The Second American Civil War
The Americans have no shared values and no trusted mechanism to resolve their differences. This would be a recipe for civil war, even if they were not armed to the teeth. Which they are.
In this post, we summarise some of the divisions in the United States, to help readers take a holistic view of where the US is right now. The picture is grim. The Americans of the left, who believe that the United States is racist, sexist and guilty of all manner of original sin, have very little in common with traditional Americans who think this is the land of the free and home of the brave. The institutions that keep a republic functioning – the perception of an independent judiciary, of unbiased media and of fair elections – are no longer trusted. When institutional processes are no longer trusted, and shared values break down, violence becomes the obvious solution. This is especially so when the elites or the oligarchs are also divided irreconcilably.
Below, we expand on the main divisions, omitting many that are less relevant, and explain why we think a dramatic increase in political violence, probably reaching the level of civil war, is inevitable in the next decade. What this violence may look like will be addressed in a future post.
Breakdown in institutional trust
Mistrust in elections: we note that the New York Times is reporting that US election results will not be known on the day, and that several days will be required for postal voting to be counted in some swing states. The NYT warned that early results would show a Trump victory, and then postal ballots would change the picture. We had identified that as a key indicator of increased risk of violence following the November elections. Florida, the US’ third most populous state, does permit postal voting. However, it is also able to announce a final tally within 12-16 hours of voting ending. This is the historic norm that applied through 2016, and that applies throughout the developed world. This only changed with the very unusual COVID measures in 2020, and it is unclear why it would persist in 2024. The changes lead many Americans to believe – not unreasonably – that there is now much more room for cheating.
Polarised judiciary: The quality of judges nominated under President Biden has been exceptionally low, with ideology and racial and sexual identity prioritised over competence. The Supreme Court may end up with another two vacant seats in the next presidential term, making the election more important for both parties. The judges under Trump have overturned critical precedents, not just Roe v Wade, but also, Chevron, which gave the permanent bureaucracy much of its rule-setting power. This is unusual, in that overturning precedent implies fundamental conflicts over values. Democrats are already talking about this, and are suggesting increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to permit more Democratic appointees, in order to guarantee outcomes in line with Democrats’ values. Both sides increasingly view the judiciary as politicised, reducing the ability of political opponents to resolve their disagreements through the legal system.
Prosecution of political rivals: After the American Civil War ended, the only prosecutions of Confederates were for those who had executed prisoners of war. That reflected the confidence of the new regime, which was eager to welcome the defeated side back into the fold. Trump, by contrast, stands accused of a litany of crimes, with prosecutors often relying on very novel legal theories, or on legal changes that seemed tailormade to target Trump. The charges against Trump relating to the January 6, 2021, riot would suggest that one day of minor rioting – during which Trump called for protests to remain peaceful – was a bigger threat to the American Republic than four years of civil war. This is a somewhat extreme claim. And Trump is not alone in being prosecuted: aides and allies like Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro and Rudy Giuliani have also been targeted, often in cases where Democrats had undertaken nearly identical actions and faced no consequences. From the perspective of Republicans, who, like almost three quarters of independents, mistrust mainstream media, these are political prosecutions and will expand under a Harris administration. That in turn makes it more important to ensure that their man wins.
Breakdown in shared interests
Project 2025: A Trump administration will have to recruit loyalists, given Trump’s experience in his first administration. Although Trump has repeatedly disavowed project 2025 – a plan by the Heritage Foundation to help a conservative administration govern – he most likely has no choice but to recruit in accordance with its recommendations, including by firing many long-serving members of the security and intelligence bureaucracies. This is perceived as an existential threat by the security establishment - that is another reason why so many national security professionals who backed previous Republican presidents and candidates – and their ruinous and unproductive wars in the Middle East - support Ms Harris.
Intra-elite conflict: Moreover, the oligarchic monied class in the United States is also bitterly divided. There are many billionaires who support Kamala Harris, including in BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and, more broadly, Hollywood and Wall Street. However, there is now a new class of billionaires that is more open in its support for Donald Trump. That it includes Peter Thiel – who controls Palantir, the world’s most sophisticated mass surveillance software – and Elon Musk – whose SpaceX is absolutely critical for national security and military communications – is of enormous significance. It means that critical components of the US’ security infrastructure are opposed to the current order.
Breakdown in shared identity and values
Immigration: Over 7 million people have entered the United States illegally under President Joe Biden. Legal migration is at around one million per year. This places enormous upward pressure on the prices of basic goods, including housing and food, and downward pressure on wages. Migration not only causes economic dislocation, but it also dilutes the votes of existing voters, who are majority white, and who increasingly believe that the system is working against them. That they believe so is more important than whether it is true. Moreover, the immigration question reflects a fundamental divide over identity: either there is a nation that is bound by heritage, language, ancestry, and patrimony, or human beings are interchangeable cogs, and anyone from anywhere can adopt any identity.
DEI: The prioritisation of non-citizens and of minorities over the majority is a very unusual and polarising policy that is not replicated anywhere outside the modern West – equality of opportunity is assured through meritocracy, not through discrimination against the majority. For whites in the American rust belt, or in rural areas, being told that they are privileged and should be de-prioritised in jobs, education and other opportunities is likely to backfire and drive them to Trump, or to further right options if Trump loses.
Breakdown of trust in opponents: President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have cast former President Trump as a dangerous extremist who is a threat to democracy. Their allies have cast him as an aspiring fascist dictator. And Trump has done nothing if not return the favour, claiming that the judicial system has been weaponised against him, that his opponents are communists, and that they are facilitating an invasion of America. Heated political rhetoric is normal. What is less normal is to cast opponents as traitors and as threats to the very system that permits the peaceful alternation of power. Trump started this trend with his threat to jail his then-rival, Hillary Clinton.
Breakdown of shared values: This is controversial, to put it mildly, but I humbly invite you to examine it with an open mind.
Transgenderism is perhaps the defining political issue of our time. Not because of the number or attributes of transgender individuals, but because of the division over the nature of reality that it reflects. Either reality is objective and observable, or feelings trump truth. Only the former worldview permits dialogue and reason.
The entire Democratic Congressional leadership joined in an amicus brief to oppose a Tennessee law that would ban sexual transitioning of minors. The transitioning of minors has already been rejected by the British, Swedish and other European medical establishments due to the irreparable damage it causes children and the absence of any evidence that it is beneficial. And yet, some US states now threaten parents’ custody of their children if they refuse to transition their children.
It is impossible to overstate how extreme the transgender ideology has become. Nothing is more likely to radicalise normal families than the threat that the state might take away their children and mutilate them if they become mentally ill.
And it is important to understand it in context: making people “affirm” that a male is in fact a female is a deliberate attempt at humiliation and subjugation, and has nothing to do with the rights of the mentally unwell, as I explain below:
Some bien pensant liberals consider this issue a minor distraction, or feel that it is merely stoking hatred against a vulnerable minority. In reality, the transgender question reflects the total breakdown in shared values. Men and women are either created different by God, and have different roles, or gender is self-selected from a spectrum and there is no fixed reality. There is either an observable biological reality that defines men and women, or there is a hazy miasma of subjective feelings that replaces objective truth. The primary social unit is either the family, consisting of the father, the mother and the children, or the primary social unit it is the atomised individual, untethered from even physical, observable evidence, let alone social duties. Either sex is real and is inseparable from gender, or everything we knew about biology is a relic from a backward, oppressive and hateful area that we must quickly leave behind, along with the bigots who claim that there are only two genders.
The transgender question reveals a schism in religious, political and social values that is impossible to overstate. The entire Democratic establishment, and at least some of the Republican establishment, is fully committed to the side that denies objective reality, making rational discourse impossible. This, not the tragic suffering of vulnerable transgender individuals, is the most politically significant aspect of the transgender debate.
Commercial Impact
The ability of Americans to resolve their disagreements through electoral politics and through the judiciary has been heavily, and perhaps terminally, eroded, due to collapsed trust in elections and in the judiciary. Violence is therefore a natural consequence.
As such, civil war in America is inevitable unless something dramatic changes that permits a national reconciliation. Neither Trump nor Harris can offer such a reconciliation, and it is not evident than one is possible, given the ideological disagreements over race, gender, immigration, religion and the role of the government. The only alternative to civil war is one side fully consolidating. However, in America’s open economy and federal political system, such consolidation is also very difficult.
It is in this context that we understand the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on 15 September 2024: there is not enough trust in the system’s ability to deliver acceptable results, or in the intentions of political rivals. Therefore an increasing number of people view violence as legitimate.
The fantasies about political violence began with the “lock her up” chants directed by Trump and his supporters against Hillary Clinton. The exercise of political violence began with the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020.
Mistrust in election results started with a Democratic fringe in 2000, who denied the legitimacy of George W Bush’s election. It expanded to a Republican fringe in 2008, with the denial of Obama’s citizenship, and therefore his electoral legitimacy. It became mainstream in 2016, with Hillary Clinton denying that Trump was a legitimate President, and expanded in 2020, with Trump denying the election results.
Violence is now starting among a fringe. The absence of shared values, of trusted institutional mechanisms through which differences can be resolved, and of shared interests, will eventually make the violence mainstream, most likely over the course of the coming decade if not less.