“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies
I hear that Robert E. Lee was voted “Most Likely to Secede” in his West Point class.
A civil war is like a fire. It consumes the energy and emotions of those around it and leaves destruction, desolation and debt in its wake – just like my first marriage. But I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about civil wars and the necessary conditions for one. After thinking about it, I’ve decided that a model for a civil war is fire.
For a fire to burn, it needs three things: fuel, oxygen, and a spark which in turn creates the continuous burning reaction. If you’re missing any one of those things, you simply do not have a fire. An example – The Mrs. and I had a clay fireplace we used out on our deck (this was a long time ago – like during Bush II). One day I was trying to start a fire in the fireplace, and the fire wouldn’t catch – the wood would just smolder – there was smoke, but no flame. The reason for that was that the wood was a bit wet. A-ha! That’s okay. I must have some charcoal starter liquid. I looked in the garage. All out.
But there was gasoline for the mower in the garage.
I poured just a tiny bit down the chimney of the fire place. A tiny bit. An itsy bitsy amount right onto the hot coals from the fire I’d been trying to make. I looked down the chimney as I dropped a match into the pit. Suddenly, a flame shot out of the chimney and washed over my face. I had a beard at that time, and as the flame hit the beard it melted and burnt into kind of a single hair shell on my chin. It smelled as good as burned blonde beard kebab. Thankfully, no one was at home, so there were no witnesses when I took the scissors and chopped the welded chunks of congealed beard hair off.
It turns out that gasoline boils at a really low temperature, and when I poured the gasoline down the chimney, it landed on the hot wood that I’d been trying to burn and immediately turned from liquid into hot gasoline vapors. The hot gasoline vapors were the fuel, fully mixed with the oxygen as they rose up the chimney. All they needed was that spark, and all the energy stored in the hot gasoline vapors ignited at the speed of sound through the chimney in a de-beardifying whoosh.
But this is a model of Civil War not an ad for the use of flame as a shaving aid. What allows a civil war to start?
- Fuel – The differences in our opinions are shown pretty well in the most recent survey done by Pew, which is reproduced right below through the power of Internet sorcery. The Right is moving farther right. The Left is moving farther left. And in both cases the degree of overlap drops. This increasingly small overlap between left and right means we’re not even talking the same language. We look at the same picture, the same news story and react in entirely opposite ways. The more fuel that builds up (generally) the greater the energy released when the fire starts. Look to see a lot of hipster beards on fire.
- Spark – A spark is an event that’s bold, audacious, emotional, and one that means there’s no going back, things will never be the same again. These are often followed up by escalations, each one following the narrative of the split (the fuel for the fire) of the Godly and good us versus the evil baby-hating them: shelling Fort Sumter; Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his Legions; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and that night that Donald Trump poured sugar into Hillary Clinton’s gas tank.
- Oxygen – This is required for the fire to go – it feeds the chemical combustion. In this civil war/fire analogy, oxygen is symbolic of the opposing governmental structure. In the Revolutionary War it was the Congress of the States that declared the war. In the Civil War? The Confederate States organized and met. Even Caesar had at his disposal the governmental structure of the Legions that he commanded and the means to provide for them. In all cases, a civil war needs a governmental structure to move from isolated insurrection to true war.
In 2018 I think there’s a lot of fuel built up – the division between Left and Right is increasing. Twitter®, the Fake News (Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.) and the concentrated attempts to deplatform entire viewpoints (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) are examples. The Left is even rioting against free speech – the very thing the Left rioted to allow in the 1960’s.
I think the fuel is currently pretty wet – it’s inhibited because people just have so much darn stuff. Who wants to go down to fight Antifa© when you’ve got to get to work the next morning so you can earn money to make payments on your new F-150 and you’ve got beer in the fridge and Netflix® on the television, which is probably more fun than punching smelly hippies?
Even Antifa™ has to get home early so they can keep working at Starbucks® and Mom still has them on a curfew. But make no mistake – they have no interest in finding common ground – they want to fight. And they don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say. From CNN:
“Antifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren’t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.” So, other people’s speech is violence, and their violence is only speech?
(H/T AR15.COM – warning, naughty words)
But a prolonged economic downturn will dry the fuel out quickly. Janis Joplin taught us that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose (and that Bobby McGee could really sing the blues), and we won’t have Civil War 2.0 until people have nothing to lose. The saving grace for many years has been the all the “stuff” that we have. Before then we’ve had a fairly homogeneous population with (for the most part) deeply shared values.
We have sparks everywhere – from marches and riots to new laws and elections – things that drive both sides crazy. These will intensify during an economic downturn, and will be played up in the press. Conflict sells ads.
We are, however, missing the oxygen – the governmental structure that benefits from the war. The current governing powers aren’t threatened by Antifa®. They’re not really even threatened by Trump, since very few of his accomplishments will outlast his time in office – Supreme Court Justice appointments being a notable exception. The swamp remains intact. Government certainly isn’t threatened by the very far right, since two out of three Klan members (all, what, 1000 of them?) are FBI agents or informants anyway. And individual states have been more-or-less neutered since the Civil War changed the nature of the agreement between federal and state governments.
Civil war? No. Not unless the economy worsens, and not unless there’s a structure that benefits “the other side” – and who on Earth would benefit from a civil war in the United States?
Notes:
I am not the first use the fire triangle analogy when it comes to war – I found a reference to a Major Patrick Pascall who used a similar model in a 2009 paper to describe the insurgency in Iraq (LINK). As far as I can tell, though, I’m the first to use it in this manner. Yay, me!
Fire Triangle By Wikimedia User: Gustavb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, snarky comments: me.
