We look at Civil Wars in Ancient Rome, modern Russia, China, and Spain and briefly at our own Civil War. We also address the question: is a 2nd American Civil War in the offing?
We look at Civil Wars in Ancient Rome, modern Russia, China, and Spain and briefly at our own Civil War. We also address the question: is a 2nd American Civil War in the offing?
Civil Wars in History
April 2024
“For many Romans, civil war remained the war that dared not speak its name. The words bellum civile had to be weighed carefully and spoken sparingly, if ever at all, because of the harsh memories of major conflicts.”
David Armitage, in his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.”
Abraham Lincoln
Sometimes, American political communications systems, which deliver opinions and policy on politics, can historically resemble a snake that just ate a giant rat, narrow on both ends with a bulge in the middle. What I mean is that in the early days of our Republic, the average American voter (a white male) would have received a narrow scope of information. A Massachusetts fisherman would have considered something tailored and unique to his views compared to what a Louisiana farmer would have seen. “The influence and circulation of newspapers is beyond anything ever known in Europe. In truth, nine-tenths of the population read nothing else,” wrote Scottish writer Thomas Hamilton, who arrived in 1830. “Every village, nay, almost every hamlet, has its press.” I like this quote because Hamilton noted “its” press.
Ken Ellingwood, writing for LitHub notes,
Despite the noble-sounding talk about the ideals of democracy, American newspapering by 1830 also was a rough-edged trade, often practiced by not-very-educated men and frequently in the service of narrow political ends. Scholars politely refer to the phase of American journalism as the era of the “party press,” when most newspapers had a strongly partisan bent or were sponsored financially by one political party or the other and treated as its mouthpiece.
The Massachusetts fisherman would have read the Whig-run Boston Atlas. The Louisiana farmer, assuming he received a newspaper, might have read the Baton Rouge Gazette.
The regionalism of information ended in the early part of the 20th century with the advent of radio. I have many issues with Franklin D Roosevelt that I will not illuminate here. Still, I have to admit his radio use during the Great Depression was mastery of the art of communication. Whether a farmer in Georgia, a Steel Worker in Pennsylvania, or a miner in Colorado, all would have gotten the same messages and seen FDR’s vision of America through the same lens. The 1930s through 1990s were the bulge in the snake’s belly.
There were still local sources, of course. Growing up in East Central Wisconsin, my local newspaper, the Post Crescent, contained an abundance of news about the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) because those were the folks who regulated hunting and fishing (or huntin and fishin in the local dialect). When I lived in Chicago, the Tribune had little about catching muskies or deer hunting season, but it had a great deal about murder rates and corrupt aldermen.
But the nightly news and other sources still provided a national connection. For a mercifully short 30 minutes, over half the country would watch news rendered by similar sources. Was there bias inherent in that news? Of course. Walter Cronkite was not conservative. Dan Rather was far worse.
But Network TV news, though certainly seeking viewers, was driven by mass marketing advertisers. Republicans and Democrats bought Chevies and drank Coca-Cola. They wanted big audiences, so the Networks took pains to curb too much ideology within their broadcasts lest they lose audience chunks.
The advent of niche cable news and social media has changed that. Advertisers will pay more to ensure the audience is loyal and stable. Additionally, the switch in content production from an advertising-driven model to a subscriber one changes the type of content produced. With ad dollars increasingly going to social media and audiences self-selecting the content they wish to see, it became more important to have a smaller but intensely dedicated audience than a large one.
Walter Cronkite commanded 29 million viewers compared to Sean Hannity’s 2.3 million, yet Hannity’s annual salary of $25 million is twice that of Cronkite’s, even if adjusted for inflation. If one watches only Fox News and listens to Dan Bongino, one will have a different view of the world than if one listens only to Rachel Maddow or reads the New York Times opinion columns.
It is this kind of ideological segmentation where we get the silly idea of an impending civil war. This podcast is problematic for me as I believe those discussing this possibility, much less than those advocating it, are a tiny, somewhat addled group. Yet in a country where we have ended up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as our presidential choices, where a small Islamic community in Dearborn, Michigan, can change 80 years of Democratic Party support to Israel, a place where Charlie Kirk and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are a thing, then I think I need to address this issue.
So, I will provide a brief primer on historical civil wars and then examine the chance of one actually happening in the early 21st-century United States.
After nearly 400 years, the Republic of Rome, founded in 509 BCE, encountered something unprecedented, with implications lasting centuries. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, feeling he had been cheated out of his rights by rivals led by his onetime mentor and friend Gaius Marius, marched his army on Rome itself. The Gauls conquered and occupied Rome in the 400s, and in the 200s, Hannibal Barca and his Carthaginian Army threatened the city.
But not since the time of the Roman Kings had two Roman armies engaged in a Civil War and marched an army on Rome itself. That ended with Sulla successfully ousting the Marians. But Sulla’s triumph was the onset of fifty years of Roman civil war that ended only with the emergence of Octavian as sole ruler—in addition to Sulla and Marius, Roman Civil Wars resounded with names familiar to us today, including Pompey the Great, Marc Antony, Cassius Longinus, Marcus Junius Brutus, Cleopatra, and most of all, Gaius Julius Caesar, Octavian’s great uncle.
Throughout the history of the Republic, class rivalries were often a prominent factor in Roman politics. First, the noble Patricians were pitted against the Plebeians. After the latter had achieved their highest offices and nobility, the opposition morphed into the Optimates vs. the Populists. The former wanted to maintain Oligarchic rule and the Mos Memoria, the traditions of Rome. The Populists, viewing all the changes wrought by acquiring a far-flung empire, wished to see changes, including adding millions of citizens to the Republic. Though Marius was a populist and Sulla leader of the Optimates (the aristocrats), it was also a personal battle between two men. By the time of the final conflict between Antony and Octavian, both adherents of populist Julius Caesar, any pretense of ideology was dispensed. The Roman Republic, which had proved spectacularly successful in imposing Roman hegemony over Italy, was unsuited for ruling an Empire that spanned over three continents consisting of 2.3 million square miles and contained 65 million people. One-person rulers dominated the ancient world, and Rome would follow this course.
Many wars involve two or three people vying for the right to rule in a country, and we do not usually tag them as civil wars. The battles of Darius I, who ascended the throne by overthrowing the Achaemenid monarch Bardiya (who he claimed was, in fact, an imposter named Gaumata), do not qualify as a civil war even though they were Persian vs. Persian. Rather, we make the distinction that a civil war was fought between citizens or peoples of the same nation as opposed to dynasts.
Many of the dynastic wars throughout history were fought between mercenary armies. Though the Roman Civil War ended as a conflict between dynastic individuals, its roots were between factions expressing differentiated views on the politics of their time.
Because these wars began with an idea or spiritual belief instead of, I want your land; there is often a notable bitterness. One of the commonalities of history is that groups who should be allies usually approach each other with greater bitterness. The slaughter of Sunnis by Shias or vice versa in the Islamic World seems puzzling to non-Muslims. The Thirty Years’ War in Germany was between two groups of the same ethnicity and of the same religion, massacring each other. And our own Civil War certainly illustrates this premise. “The pressure to define civil war is often inversely related to the political stakes for offering such a definition: the higher the pressure, to be precise, the greater the chance that exactitude will itself be a source of political contention,” adds Armitage.
The 30 Years’ War in Germany was about Religion with the Protestants vs. the Catholics. But in a real sense, it was a civil war with Germany that ended with the deaths of nearly a third of the population. In a piece by Pascal Daudin entitled “The Thirty Years’ War: The First Modern War?” states,
The Thirty Years’ War was a complex, protracted conflict between many parties. It was a series of separate yet connected international and internal conflicts waged by regular and irregular military forces, partisan groups, private armies, and conscripts. Because it had a profound, lasting impact on Europe at the time – drawing in entire sections of contemporary society both on and off the battlefield – it might rightly be described as an example of total war. And though there were French, Swedish, and Spanish participants, Germans fought it mainly in Germany.
The Russian Civil War fought between 1918 and 1922, is arguably the most important civil war of the 20th century. It changed the lives of over half a billion people and dramatically shaped the geography of Europe, the Far East, and Asia. Over a four-year period, 20 countries, including the United States, battled in a crucible that would give birth to Communist revolutions worldwide and the Cold War.
One of the oddities of the beginnings of this war was whose side to choose. The Germans were initially wary of the Bolsheviks for fear of a workers’ revolt in their nations, especially after four years of fruitless war. Yet the allies, Britain, the United States, and France, were not exactly keen on a communist Russia either. Eventually, the allies supported the “whites,” a disparate coalition of anti-Bolshevik parties. Yet, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, the Red Army handed victory to the Bolsheviks.
The Chinese Civil War, fought between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party (GMD) from 1946-1950, was a defining conflict for China, East Asia, and the world. The Civil War included several large battles and campaigns and was notable for the involvement of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The CCP’s victory and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 shifted the balance of power in the emerging Cold War.
Because Putin mirrors the efforts, governance, and goals of the original Russian Communists who ruled his nation, the results of that war are with us today. Even more profoundly, Mao’s eventual victory in China led to a face-off in which the CCP, still in power 75 years later, represents a key challenge for the US.
On July 18, 1936, troops under the leadership of General Francisco Franco began an uprising against the democratically elected government of Spain. This revolt quickly escalated into a civil war. The Spanish Civil War is sometimes called a prelude to World War II because of the involvement of so many foreign powers, including Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who provided weapons and supplies to Franco’s side, called the Nationalists. Republicans, who supported the overthrown democratic Republic, were supported with munitions and money from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Volunteers, nicknamed the International Brigades, came from Ireland, France, Poland, Canada, and the United States. (The group from the US called themselves the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”) Many celebrities, such as British writer George Orwell and American novelist Ernest Hemingway, supported the Republican cause. International volunteers from France, Portugal, and Morocco also supported Franco. Celebrities who supported the Nationalists included British novelist J.R.R. Tolkien and American writer Gertrude Stein.
There was very much a class aspect to the Spanish Civil War, reflected by the involvement of nations such as Soviet Russia. Conservative elements in the clergy, military, and landowners supported the nationalists. The ruling Republican government, led by the socialist premiers Francisco Largo Caballero and Juan Negrín (1894–1956) and the liberal president Manuel Azaña y Díaz, was supported by workers and many in the educated middle class as well as militant anarchists and communists. The religious aspect was also prominent, as many Republicans murdered Spanish Priests and decried Catholicism.
Eventually, the Republicans were destroyed. Franco remained Spain’s dictator for nearly 40 years. Spain was a nonbelligerent during World War II but supplied economic and military assistance to the Axis powers during the conflict. About 500,000 people died in the war, and the trauma deeply scarred all Spaniards. Franco, who owed much of his success to Germany and Italy, never formally joined the Axis, which was a wise move in hindsight, but Franco was a survivor.
The seeds of the United States Civil War were planted at the very inception of the Republic. Benjamin Franklin openly campaigned against allowing slavery to continue. George Washington freed his slaves on his death. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, called it a “moral depravity,” a “hideous blot,” and contrary to the laws of nature. Jefferson, better than anybody, knew the contradiction of a Declaration espousing liberty while simultaneously denying it to millions.
Yet the new nation was trapped. Knowing that the five most Southern states, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Maryland, and even Virginia, the largest state at that time, would not tolerate an outright abolition of slavery, the decision was made to allow it to continue. The possibility of an American Civil was averted many times in compromises in 1820 and 1850, but the threat always loomed.
In the 1830s, it was through sheer force of will that Andrew Jackson, an owner of slaves, prevented a civil war by facing down a secessionist threat from South Carolina. So when the Civil War began in 1861, after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, it was very much along geographical lines that reflected the politics of each region: free states to the North and slaves to the South.
Today, there is a new concept online, in books, and in movies – the Second American Civil War. There are now several renderings of possible regional enclaves, such as the one in my transcript showing the country divided into ten regions and asking who’d win. The issue with this particular conjecture is that you have politically differentiated states that often share the same region. Utah is deep red, but Colorado is increasingly blue, yet they share the same region. Illinois and Indiana are also together. I have a home in Illinois, the land of JB Pritzker, and I can tell you it had little to do with the state that gave us Mike Pense despite their common Midwestern heritage.
Townhall columnist and conservative commentator Kurt Schlicter, also a former lawyer and retired infantry Colonel, has a series of books titled “America’s Growing Political and Cultural Divisions Have Finally Split the United States Apart. Now, as the former blue states begin to collapse under the dead weight of their politically correct tyranny, called The People’s Republic of the United States.”
In addition to this madness, we now have a movie coming called Civil War, which is described as “A 2024 dystopian action film. The plot follows a team of journalists who travel across the United States during a rapidly escalating Second American Civil War, which has engulfed the entire nation. One of the factions is the “Western Alliance, a team-up of Texas and California. Uh-huh, Greg Abbot and Gavin Newsom probably disagree on the color of the sky, so it’s a little rich to imagine their becoming war alliance besties. Another faction is the “Florida Alliance.” At least that one would make sense from a surface view. There is a homogeneity of politics from Louisiana to Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.
Well, sort of, this gets us to the idiocy of those predicting, or worse, advocating, some sort of regional civil war. IL is a bluer-than-blue state. Well, actually, three counties out of the 102 in the state, Lake, DuPage, and Cook, the home of Chicago, vote solidly Democrat. The Rest of the state is ruby red. Conversely, TX, which has not elected a Dem governor since Ann Richards over 30 years ago, is considered stalwart red. Unless one looks at Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, and Austin. All are solidly Democratic cities. So, under this scenario, hordes of Chicagoan militia would have to fan out to conquer the geography of Illinois. And the newly constituted rightist brigades of Texas Rangers would have to engage in street fighting to “liberate” San Antonio (and the Alamo) from forces of leftist tyranny.
Again, all of this is ludicrous, but I go through this exercise to note that the difference is not red states vs. blue states but increasingly rural and suburban vs. urban. Something past civilizations would have understood. And for the people who believe in impending civil war, and again, the tiny faction who advocate such a thing, represent the fundamental dichotomy in American politics.
The issue with our nation today is not one of left vs right or even urban vs. rural but of normalcy vs. chaos. Of compromise vs. purity. Of adherence to traditional institutions vs. identity and tribal politics. Of loyalty to radical policies on the left to loyalty to a radical personality on the right. One group who sees opponents within our Republic, with loyalty to that Republic paramount, to loyalty to one’s political tribe and those in the other tribe, they are not opponents but enemies.
Part of this is due to the balkanization of information now enabled by the plethora of news sources, as I have noted above. When there were three channels on TV or two local papers in a community, they may have differed, but the incentives were for a broad array of viewers (and advertising played a part in that). There are several other causes that would take a book, much less a podcast, to describe, but I am focusing on media today. In an effort to build off the fears and anxieties of the other, it is compelling media content creators and normal social media users to suggest that a second civil war is pending. And though this possibility is very remote, stranger things have happened. There is a funny scene in the Michael J Fox 1985 movie adventure Back to the Future, where our protagonist Marty McFly goes back in time to meet his mentor and friend, Dr. Emmet Brown. The genius inventor does not believe Marty’s insistence that he is from the future. It does not help that when Brown asks Marty who was President in 1985, and Marty states Ronald Reagan, Brown scoffs, “The movie actor! And who is the VP, Jerry Lewis!”
If one travelled back today (a trip as long as Marty’s ALAS) to 1995 and told a denizen of that time that Donald Trump was once (and future?) president, the scoffing would be even more voluminous. In such a world, I have to deal with the issue of a second American Civil War.