Former Russian Prime Minister and longtime Vladimir Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev recently made a bold prediction that the United States would soon collapse into a second civil war brought on by the 2024 presidential election. While such dire prognostication would usually be dismissed quickly as hyperbolic post-Soviet propaganda spewed by a government hit hard by U.S. sanctions, it’s impossible to dismiss such a concept completely when many Americans worry about the same possibility.
The more outspoken and partisan voices from both sides of the political spectrum see a country facing calcifying polarization, economic division, and growing threats of violence modeled on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and the post-George Floyd riots. They not only wonder out loud if the U.S. is hurtling toward internal large-scale armed conflict but seem resigned to some brand of sociopolitical or economic damage forging an irreparable divide among its citizens.
When they emerge from their books and battlefields, the scholars and historians specializing in the original Civil War, from 1861-65, rarely believe that sort of starkly regional conflict would occur in 21st-century America. Instead, they watch out for skirmishes and armed uprisings playing out along ideological lines.
The historians’ vigil sharpens all the more with two assassination attempts taking place in close order against a presidential candidate. Those events beg the question of what is still to come between now and November.
Greg Downs is a history professor and departmental chairman at the University of California, Davis. He reminds his students that conflict is not only normal in politics but the essence of it. As a result, the presence of division in the American landscape is not an inescapable predictor of coming warfare.
“Violence becoming more prevalent in politics is a different story than normal political tension,” Downs said. “There should be ongoing efforts to remove violence from our electoral and governmental systems.”
By way of comparison as to how comparatively civil the political scene is today, Downs turns history’s clock back to the 1840s, when voters had to fight their way to the ballot box as a predictor of the bloody flight to follow along the Mason-Dixon Line. While people are not yet seeing fights in polling places, he insists today’s electoral scene teeters on the edge of recurring violence if tensions become endemic.
“When violence threatens the way people vote or how they’re able to express themselves, that would be a huge problem,” he added. “But that’s not yet a civil war.”
Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper chairwoman in American history at the University of Connecticut. As president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, she agrees with Downs that a large-scale armed conflict like that which raged from 1861-65 is unlikely to occur today. Still, she seems some echoes of that war in the nation’s current divisions.
“As a Civil War historian, I’ve been seeing many people from the Left and the Right saying we are on the brink of another civil war,” Sinha said. “I think that’s really irresponsible. Today’s political violence is concerning, but it’s nowhere near a full-blown war. When people draw these very simple, facile historical analogies, I would caution them to be more careful.”
While rejecting alarmist warnings, Sinha described a relationship between the conflicts of the 1860s and today’s ideological red-state-blue-state divisions that make “civil war” talk fashionable.
“There is some overlap between states that were former slave states that became part of the Confederacy and what we call red states today,” she explained. “But we didn’t have many of the states of the American West then. Though the red vs. blue map of today’s ideology can’t match exactly the map of the 19th Century, we still live with the legacy of those original Civil War questions that weren’t fully resolved.”
Sinha sees a country still wrestling with problems such as interracial democracy, national birthright citizenship, the banning of insurrectionists, and voter suppression.
Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown distinguished chairman for leadership in global affairs and professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. His book, Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy, looks beyond the historical concept of nationwide conflict while seeing the possibility of ample violence on a less organized scale.
“Today’s violence will run along partisan lines,” Suri said. “What could be different in the future from the kind of skirmishes we’ve become accustomed to since the Civil War is we could have a central figure today organizing and encouraging it.”
Suri nominated former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as possible rabble-rousers-in-chief. If Republicans lose ground in the 2024 election, Suri believes some in the GOP will believe the “game is rigged” and will call on their supporters to take hostile action.
“I see it going beyond the previous attempts of creating fake electors and shifting to violence with threats against elected officials or nonelected personnel playing important roles in the electoral process,” Suri added.
While Suri focuses on threats in the wake of a Trump loss, Downs can imagine only one scenario in which a large armed conflagration would consume lives along significant swaths of territory.
“Such a conflict would require a serious division in the High Command of the United States Military that ruptures the Officer Corps,” Downs proposed. “That could cause the kind of division you saw in the original Civil War. If we really did see that military hierarchy divided by some constitutional interpretation, then my thoughts on a potential second civil war would change very quickly.”
Fortunately, Downs sees today’s citizens as too distracted by disposal, rapidly evolving news cycle, and endless social media to invest in such a destructive armed campaign.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In Connecticut, Sinha believes there are ways for today’s citizens to turn away from division and the threats of political violence.
“Ordinary American citizens can support the traditions of representational government by not becoming beguiled by hateful rhetoric,” she said. “That amounts to not demonizing people and watching out for conspiracy theories that we know emerge from enemies of the United States.”
John Lewinski, MFA, is a writer based in Milwaukee.
