The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths

“Well, l could be wrong, but l believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.  l would be surprised if the affiliates were concerned about the lack of an old wooden ship, but nice try.” – Anchorman

politicalspectrum

So, I guess that my “Secretly Wants To Live in a Post-Apocalyptic Society” secret is out of the bag?  I guess I need more dehydrated food.  And scotch.

(Part II of this series is posted at: The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar)

There are some posts where I know exactly what I want to say, and how I want to say it.  Often, those are fairly well scripted, either with a handwritten first draft or a set of researched bullet points.  I’ll expand those into the full post.  Those are nice.  The structure has been created.  The post flows out.

Some topics are topics that are well planned out (I actually plan the blog topics about three months out) and fit.  Some topics just hit me with a blast of inspiration and nearly write themselves.

And some are difficult.  Very difficult – they occupy headspace I know that I’m going to write about them, but the issue is so difficult that I want to make sure it comes out how I want it to come out, that it doesn’t inadvertently come out in some sort of ham-handed way.  This is one of those.  I’m sort of pleased with the results – it came out the way I wanted it to come out, just like the ending to Breaking Bad, or Jean-Claude Van Damme’s last optometry appointment – he still doesn’t need glasses, yay!

Don’t know a great way to put this, but we’re (in the United States, and in Europe, though my read there is much murkier) heading towards civil war.  In Europe, civil war means dissolution of the EU and (likely) expulsion of large numbers of immigrants.  But I’m not European, so I won’t go too far speculating about them.

I’m not sure if it will be a decade off or longer, but I put the arrival of this war as soon as 2024, and as late as 2032.  Not really any longer than that.  What would stop it is a prolonged, total war that would challenge the very existence of the United States.  External threats and an external enemy are the best way to create unity (and second term for a president named “Bush”).  And that’s not good, because a prolonged war always leads to extremes, and we have extreme weapons – in that way, a civil war might be the best-case scenario.  But I digress – back to civil war.

Why?  Again, this won’t be exactly the same civil war as THE Civil War – there are some facets that will rhyme, but others that won’t.  The major theme is division.  And what better way to show that than with . . . maps.

Here’s a map from Colin Woodward and Tufts University, and Brian Stauffer, depicting the 11 cultures that they contend make up the United States:

11nations

So, there’s this.  Accurate?  I would personally draw a line between those who like Star Wars® instead of Star Trek™.  Those people are awful.

And it’s not just culture, the Woodward/Tufts map is pretty accurate at predicting where we are today politically.  Here is a map of the Clinton/Trump 2016 vote count:

vote-by-nation-2016

The redder you are, the more Trump.  The overlay of the Woodard/Tufts map is clear.  These cultures are significant, and real, and explain NASCAR®, country music, and the inexplicable popularity of PEZ®.

And I think I’ve graphically made my case for there being a division.  But how significant is it?  Well, research shows that it’s pretty one-sided.  Liberals (at least young ones) are significantly more close-minded than conservatives:

civilwarstats

Yes, you read that right.  45% of liberals would be uncomfortable with a roommate with opposing political views.  12% of conservatives would be uncomfortable.  I guess this means that liberals don’t like diversity?

In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar was ordered back to Rome.  Quite specifically, he was ordered to leave his army, the 13th Legion (Legio XIII, Gemina, or “Twins”) beyond the border of the Rubicon river, which was considered the northern border of Rome.  He didn’t, and then spawned a civil war that (ultimately) led to the end of the Roman Republic and Caesar being proclaimed Emperor.  To this day we celebrate this event by ordering salads in Caesar’s name.

geminaxiii

The last time the 13th Legion was active, I think they got in line in front of me at Arby’s® in Boulder, Colorado after a Van Halen© concert.  Man, when 4,000 people are in front of you in line, you’d expect they’d run out of roast beef.   They did.  Thankfully they had lots of panda and koala bear left.  They also ran out of Horsey Sauce L.  They claimed they ran out of horses.

So we have divisions that are significant, enduring (these divisions aren’t new), and deep.  Yet for decades we haven’t had a problem.  Why are we at the Rubicon?

Well, we were ethnically much more uniform than today.  The United States in 1965 (at the time of a major change to immigration policy) was 85% white.  Now?  62%.  That’s a pretty significant change, and one that impacts politics.  Again, cultural divisions lead to war.  And the easiest division is what you look like.  I know that people like to fight and will pick any old reason to fight.  Religion in Northern Ireland (Protestants and Catholics), football in California (Raiders™ vs. 49er’s©), and really important stuff (Star Wars© vs. Star Trek™).  People will fight each other to the death because we don’t like each other’s hats.  Historically, multi-cultural societies . . . fail.  Spectacularly.  (Again, this is not an indictment of any individual group, just a reading of history.)

But civil war in the United States is . . . very singular.  The Civil War was built upon philosophical differences (with very human consequences).  Issues involved in the Civil War include slavery, states’ rights, and Northern industrialism versus Southern agrarianism.  But one of the underlying causes might just be that map of the 11 cultures shown above.  The Northern states were built on the Puritan ethic.  They make up the Boston/New York corridor and the swath heading west from that.  The Southern states were built upon scoundrels – the Irish malcontents and Scottish reivers that immigrated later.  They’re the ones that make up Greater Appalachia.

So what will cause a civil war in the United States?

The first thing is the philosophic divisions listed above.  The desire for the freedom of individual determination is still strong in the Deep South and in Greater Appalachia and the Far West.  That hasn’t changed.  The Puritans in Yankeedom and the Left Coast still very much want to make their values the only values that matter.  Note the graph above that shows relative discomfort with diverse exhibited by liberals.  Ouch!

These groups have hated each other since the 1600’s.  And it will never go away, especially as long as the New England Patriots® keep winning Super Bowls™.  The two sides have never spoken the same language.  The time that both North and South united?  After the Civil War, the North (magnanimously) allowed the South to keep their heroes (Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Davis) and they were transformed into American heroes rather than insurrectionist traitors.  Not a bad trade.

There were places that held out – the first celebration of July 4th after the Civil War in Vicksburg was on July 4th, 1945.  Admittedly, Vicksburg surrendered on July 4th after a horrific siege and devastating defeat for the Confederacy.  It took 80 years and winning not one, but two world wars for Vicksburg to celebrate national unity on a regular basis on July 4.  These divisions remain to this day.

But what else will cause this war?

The Fourth Turning – it’s time.  Here’s a previous post (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) that explains this timing in more detail.  The last generation to have experience the horror associated with total war, with the mobilization of the entire economy of the United States to defeat a foe is . . . dead.  The youngest boys that landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day are 95 today.  They control nothing.

Our leadership, our population has no connection to those that saw the horrors of a continent ripped apart by war.  They led our nation (and all of the nations of the West) and their actions were held in check by the horrors that they had seen.  Now their experiences no longer temper the actions of the leaders (and desires of the people) to avoid apocalyptic levels of violence.

Let’s continue with economics – I’ve discussed before that the current economic practices have a time limit (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck).  One cause of civil war (not necessary, but certainly an exacerbating cause) is economic collapse.  When people have more to lose than to gain, they won’t fight.  As Janis Joplin said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”  And when people are ruined?  They fight.  See the French Revolution (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be).

Economics will be a trigger, but not the underlying cause of division listed above.

So, we have a civil war.  What’s the end look like?

Breakup.

I don’t think that the things that have held us together as a nation will continue to hold us together.  What values do we have in common anymore?  It seems like . . . none.  Let me elaborate.  I could do a post on each of these (and likely won’t – other people cover this on a regular basis, so unless I have a Wilder take, I won’t):

We don’t speak the same language at all, anymore.  Even though I have friends that don’t (at all) agree with me politically, I fear that they aren’t the norm.  The end state isn’t 11 countries.  It’s probably (at least) four.  I can see a Heartland State, an East Coast, a West Coast, and a Northern Mexico.  Los Angeles will be Mexico.  Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle will be East Coast.  The Boston/Manhattan/DC corridor will be East Coast.  Northern Mexico will be as shown as El Norte.

But on the bright side?  Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t need glasses!!! How awesome is that?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

37 thoughts on “The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths”

  1. Here in Appalachia (and I hope you pronounce it correctly – “Appa-LATCH-a”) and the Deep South, the mindset that we need to secede is widespread. We see the values that made America great – and which still work when they’re tried – being replaced by values which have failed whenever they’ve been tried throughout history. Leftist values have brought down some once-mighty nations and there’s not a chance they’d work this time.

    It’s no accident that Southerners hold to conservative values. Those who have less money are always more pragmatic than those with more money. We live closer to the earth and closer to God than the wealthier Northeast and West Coast, who have less need for spiritual truths. An abundance of money causes people to wrongly believe that they have no more need of God and they begin to look with condescension on those who have less and who cling to their God and guns.
    In my, and our, opinion, a Civil War is desperately needed. Let the country divide and let a mass migration take place in which leftists migrate to leftist regions and consevatives migrate to conservative regions.

    2. AMERICA has commited every crime GOD WARNED AGAINEST,now they’ll all face the music,HE called the men to stand up,there were none,the only man ,turned out to be a skinny Iranian woman who attacked the love of america, SATANS minions Google and Youtube,NOW they will be wipped off the planet forever,and its to late now to stand up..they’ll be coming…

    4. The problem is a lot more of us conservatives live in so called leftist regions than people think. And many of us are not willing to just leave and migrate to conservative regions. The lefties are not going to run me out of my home. Let the fight begin.

    5. Living in So Ca all my life, I can remember the bicentennial as a young boy…Now that same area is filled with immigrants who I wonder even understand the oath they took to become Americans…

      Leftist to right of me, Progressives to the left of me…when the music starts playing, I’ll be rock n rolling all around me.

      long live the Republic…The West coast needs a brass cleaning enima…Patriots are welcome to attend.

      1. I’m right here with you in SoCal, lived here over 30 years. I’m so over living here though!! Would love to move to S. Carolina!!

        1. Y’all come on down. We have better food, prettier women, plenty of rainfall, fervent churches, much better race relations than the Blue Newsers would ever let on, and serious folks — some of them even with permits — who carry guns and know how and when to use them.

      2. “Everywhere is freaks and hairies
        dykes and fairies, tell me, where is sanity”
        Not long ago I used this opening line of “I’d Love to Change the World,” by Ten Years After, 1971, in a comment on Sputnik website. They sent me an E-mail saying they couldn’t post it because it was “racist” and violated their comment policy.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP5XRxFgRlY
        Ironically, back then there weren’t nearly so many of them as there are now.

    6. If only we could migrate and solve the issue. The result will be the same as what we do eventually end up with, but I fear that all three of von Clausewitz’s objectives will need to be met: the enemy armed forces must be put into a position where they cannot fight, the country must be occupied, and the will of the people to fight must be broken. Those are necessary preconditions to ending a war. If they’re not met? You have Afghanistan or Iraq . . .

  2. The conflict in Northern Ireland is one between the Irish and the English. It just so happens that the Irish were/are Catholic and the North is Protestant. This is NOT a religious war.

    2. Noted, and the comment is appreciated – religion is a primary demarcation but not the underlying cause. My overall point is that we will sieze on any division to drive us apart – it’s harder to act as a unit than it is to fight and squabble.

    3. Wrong, on so many things. It was a bunch of Roman catholic terrorists against Christian Irish, the Romans thought they could concur the Irish with random killings and boomings of innocent Christian farmers and shop keepers to drive them from there lands they had lived on for thousands of years through fear of death and financial ruin by shutting down society with random barbaric acts of terror. The republic was half Protestant just not the ones in government control, even in the republic most farmers and shop keepers were protestant and employed the lazy romans when the dole wasn’t enough to get by on. thats why the romans lost and are almost non existent in Ireland. There children left on mass to Scotland and England to get jobs and a future because there parents had so many children they could not feed them all, under orders from the Vatican and the delite of pedophile priests to over populate and out number the Christians. It didn’t work the children could see who was good and who was bad and chose a better life. My Mother lived through the “Troubles” as a midwife and the roman catholics would shoot at her from roof tops just for doing her job and delivering there babies for free. Some where so bigoted that they would let their wifes and unborn children die than let a Christian deliver them into this world. Disgusting people the majority of them. I could go on and on about the criminal things they did to my family over the years… even though my family would not retaliate, just take it head on and use it to prove to the others who is civilized and who is not.(we’re from Donegal in the republic) My mother was forced to go to Northern Ireland to get her eduction because as a Christian she was denied it in the republic, yet may romans went to northern Ireland to have there children born for free.

      1. Well said, and thank you for correcting them.
        The IRA are and always have been nothing but Marxist terrorists.

  3. These maps should be widely published. Move now, avoid the rush.

  4. The part of OR you have wrong…

    Northwest part of OR is blue while the rest is Red!!

    1. Research the 2016 voting results at the Oregon Secretary of State website – if you subtract the results of just one county, Multnomah, Trump would have carried the state by over 50,000 votes and Oregon would have a Republican governor by an even larger margin. That one county, out of 36 total, drives all the politics in Oregon – along with a deeply corrupted judiciary and an only slightly less corrupted executive and legislative. Also, Oregon has a 4th branch, administrative…and that tells you a lot right there.

      1. This is a fantastic point and why a civil war will be incredibly ugly. Many states suffer under similar scenarios….

        I live in Maryland, always a “blue state” during elections and most often it is not even close. The part I live in on the map would be in the “Tidewater” area and solidly red though. Maryland has 24 counties and 19 of them went to Trump but the state was over 63% for Hillary as a whole.

        The Chesapeake and Eastern Shore between the bay and Atlantic are deeply conservative, as are the north and western areas in the Appalachia foothills and Cumberland areas— it is the highly-populated, central part with Baltimore and the DC suburbs that turn the state blue.

        The centuries-old families and homesteads of the east, south and northwestern parts of the state will not go away quietly or “peacefully emigrate” away from their ancestral homes.

        The future civil war in Maryland could make Antietam look like a lazy, Sunday picnic…….

  5. I believe that we must start talking about an alternative of a system. It has to be put in place before we get to the collapsing point. I am the author of Hanomy Manifesto which is free to download/review by everyone. I believe I have solutions to most problems existing today and in the future … worldwide. In short, Hanomy is a new social, financial, and political system for the entire world. Numbers work and it can be implemented in just a few short years. I hope that at least you would read the 2-pages summary. I am counting on volunteering and social media to spread the word, hoping that persons of the right resources will help spread the word of Hanomy to all corner of the world. It is a truly worldwide paradigm shift for humanity. Collaboration is welcome as well as comments/suggestions to improve the document. Soon, the 2 pages summary will be translated to many languages in hope that people in trouble countries will pick up Hanomy as an alternative conversation and raise awareness to this new system. Thank you for your time.

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  7. An interesting read, to be sure.

    I am rather doubtful there will be another shooting Civil War. Who will fight it? Elderly Boomers like me that rail against liberalism in blog comments? I’m a little old for 20 mile hikes and racing to the next foxhole. How about Millenials then? But wait . . . I am continually told they are all worthless. So who does the fighting? Furthermore, who will pay for it?

    And the ideological divide isn’t as clear as the map. Many Red States are only ‘red’ by a few percentage points. Political ideology is hardly monolithic in these areas.

    The author makes a very good point. Such a war won’t happen until people feel they have more to gain than they have to lose, but who wants to risk their life when life is as easy as it is today?

    If there is a Civil War, the outcome won’t guarantee a better world than we now live in.

    My crystal ball shows us staying together as a nation until the wealth transfer payments run out. At that point the bonds may break and people may feel they have more to gain by leaving The Union. But if that happens I see us separating like the Czechs and Slovaks.

    My two cents.

    1. The Czech and Slovak republics separated amicably because they each had homogenous regions conjoined more out of convenience than anything else when the Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved after WWI.
      Thus they could part company fairly simply.
      There isn’t going to be any amicable divorce here, because the divide is house to house and door to door, and the many of the ones doing most of the agitating aren’t even actual Americans, in any sense.

      Which is the same way the civil war will go, and it will as bloody or bloodier in the so-called “blue” states, because they aren’t nearly as “blue” as state tallies portray.

      Which is why all maps based on counties are crap.

      What’s coming isn’t a parting of the ways.
      It’s going to be the vomiting out of the communism that’s been rammed down the country’s throat, by a hardcore few who thought to benefit from it. There will most notably be a shortage of rope.

      To a lesser degree, it will be ethnic, but to a tremendous degree, it will be a cleansing.

      The trick in such circumstances is always to see that no would-be Napoleon jumps in the saddle while no one’s paying attention.

      1. My bet is our would-be Napoleon is between the ages of 10 and 40 right now . . . depends on when the egg drops . . . (so to speak).

    2. If done by sensible people, sure . . . but one thing about a certain political bent, they don’t want just your money and your property, they want your mind and soul as well . . .

    3. you nailed it feeble. When the payments stop we all begin to question the system. Who knows who will shoot or be shot? DC might have a problem….

  9. I live in New England, not 50-odd miles from where I was born. I love it here. The family does too. But I’d move if I could.

    A few years ago I had to pre-emptively turn down a chance to move to east Texas because the wife put so many conditions on it the move wasn’t feasible.

    Why do I fear that will prove to be a disastrous thing?

    1. You have to get out of there . . . the population density . . . the instability . . .

      What would it be like three days after the trucks stopped showing up at the local supermarket? Six days?

  10. State-based electoral college method of voting (by county) for Governor and US Senators may be the only way to prevent an actual civil war. At some point, citizens will no longer allow the liberal urban areas to control election outcomes decade after decade

    look at the 2016 electoral map

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