> I can't actually see how a civil war would work mechanically. There is a good deal of discussion of this on the right if you know where to look. The general

> I can't actually see how a civil war would work mechanically. There is a good deal of discussion of this on the right if you know where to look. The general consensus seems to be that it wouldn't look like the Civil War at all, but more like an insurgency - like the political violence of the 1960s, but with much greater magnitude and frequency. The thing that scares me is that I'm seeing both sides begin to use tactics that isolate individuals who are vocally opposed to them, track their movements, and organize actions against them. Thus far those actions have mostly been threats and harassment, but it seems a small step between a group confronting someone in a restaurant and individuals or small groups attacking them in their homes in the middle of the night. > The right side of the political divide makes up almost all of the armed forces, first responders, and police; their civilians also own most of the guns; and they control the food supply. None of those things matter as much if the left controls the federal government. Obviously they don't at the moment, but to many on the right that's what at stake in the next couple of elections. Objectively, I don't think there's any real doubt that the right would win an armed conflict. That said, objectively there was no hope for a Confederate military victory in the Civil War, but that didn't stop the war from happening. > This isn't like the US civil war where it was the North against the South. I would argue that the US Civil War wasn't a "civil war" at all, but a failed revolution. The US has never experienced a true civil war. > This would be geographically isolated urban cores versus their surrounding suburbs and rural areas. Mostly, but not exactly - the divide is between ideologies, one of which is concentrated in urban areas. What's most alarming about that to me is that people are beginning to physically move to areas where they are part of the overwhelming political majority. I don't have the citation on hand, but the number of "toss-up counties", where one candidate edge out the other by only single-digit percentages, declined drastically between 2004 and 2016.