There might be a bit of violence, but if you think that Americans are going to all out war instead of just accepting the election results and whining about it on twitter then you're mistaken.
There might be a bit of violence, but if you think that Americans are going to all out war instead of just accepting the election results and whining about it on twitter then you're mistaken.
The vast, vast majority of people don't need to take up arms for it to be a civil war. If it happens, it isn't going to look like a redux of the first American civil war, with large armies on two well-defined sides meeting in open battle. It's going to look like the bad nights in Portland, or like Kenosha, but in lots of places and on a regular basis. If Americans are regularly shooting and killing other Americans in the streets on a significant scale over political ideologies, that's a civil war no matter what the news calls it.
Think the Troubles rather than Antietam
Yeah, exactly. It'll look more like what we'd maybe be inclined to call "civil unrest" in the West. That's just what civil wars look like in the 21st century, though--small-scale, brief, intense clashes between small minorities of highly motivated people with a wide spectrum of different motivations.
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The future is Fallujah not Gettysburg
Not even Fallujah, I think--more chaotic than that. In Fallujah, you had "standard" asymmetric warfare, with a relatively normal professional army on one side, and guerilla fighters on the other. I think it's unlikely in the extreme that we'll see anything like that in the United States. That is, I think it's unlikely in the extreme that we're going to have a Red Dawn type situation, where ordinary Americans are resisting an army (ours or anyone else's). I really think the model we should have in our heads is the most violent days of the George Floyd protests over the summer: loosely knit coalitions of civilians fighting each other, with the organized police and military sort of taking advantage of the chaos to fight everyone. A genuine civil war would deepen existing divides, and may even divide the cops and the military. It's not going to be the house-to-house fighting of Fallujah with a disciplined, professional group on one side and civilians on the other. It's mostly going to be civilian vs. civilian, with the "professionals" caught in the middle.