31% of likely voters think US civil war likely within 5 years
rasmussenreports.com
rasmussenreports.com
Beyond all of that, though, my reading of history is that civil wars usually have a geographic component. So, there is usually one region (that may be home to a different ethnic group) which elevates it's political grievances into actual war. But how would that even work in the United States? This isn't like the US civil war where it was the North against the South. This would be geographically isolated urban cores versus their surrounding suburbs and rural areas.
And, finally, I don't think Americans have the stomach for casualties. Life is pretty damned good here. So good that we soured on Iraq and Afghanistan after a few thousand casualties (where we never even had to look at dead bodies, just flag-draped caskets). Somehow I don't see us being okay with the corpses of our dead children littering the streets of Los Angeles or Manhattan.
What does that say about the state of America? As I noted in another comment, at least somewhat it probably says people aren't very conscious of the immensity of what a US civil war means. So that speaks to civics and educational issues, which are real and relevant.
But I would just say that in a society people's feelings matter, whether rational or irrational. Irrational feelings lead to real world outcomes all the time.
So even if you think that believing this outcome is likely in the next 5 years is extremely irrational, the fact that a significant proportion of the voting population could believe this has real-world implications.
We're in a country where a lot of people believe the president when he says three million people voted illegally. [1] If you believe in the existence of those imaginary people, you might wonder what will happen when they take up arms.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/...
I've come to start thinking about media (and specifically our extremely high levels of media consumption vs. the past) as a distorting lens which prevents us from perceiving reality accurately.
However, for that to happen we'd have to give up our politics, which has polarized the country. The two party system has successfully divided and conquered us, it puts us in two separate camps, so we don't organize against the real threat which is the rise of income inequality/elitism and the marginalization of the worker class.
However, the rise of the machines replacing workers could push the pain point enough for (if not a civil, a revolutionary) war to be inevitable, unless the government puts things in place like GBI/Universal Healthcare to quell the masses who are no-longer able to work.
5 years is a bit of a stretch though, 15 is probably when the real pain from automation is going to be felt.
Edit: I don't think civil war will happen, I don't think the younger generations have been raised to be too docile by their media/etc. Civil war would possibly shut down cellphone access and access to fb/social media/etc... Not to mention you'd need to war against people you already know and may love, regardless of their opinions.
Times are a lot different than they were in 1860's, I think if there were a civil war it wouldn't be between left/right.. it'd be between establishment and poor/middleclass -- but the 2 party system has us polarized, so we'd need to come together for that to happen. So far they've won the 'divide and conquer' war already.
There is a good deal of discussion of this on the right if you know where to look. The general consensus seems to be that it wouldn't look like the Civil War at all, but more like an insurgency - like the political violence of the 1960s, but with much greater magnitude and frequency.
The thing that scares me is that I'm seeing both sides begin to use tactics that isolate individuals who are vocally opposed to them, track their movements, and organize actions against them. Thus far those actions have mostly been threats and harassment, but it seems a small step between a group confronting someone in a restaurant and individuals or small groups attacking them in their homes in the middle of the night.
> The right side of the political divide makes up almost all of the armed forces, first responders, and police; their civilians also own most of the guns; and they control the food supply.
None of those things matter as much if the left controls the federal government. Obviously they don't at the moment, but to many on the right that's what at stake in the next couple of elections.
Objectively, I don't think there's any real doubt that the right would win an armed conflict. That said, objectively there was no hope for a Confederate military victory in the Civil War, but that didn't stop the war from happening.
> This isn't like the US civil war where it was the North against the South.
I would argue that the US Civil War wasn't a "civil war" at all, but a failed revolution. The US has never experienced a true civil war.
> This would be geographically isolated urban cores versus their surrounding suburbs and rural areas.
Mostly, but not exactly - the divide is between ideologies, one of which is concentrated in urban areas. What's most alarming about that to me is that people are beginning to physically move to areas where they are part of the overwhelming political majority. I don't have the citation on hand, but the number of "toss-up counties", where one candidate edge out the other by only single-digit percentages, declined drastically between 2004 and 2016.
"After meeting with North Korean dictator, Trump calls press America's 'biggest enemy'" http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/13/media/trump-tweet-media/inde...
[0] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ques...
It's also likely that given the state of civic knowledge and education in the country that respondents conflated something like "violence" or "minor fighting with a political tinge" to "civil war" without really understanding how immense of a thing a US civil war actually would be.
But still, to me, even the idea that a much smaller percentage of Americans (let's say 15%) could imagine a civil war happening in the next 5 years was shocking on its face, and worthy of awareness and discussion.