. Sullivan’s worry about increasing political violence in the U.S., and the apocalyptic rhetoric that could fuel it. Elected Democrats don’t even seem to believe their own insistence that Trump is a “threat to democracy” who wants to become a dictator. Rising stars like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer are keeping their powder dry for 2028, clearly expecting democracy to survive until then.

However, apocalypticism is by no means confined to Democrats. Trump regularly claims that if he loses in 2024, we “won’t have a country anymore.” Blaming the July 13th assassination attempt on the Left, which both Mr. Sullivan and other Republicans have indulged in, further contributes to apocalypticism rather than lowering the temperature.

But again, extreme rhetoric or radical ideologies do not themselves produce civil war. The reality is that the U.S. is too wealthy, too comfortable, and too socially alienated to produce committed civil warriors. 

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Joseph Sullivan

Senior Advisor at The Lindsey Group

Joseph W. Sullivan is a senior advisor at the Lindsey Group, a global macro advisory and forecasting firm. From 2017 to 2019, he served as the special advisor to the chairman and a staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Andrew Blinkinsop

Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Berkely

Andrew is a Ph.D.candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the intersection of American Politics and International Relations, and researches U.S. public opinion, ideology, partisanship, and foreign policy. He's particularly interested in the ways political elites and the mass public influence one another. He lives in San Diego with his wife Jill and dog Bud and listens to too many podcasts.