The Second American Civil War [US, curr ev, Patreon]

[siderea]

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1766175.html

0.

Someone recently asked me, in regards to my pestilence tag, whether I also had tags for war, famine, and death as well.

To which I replied, May 27, 2022, "Soon."

1.

A whole lot of people in the US are now talking about the likelihood of civil war. Now, I haven't seen anyone explain why they think (or feel) that is likely, but I can explain why I think it's likely, or at least much more plausible.

For those who haven't heard in all the general tumult, the governors of Minnesota (Tim Walz (D)) and Massachusetts (Charlie Baker (R)) have issued executive orders denying extradition requests from other states regarding abortion.

2022 June 25: Axios: "Massachusetts, Minnesota become safe havens for abortion":

With Roe overturned and states now able to ban or permit the procedure at any point, it's possible that lawmakers in Republican-led states may seek to prosecute women who cross state lines to seek an abortion or charge providers in other states, according to the New York Times. [...]

Yeah, that's a thing they are likely to try. Also, if they get control of the Congress, they will try to pass a Federal law that requires free states to cooperate with subjugating states in their prosecution of antiabortion laws against people who escape subjugating states to get abortions or citizens of free states who provide abortions.

The executive orders [...] give the governors of their states the power to deny any extradition request from other states pursuing criminal charges against people who either received, assisted or performed reproductive health services that are legal in their states.

The orders also prevent state agencies — unless they are required by a court to do so — from assisting other states that are attempting to seek civil, criminal or professional sanctions against people who provide, seek or receive health care services, including abortions, that are legal in Minnesota and Massachusetts.

Thing is, it's really hard for anybody at all familiar with the lead up to the, er, first American Civil War to read that and not to be instantly reminded of the "Bloodhound Bill": the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

From Wikipedia, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850:

In response to the weakening of the original [1793] Fugitive Slave Act, Senator James M. Mason of Virginia drafted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which penalized officials who did not arrest someone allegedly escaping from slavery, and made them liable to a fine of $1,000 (equivalent to $32,570 in 2021). Law enforcement officials everywhere were required to arrest people suspected of escaping enslavement on as little as a claimant's sworn testimony of ownership. Habeas corpus was declared irrelevant, and the Commissioner before whom the fugitive from slavery was brought for a hearing—no jury was permitted, and the alleged refugee from enslavement could not testify[6]—was compensated $10 if he found that the individual was proven a fugitive, and only $5 if he determined the proof to be insufficient.[7] In addition, any person aiding a fugitive by providing food or shelter was subject to six months' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive from slavery were entitled to a bonus or promotion for their work.

Enslavers needed only to supply an affidavit to a Federal marshal to capture a fugitive from slavery. Since a suspected enslaved person was not eligible for a trial, the law resulted in the kidnapping and conscription of free Blacks into slavery, as suspected fugitive slaves had no rights in court and could not defend themselves against accusations.[8]

And:

The Fugitive Slave Law brought the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, as it made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. "Where before many in the North had little or no opinions or feelings on slavery, this law seemed to demand their direct assent to the practice of human bondage, and it galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery."[15] Moderate abolitionists were faced with the immediate choice of defying what they believed to be an unjust law, or breaking with their own consciences and beliefs.

And:

Many Northern states wanted to disregard the Fugitive Slave Act. Some jurisdictions passed personal liberty laws, mandating a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could be moved; others forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of alleged fugitive slaves. In some cases, juries refused to convict individuals who had been indicted under the Federal law.[3]

And:

Jury nullification occurred as local Northern juries acquitted men accused of violating the law. [...] [Secretary of State Daniel] Webster led the prosecution against men accused of rescuing Shadrach Minkins in 1851 from Boston officials who intended to return Minkins to slavery; the juries convicted none of the men.

And:

In November 1850, the Vermont legislature passed the Habeas Corpus Law, requiring Vermont judicial and law enforcement officials to assist captured fugitive slaves. It also established a state judicial process, parallel to the federal process, for people accused of being fugitive slaves. This law rendered the federal Fugitive Slave Act effectively unenforceable in Vermont and caused a storm of controversy nationally. It was considered a nullification of federal law, a concept popular in the South among states that wanted to nullify other aspects of federal law, and was part of highly charged debates over slavery. Noted poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier had called for such laws, and the Whittier controversy heightened pro-slavery reactions to the Vermont law. Virginia governor John B. Floyd warned that nullification could push the South toward secession, while President Millard Fillmore threatened to use the army to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Vermont. No test events took place in Vermont, but the rhetoric of this flare-up echoed South Carolina's 1832 nullification crisis and Thomas Jefferson's 1798 Kentucky Resolutions.[13]

And:

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in response to the law.[16]: 1 [17][18]

Many abolitionists openly defied the law. Reverend Luther Lee, pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Syracuse, New York, wrote in 1855:

I never would obey it. I had assisted thirty slaves to escape to Canada during the last month. If the authorities wanted anything of me, my residence was at 39 Onondaga Street. I would admit that and they could take me and lock me up in the Penitentiary on the hill; but if they did such a foolish thing as that I had friends enough in Onondaga County to level it to the ground before the next morning.[19]

There were several instances of Northern communities putting words like these to action. Several years before, in the Jerry Rescue, Syracuse abolitionists freed by force a fugitive slave who was to be sent back to the South and successfully smuggled him to Canada.[20] Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns were both captured fugitives who were part of unsuccessful attempts by opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law to use force to free them.[21] Other famous examples include Shadrach Minkins in 1851 and Lucy Bagby in 1861, whose forcible return has been cited by historians as important and "allegorical".[22]

And:

In February 1855, Michigan's legislature also passed a law prohibiting county jails from being used to detain recaptured slaves, directing county prosecutors to defend recaptured slaves, and entitling recaptured slaves to habeas corpus and trial by jury[14]. Other states to pass their own personal liberty laws include Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

And:

In 1855, the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the only state high court to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, as a result of a case involving fugitive slave Joshua Glover and Sherman Booth, who led efforts that thwarted Glover's recapture. In 1859 in Ableman v. Booth, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the state court.[11]

For those of you not familiar with US history, the first American Civil War started in 1861.

I'm not saying Governors Walz and Baker were wrong to do what they did, any more than I think Vermont was wrong to do what they did in 1850 or any of the states that passed laws resisting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 or my fellow Massholes of the 1850s who refused to convict violators of the law, or any more than I will think it's wrong when the legislatures of Massachusetts and other states inevitably resist the inevitable attempts of oppressor states to dominate the free states.

But I'm saying we know where this goes. This ends in bullets.

2.

This is the thing you need to understand about the American Civil War: the biggest lie told about it is, of course, that it was about "States' Rights".

You know – you think you know – that the claim that the American Civil War was over "States' Rights" is a lie because, actually, the American Civil War was over slavery.

But there is a bigger, worse lie. The Southern states weren't fighting for their right to have slavery. They already had slavery. The North was respecting their right to make that determination for themselves. The North was respecting the Southern states' rights.

No, the thing the North objected to was the spread of the practice of slavery outside the South.

Americans, think about what you know, but have probably never quite put together: in the years leading up to the the Civil War, the fight over slavery was not over whether or not the South could continue to practice it, it was whether new territories and states would be slave or free. The South actively was attempting to dominate the US goverment by proliferating slave states:

The difficulty of identifying territory that could be organized into additional slave states stalled the process of opening the western territories to settlement, while slave-state politicians sought a solution, with efforts being made to acquire Cuba (see: Lopez Expedition and Ostend Manifesto, 1852) and to annex Nicaragua (see: Walker affair, 1856–57), both to be slave states. Parts of Northern Mexico were also coveted, with Senator Albert Brown declaring "I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason – for the plantation and spreading of slavery".[11]

Don't get me wrong: the Northern abolitionists absolutely did want to stamp out slavery including in the South, and their long-range strategy for doing so first entailed containing it to the South.

But please understand, the interests in containing slavery extended beyond the morally-motivated abolitionists.

Has anybody ever actually pointed out to you the real problem with the Three-Fifths Compromise? The problem is not that it was an insult to the dignity of enslaved people and denigration of their personhood. That actually gets the problem backwards, suggesting that the right solution is that enslaved people should count 100% as people. But it was the slave States who wanted their enslaved to count 100%, and the Northerners who objected and wanted them to count not at all.

Have you forgotten what the Three-Fifths Compromise was counting people for?

Because that's what the real problem with the Three-Fifths Compromise was. The Three-Fifths Compromise was for calculating how many Congressmembers a state got. The Three-Fifths Compromise said that the South got to count enslaved people towards their census – not as much as full citizens, but some – to count for how many seats in Congress the state was entitled to.

And the problem is that if a slave counts for three-fifths a person for purposes of getting allocated members in the House of Representatives, then a state could buy Representatives in Congress by buying slaves.

Or, for that matter, breeding them.

(Gee, I wonder how else a state might use the law to increase its population so it gets more control of the Federal government?)

The Three-Fifths Compromise allowed the South to buy Congressmembers – that is, seats in Congress. Seats that could then be populated by Congressmembers who would never, ever represent the interests of the enslaved people on whose count their seat was created.

The South didn't just love slavery because they thought it keen to enrich themselves by profiting from uncompensated labor of workers who could never quit and need never be paid. The South was using slavery to exploit the loophole in the Constitution provided by the Three-Fifths Compromise to attempt to take over the entire country and make it such that the other states couldn't rule themselves.

Of course it mattered passionately to them that new states being brought into the Union – meaning having votes in Congress! – be slave states. If states were brought in as free states, it would frustrate their plans to take control of Congress.

Of course pro-slavery partisans flooded the free-state-leaning Kansas and attempted to seize it.

It mattered to them what other states did regarding slavery because the Southern states were using slavery to game democracy, with the ultimate intent of stamping it out, and they didn't want to be out-numbered in Congress.

I wonder how many of you reading this think this is unhinged of me to allege, who think it some flight of fancy I have invented, it being something you had never heard of.

The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power in the U.S. federal government held by slave owners during the 1840s and 1850s, prior to the Civil War.[1] Antislavery campaigners, led by Frederick Douglass, during this period bitterly decried what they saw as disproportionate and corrupt influence wielded by wealthy Southerners. The argument was that this small group of rich slave owners had seized political control of their own states and were trying to take over the federal government in an illegitimate fashion in order to expand and protect slavery. The argument was later widely used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.

The main issue expressed by the term slave power was distrust of the political power of the slave-owning class. Such distrust was shared by many who were not abolitionists; those who were motivated more by a possible threat to the political balance or the impossibility of competing with unwaged slave labor, than by concern over the treatment of slaves. [...]

The term was popularized by antislavery writers such as Frederick Douglass, John Gorham Palfrey, Josiah Quincy III, Horace Bushnell, James Shepherd Pike, and Horace Greeley. Politicians who emphasized the theme included John Quincy Adams, Henry Wilson and William Pitt Fessenden. Abraham Lincoln used the concept after 1854 but not the term. They showed, through a combination of emotive argument and hard statistical data, that the South had long held a disproportionate level of power in the United States.

And:

Southern power derived from a combination of factors. The "three-fifths clause" (counting 100 slaves as 60 people for seats in the House and thus for electoral votes) gave the South disproportionate representation at the national level.[8]

With less than a third of the free population, and less than a third of the wealth, they had eleven Presidents out of sixteen; seventeen Judges of the Supreme Court out of twenty-eight; fourteen Attorney Generals out of nineteen; sixty-one Presidents of the Senate out of seventy-seven; twenty-one Speakers of the House of Representitves [sic] out of thirty-three; eighty-four foreign ministers out of a hundred thirty-four; with a like disparity running through all the [illegible] of the General Government. [Hutter, E. W. (April 10, 1865). "The Nation's Great Triumph". Philadelphia Press (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).]

And:

The existence of a Slave Power was dismissed by Southerners at the time, and rejected as false by many historians of the 1920s and 1930s, who stressed the internal divisions in the South before 1850.[5] The idea that the Slave Power existed has partly come back at the hands of neoabolitionist historians since 1970, and there is no doubt that it was a powerful factor in the Northern anti-slavery belief system. It was standard rhetoric for all factions of the Republican Party.[6] [...]

All from the Wikipedia article, Slave Power.

3.

Think back, Americans, to what you know about the actual start of the war, itself. How did the shooting actually start? What do you know? You know that the Southern states decided to secede from the Union, then what? Did you think the US sent troops in to reconquer them?

The opening shots of the American Civil War were those of the Confederacy firing on the Union's Fort Sumpter, April 12, 1861. South Carolinia – where Fort Sumpter is – had seceded on December 20, 1860, four months previously.

Fort Sumter is located in the middle of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.[129] Its status had been contentious for months. Outgoing President Buchanan had dithered in reinforcing the Union garrison in the harbor, which was under command of Major Robert Anderson. Anderson took matters into his own hands and on December 26, 1860, under the cover of darkness, sailed the garrison from the poorly placed Fort Moultrie to the stalwart island Fort Sumter.[130] Anderson's actions catapulted him to hero status in the North. An attempt to resupply the fort on January 9, 1861 failed and nearly started the war then and there. But an informal truce held.[131] On March 5, the newly sworn-in Lincoln was informed that the Fort was running low on supplies.[132]

[...] Lincoln ultimately decided that holding the fort, which would require reinforcing it, was the only workable option. Thus, on April 6, Lincoln informed the Governor of South Carolina that a ship with food but no ammunition would attempt to supply the Fort. Historian McPherson describes this win-win approach as "the first sign of the mastery that would mark Lincoln's presidency"; the Union would win if it could resupply and hold onto the Fort, and the South would be the aggressor if it opened fire on an unarmed ship supplying starving men.[134] An April 9 Confederate cabinet meeting resulted in President Davis's ordering General P. G. T. Beauregard to take the Fort before supplies could reach it.[135]

What the South termed the "War of Northern Aggression" was the War of Southern Aggression. The parties may have changed, but "every accusation is a confession" was true then, too.

The South didn't secede to protect their States' Rights. The North had respected the Southern states' rights to perpetrate atrocities, arguably to a fault. Lest you forget – or perhaps you never knew – there were slave states that stayed with the North. Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky did not feel that leaving the Union was necessary to protect slavery.

No, the South seceded because the North wouldn't let the South seize control of the entire country and dominate the other states. The "rights" the South was furious the North weren't allowing them were the "right" of Southern states to force Northern states to return escaped slaves, the "right" of Southern states to buy seats on Congress by trading in human chattels, and the "right" to force territories that wanted to enter the Union as free states to legalize slavery to get statehood, all in service of the "right" of the South to attain dominance of the entire country and subject all the citizens of the other states to its rule.

Fundamentally the "right" the Southern states wanted was the "right" to subvert and vanquish democracy, itself. The "states' right" the Southern states wanted was the right to overcome the democratically elected governments of the Northern States and obviate the laws of their legislatures. It was not enough for the South to practice slavery within its borders. It arrogated to itself the "right" to attack Northern states' autonomy as states, to force Northern states to submit to its rule, not merely so that the South could continue to enjoy slavery, but so that it would control the nation in all ways. As the Southern states saw it, only the Southern states should have any say in how the US was run. The other states shouldn't have as much – or really any – representation in Congress, the other states shouldn't be allowed to refuse to enforce the slave states' laws on their own soil.

From Wikipedia, American Civil War:

A long-running dispute over the origin of the Civil War is to what extent states' rights triggered the conflict. [...] Before the Civil War, the Southern states supported the use of federal powers to enforce and extend slavery, as with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.[89][90] The faction that pushed for secession often infringed on states' rights. Because of the overrepresentation of pro-slavery factions in the federal government, many Northerners, even non-abolitionists, feared the Slave Power conspiracy.[89][90] Some Northern states resisted the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Historian Eric Foner states that the act "could hardly have been designed to arouse greater opposition in the North. It overrode numerous state and local laws and legal procedures and 'commanded' individual citizens to assist, when called upon, in capturing runaways." He continues, "It certainly did not reveal, on the part of slaveholders, sensitivity to states' rights."[85] According to historian Paul Finkelman, "the southern states mostly complained that the northern states were asserting their states' rights and that the national government was not powerful enough to counter these northern claims."[86]

The idea that the Southern states were just quietly minding their own business when the North intruded upon them and curtailed their "States' rights" to do as they pleased is insane, and unconnected with the historical record.

And this matters, like it has never before mattered in your lifetimes, because here we are again. A group of states has been quietly hell-bent on subjugating their own population; this will inevitably prove unpopular within their borders, causing their citizens to flee to escape the effects of subjugating laws. Maybe they'll be okay with that. Maybe they'll be totally fine with their citizens crossing state lines to get the healthcare they've criminalized. Or, you know, maybe they won't be. Maybe they'll do the incredibly obvious and probably inevitable thing and assert the right to pass laws on other states' soil and force other states to prosecute their laws for them.

It should not be a surprise that people who thought that the buying and selling of human beings and that profiting from a racialized caste system are legitimate enterprises also believed that attempting to subjugate the entire nation is a natural entitlement. It should not be a surprise should it turn out that people who think that subjugating half their populations and criminalizing bodily autonomy also feel they have the right to put the rest of the country to the sword.

The people who do not think its wrong to reach into other people's bodies do not think its wrong to reach into other people's states.

This will end in bullets because this is not a conflict of equally plausible moral positions, but a conflict between a polity organized around the legitimacy of subjugating others and peoples who do not care to be subjugated and will not go quietly.

4.

I have heard a deeply terrible take that "civil war in the US is unlikely because grievance doesn’t necessarily translate directly into violence" by an alleged expert back in January which I found perplexing in its cluelessness. It assumed that the threat model of civil war is "violent extremism" "erupting" "into full-fledged conflict".

The idea that when civil war comes to the US, will bleed up from the grassroots is as woefully naive now as it was when John Brown lead an attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

The American Civil War happened when the South was thwarted in its attempts to crush American democracy by political mischief, declared themselves independent, and then at a time the US Army had 16,000 troops, raised their own army of 100,000. [W]

Our experience teaches us that civil war comes from the top down: when a powerful polity that controls more than their fair share of the country gets prevented from carrying out their dominating ambitions, and decides that if they can't win the game by cheating, they'll overturn the whole board.

Our history teaches us that civil war is the result of a power-mad minority trying to impose its will over the rest of the nation, by any means necessary.

In this, the American Civil War starts looking similar to many other wars that we don't think of as "civil wars", but wars of conquest – wars where somebody thought it would be nice to oust some other people's government and subjugate their states.

The threat model is not that a bunch of military larpers will decide to try to overthrow the federal government. The threat model is that a conquering-minded, anti-democractic movement will take over the federal government, and then as they subjugate the states that resist them, send in federal troops.

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Comments

Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[siderea]

Comment catcher comment for catching comments.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[writerkit]

While I hadn't heard it put together exactly like this, now that you have it's more of a "Oh, yes, that should have been blindingly obvious if I thought about it for half a second" than any real sense of surprise.

I am thinking my developing interest in disaster response should be made to flower sooner rather than later, based on this, with emphasis on practical skills.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[lferion]

I largely knew the pieces of that, but had never put them together. Thank you for laying it all out so clearly.

Appallingly, nightmare-inducingly, terrifyingly accurately clear.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[heron61]

This makes terrifying amounts of sense, and also has a corollary - my strong suspicion is that the side that wins will be the one who holds the presidency when things start happening. Given that this all looks fairly inevitable, I'm hoping it starts prior to November 2024, since I very much worry about various fascist election boards and secretaries of state stealing the election. On a more personal level, given that Portland is sadly now on the fascists map in a way it wasn't prior to 45's election, if this happens, I worry about people from Idaho attacking Portland - ugh.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[nancylebov]

For what it's worth, I don't think there will be a civil war in the sense of organized military on both sides, though maybe I should be more pessimistic about the US military splitting. A big insurgency is all too plausible.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[gingicat]

Abolition idealists among those arguing over the three-fifths clause were hoping that this would lead to freeing of slaves. Not that anyone really thought it would happen.

I think that one of my teachers may have pointed to "Bloody Kansas" as one of the precursors to the Civil War. But I don't ever recall seeing the analysis this well packaged.

Prison labor has replaced slave labor, even to our allegedly enlightened times.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[jjhunter]

We haven't eradicated all our variants on the Three-Fifths Compromise.

The Sentencing Project: Locked Out 2020: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction

5.2 million Americans are forbidden to vote because of felony disenfranchisement, or laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes.

There is an extremely highly overlap between the states where abortions are being criminalized and the states where a felony conviction is sufficient to permanently disenfranchise people, or at least people currently serving sentences are not permitted their vote.

Where state prisons are located in whose districts becomes a form of gerrymandering when the prisoners are not permitted a voice in their representation.

I am deeply, deeply concerned about this nasty nexus of forced breeding policies, legalized disenfranchisement for people trying to 'evade' those policies and those who help them compounding already robust systems of disenfranchisement via mass incarceration, not to mention active, organized infiltration of state and local-level positions with impact on election logistics by white supremacists and other hate groups.

Every time I hear people bemoaning liberals not getting out to vote now I think of all the people who desperately do want to vote and have been stripped of their right to do so, or who aren't considered 'old' enough to vote but are apparently old enough to get raped and forced to carry the baby to term, or who have the right but can't get time off work or help with child care or transportation to a polling place or disability accommodations like remote voting or - !

Those people count too, you know? And it is a crime that they are being prohibited from having a voice so they are respected in being accounted for.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[cvirtue]

Typo alert: double “will”

“The idea that when civil war comes to the US, will will bleed up from the grassroots is as woefully naive now as it was when John Brown lead an attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859.“

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[moodsong]

I did not know that.

Edit: For the person who jokingly asked me about it last time. I looked it up, canadians can't sponsor non-family immigrants.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[razielim]

I'd always thought of it as "Sure, the Civil War was about States' Rights... States' Rights to not enforce or participate in slavery."

The nuance of the 3/5's thing I'd long since forgotten about, and wow, I don't even remember learning about the start of the war, though surely I must have.

I don't yet feel like we're inexorably hurtling towards civil war and/or Bushwick, but that may just be because I don't want to hurtle towards it. The possibility, however, is far from a crackpot theory. People might have trouble imagining our society descending into violence and destruction from its perilous pleasant perch, but that's not a good reason for dismissal of the possibility.

I'm reading The Prince this week, and reading your post, I'm thinking about the last fifteen years of US history, the mounting tension which has had no direction for safe diffusion. To delay a war which is inevitable is to give your enemy the chance to prepare and seize the best possible opportunity to strike first, and all that. Has this potential war been brewing since 2008? But I'm all wrapped up in my conviction that, on principle, NO war is inevitable. And if I entertain the theory that some are, how do I know the difference between the two types? If you start treating any possible brewing war as a certain future war, then they all become self-fulfilling.

I'll say the same thing I said to my dad when he asked Feb 23rd whether I think there will be a war in Ukraine. If enough powerful people want war, they will make war. And I fear many powerful people want war, this one and others.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[mellowtigger]

Nice collection of history here. I agree with your ideas. The course of future-history seems plausible to me, based on the patterns you've explained. I'll write up a quick summary now and point people to this link.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[sniffnoy]

OTOH, here's a 2018 article by Samo Burja on why civil war in the US is unlikely (this is a different article than the one you mention above, I read that one too :P ). In short: There's not really any other force within the US that can oppose the federal government and the US military; the civil war was possible because states were more powerful back then, modern-day US states wouldn't be able to do that.

That sounds about right

[wobblegong]

I have been internally referring the hideously evil, "conservative" political element as... I hadn't come up with a single pithy term for it, but just the mental image/impression of the slavers and slaveholders from American's not-distant-enough past. I do not enjoy being this literally correct.

I'd really like a better term for them though. "Conservative" obviously doesn't work in the slightest– I was taught that when used politically it refers to people who want things to not change, which would be the most screamingly hilarious claim you could make about these bastards rolling back every law of the last century as fast as they can find its jugular. "Radical right" still feels like it's pointing more at the domestic terrorist type, which is a compatible type of evil but IMO distinct from the kind of calculated political evil that wants to build a pyramid of human corpses. Hmm. Well, I'm sure we'll have a term before long, particularly as all of this picks up speed.

Thank you as always for your posts– better to see what might be coming more than five minutes in advance. Even if nobody in my life wants to hear it, there's always some things I could get started on now without explaining myself.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[(Anonymous)]

This is all fascinating of course, but the question is what do to about it? Not to stop it from happening...if that's even possible, I have no idea how to do it. I mean is there anything at all that a person could to do prepare? Besides leave the country entirely, I mean, which is not going to be possible for most people.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[ckd]

I feel like the Civil War didn't really "end"; it simply turned into a Cold War with periodic flare-ups of violence punctuating a longer-term and more subtle infiltration effort by the spiritual descendants of the Slave Power.

An effort which has been far too successful.

Historical trivia note: the Massachusetts seat in the US Senate once held by Charles Sumner, famously physically attacked in the Senate chamber after denouncing slavery, is now held by Elizabeth Warren.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[malovich]

So, War poked its head in.

Yeah, this is how the chaos unfolds. I am both depressed (a *lot* of people didn't want to believe this was actually happening and I could see it like a straight line; people went 'its okay in limited contexts but it won't go *much* further' for over fifty years) and also feeling a bit helpless as it careens towards the edge. The US is incredibly influential and where they go, everyone re-evaluates.

...but the general sense that we can do whatever we like to others if we can influence the consequences pervades society and people don't seem to understand the far-reaching implications of this...

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[megpie71]

I was reading in the Guardian today about the latest decision by the US Supreme Court (the one about effectively limiting the power of the EPA) and it occurred to me - this sort of thing, this deliberate limiting of the power of the federal government and federal government agencies, is the sort of thing which is intended to break the union of the states. It's intended to effectively turn the USA into a bunch of warring micro-states, each arguing their way of doing things is best.

And it's being done in the pursuit of power and profit, same as always.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[londo]

This is why I was shitting myself 24 months ago when MA and MD both had governors openly admitting to sending state troopers to guard shipments in case Feds tried to seize them again.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[alexxkay]

I knew maybe half of this, and was already convinced that we are rapidly moving towards ACW2.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[graydon]

As much as possible, exercise choice in how you respond to an enemy.

It's important to recognise that the frame of a second civil war is the slaver faction frame; they want one, so they can win it and restore the honour of their ancestors and their own honour. (Being told you're bad for wanting what makes you good in your construction of virtue upsets anybody; it especially upsets authoritarians.)

The observation that the slavers will not stop of their own will is sound; there's been a generational response to civil rights, female suffrage, and just generally the idea that being easily sunburnt doesn't make you special to insist that no, no, patriarchal white supremacy is what god wants.

Thing is, you can also recognise a couple of other things. They don't have anything like majority support. (And it's got strong demographic skew; the US gerontocracy is there in part because the generations younger than X are demographically crazed radicals compared to boomer norms.) They're afraid, and will speak compulsively about the nature of their fears. (You can use that; doing everything the right-wing propaganda effort is insisting is bad would be better policy than currently enacted.)

That provides an alternative frame -- it's a criminal conspiracy and could be treated as such. The civil power to reduce them to a condition of obedience exists, and has not been exercised more or less because the people exercising the civil power are fellow white men. The effort to corrupt courts stems from this; the intense focus on anti-diversity stems from this.

That exercise of the civil power takes facts and forthrightness and most of all it takes wanting to solve the problem -- to end the cultural transmission of the slaver culture -- but it's entirely doable by means short of war. The "it has to be war, war is inevitable, and we'll win" is the slaver frame, and like nigh-everything else they say, the factual basis of the frame is highly questionable.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[razielim]

Coming back with a thought: Have you read Democracy In Chains by Nancy MacLean? I think you'd find a lot of its extra shades to this narrative of interest.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[elusis]

Inslee has also said WA will not enforce other states' laws against people traveling to WA for abortion.

BTW according to a friend doing a bunch of movement work, the terminology they're wanting folks to use are "sending" and "receiving" states.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[ageorwizardry]

This kind of post is exactly why I read you.

I was indeed taught, growing up in Alabama in the 90s, that states' rights were the cause of the Civil War. I understood this as The Correct Answer To Put On Tests, but it never made sense to me; it seemed like a meaningless circumlocution—state's rights to do what? To continue slavery, so: same difference.

I never knew about all the things Northern states did to disobey federal-level pro-slavery laws, and of course how exactly backwards that makes the actual role of states' rights in the Civil War from what is usually claimed. (They always do like to claim being oppressed when they're the ones doing the oppressing, don't they.)

I'm also reminded that some years ago I saw someone speculating that if states used their powers to advance progressive causes, Republicans might be bound to respect those results, because of their long commitment to states' rights—and I was gobsmacked that anyone being professionally paid to have a clue about politics could possibly think that states' rights were a genuinely held principle of Republicans, as opposed to just a tool they use to achieve their goals. Of course they don't give a fuck about states' rights when they're being used to achieve different goals.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[403]

Although few of the implications were spelled out, and the phrase “slave power” never appeared, I recall that the bits about the 3/5ths compromise granting the South disproportionate power, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and the fact that the South started the Civil War at Ft. Sumter, were all in my (public) high school U.S. History textbook. In AZ, in ~2002. It was utterly uncontroversial at the time. And I’ve been wondering why so few U.S.-ians in the present day see the obvious parallels lining up.

Just today, it clicked that my mom was shocked when she found that the same textbook talked about the smallpox blankets given to Native peoples at various times from (at least) the 1700s onward. When she was in school, the system only taught that there had been repeated epidemics. So maybe most people *don’t* know this stuff, after all.

Re: Comment catcher: The Second American Civil War

[sleeperchance]

I'd been reluctantly reaching the conclusion that ACW2 is coming over the last month or two. Your post cemented it, and I've gotten to about Step 0.5 planning. Already accepted and starting to figure out what to do, and spreading the news. So, thank you.

It's occurred to me that the Confederates used their own scrip, and to wonder about what will happen with financial markets and money in autonomy states. I expect all federal funding to those states to disappear.