We might actually be on the verge of a civil war, but it won't look like the last one. It will look more like "the troubles" in Ireland.
This is one from 2016 and is red-blue binary. It is perhaps the most illustrative: https://blueshift.io/election-2016-county-map.html
This makes peaceful resolution very difficult, as we're dealing with two groups who largely live apart from one another, with different geography, culture, and social mores. I think it's important to emphasize, there are a lot of people who genuinely believe that systemic voting irregularities influenced our last election, to the point of having changed the outcome, and don't view Joe Biden as having been legitimately elected. Furthermore, they believe that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, refused to even hear their case, and that Congress would in no way give their grievances with the process an open debate, before accepting results they viewed as fraudulent. This puts them into a position of desperation. The videos of people being arrested at the airport do not help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwJ5HXSzuA
Given the geography. I expect to see red-hats (Trump people) going into the cities where the blue-hats (centrists) and the black-hats (Antifa/BLM) live, and then retreating into the rural areas, where supportive sheriffs are more likely to run interference against other law-enforcement agencies. To some extent, this is what we already saw at the Capitol Building, as well in places like Kenosha where people like Kyle Rittenhouse came from out-of town (albeit within reasonable driving distance) to the city where violence was occurring.
EDIT: better link
EDIT 2: The phrase "I've thought a lot about this" suggests that one has thought more of themselves thinking about the issue, than about the issue itself. As such It has been removed.
Randall Munroe did a twitter thread[0] on the election map he did for xkcd 2399[1] and he actually discusses about the bias in common election maps: in fact there is no such geographic split.
Or, as he puts it:
> There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than NY, more Trump voters in NY than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
Don't take the map literally, the key ideas are in the Twitter thread. The main point of his thread, is that maps aren't good at saying where voters are and are fundamentally biased (“You can be a Biden voter in a Trump household in a Biden precinct in a Trump county in a Biden district in a Trump state in a Biden country. Then what color is your land? Dirt-colored, I guess! Not only does land not vote, it doesn’t even have a preference.”). He made his map as a counterpoint to nationwide maps, but he could have made the same map at the state, or even the district level: there are trumps voter in the middle of San Francisco and Bidden voters in the middle of nowhere in rural California. In fact, there are more Trump voters in LA alone than in 80% of the red areas in nationwide maps.
They also do not reflect movements that are fundamentally leninist in organization, where a small cohesive nucleus of activists defines the agenda and directs action. Without a Fox News stoking and directing anger, there is no "red rage", and Fox people are urban people. Without someone running 4chan, there is no Anon/QAnon, and the likes of 4chan are run by urban geeks. Trump always defined himself as a proud NewYorker. And so on and so forth.
What is true is that nowadays people can live in socially-isolated bubbles that do not communicate with other bubbles. This is not a function of geographical location, though, but hyper-personalized media consumption. It happened already in the 70s on the left, for example, where people who only read "alternative" media could not understand how their points of view where not as hegemonic as they thought. Now it's just spread to everyone thanks to the web: at some point you'll gravitate to a media bubble and probably stay there forever.
Littlestymear linked a map in another reply to my comment that seems to break it down purely by population in clusters of 250,000: https://xkcd.com/2399/
That map still suggests that clusters of blue in highly urban areas are surrounded by clusters of red in "less urban" areas, and never the opposite. Rural, or less urban environments have different cultures than highly urban environments, and this is readily observable.
>They also do not reflect movements that are fundamentally leninist in organization, where a small cohesive nucleus of activists defines the agenda and directs action.
I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by this. Please be more explicit.
>Without a Fox News stoking and directing anger, there is no "red rage", and Fox people are urban people.
This is a misconception. One blames the media for the information purveyed rather than the sorts of people amenable to Fox's viewpoint in their news. If there was prima facie no distinction between those who adore Pres. Trump, and those who despise him, prior to their exposure to Fox News, then this might be a tenable position, but given that there are two different demographics, both of which have access to Fox News and yet react distinctly differently to it, tells us that there are other factors at play.
>What is true is that nowadays people can live in socially-isolated bubbles that do not communicate with other bubbles. This is not a function of geographical location, though, but hyper-personalized media consumption.
And yet geography seems to be at play in which media bubble you end up in, as do a number of other factors. Perhaps the media bubbles are as much a function of existing divisions as the exacerbated divisions are of the bubbles?
But that is not something that changed of recent. New York has always been different from St. Louis, but both "universes" could coexist and now they seemingly cannot. That doesn't look to me like a function of geography.
What has changed is that it's now easier to be an "undercover radical stlouite" in NY and viceversa.
> I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Trump's organization is fundamentally bolshevik in nature, with a small inner circle of "avantgarde" that decides everything and then pushes decisions down to the masses. It's why significant chunks of his own party don't like him, because there is little or no policy elaboration even slightly down the pyramid. Both Clinton and Obama did it to an extent in their first few years, but nobody has done it as much as Trump. Trump could make it stick because the social web reduces the need to cozy-up to the larger press ecosystem for his message to spread. It's the sort of qualitative jump that early-XX century parties did with radio and films, which removed a lot of influence from local bigwigs in favours of national leaders.
> One blames the media for the information purveyed rather than the sorts of people amenable to Fox's viewpoint in their news.
Amenable people still need to articulate and support their views to be effective, and for the message to be efficiently evangelized and legitimized. Dedicated media does that work for them. Without that work, they wouldn't be as effective.
> there are other factors at play.
Of course there are, but the likes of Fox are important factors. Their tone has been extremely divisive since the '90s, this is a long wave coming.
> And yet geography seems to be in play in which media bubble you end up in
Yes, but this was always the case and it's arguably much less so now that local papers are dying off. The point is what is changing, and geography has largely not changed; but the media landscape has, and pretty dramatically too.
It really is becoming country vs. anything even remotely close to a city. The only exceptions seem to be rural college towns and hipster/artist enclaves. There are some good examples of the latter in Appalachia.
Agrarian: traditional, religious, rigid social roles, rigid hierarchies determined by gender/race/etc., suspicion of change, and fiscally conservative with a suspicion of debt or loose monetary policy.
Industrial/cosmopolitan: fluid, either non-religious or liberal religion, fluid social roles, hierarchies only as-needed (e.g. corporate hierarchies that are opt-out), welcoming to rapid change, and fiscally liberal with a pragmatic attitude toward things like monetary policy and debt.
The wrinkle in this model is that the top of the hierarchy of "red America" seems to be located in urban centers. Trump is from New York. Most 4chan /pol users are in cities. The people operating Fox News and other further-right news sources almost all live in cities. So it's sort of like you have this minority of urban America either sympathizing with or puppeteering a rural revolt against modernity.
Of course I wonder if the civil war was different. Banks, governments, and major property owners in urban areas profited a lot more from slavery than poor and middle class farmers and skilled laborers in the South. Quite a lot of the profit from slavery ended up in New York, Boston, DC, and even London.
Maybe part of the answer to this is for rural Americans to turn off Fox News and OAN and the /pol orbit and all the rest of that "ruralist propaganda from urbanites" and figure out what they really think and articulate it themselves. What emerges may well be something toward which urban "elites" could be more sympathetic.