The Next American Civil War

I got my crystal ball off the shelf last evening and asked it about the future of the United States.

I posted earlier about the increased polarization in the country.

Yesterday, I read that both major political parties are adopting new campaign strategies in light of this polarization.

The old strategy was to find a candidate that could appeal to the base, but successfully rush to the center to capture the votes of moderate, non-partisan Americans.

But moderate non-partisan Americans are becoming rare. As the nation splits into rival tribes, moderates are taking sides.

The new strategy is to select more extreme candidates who can energize the base - and thus motivate more partisans to go to the polls than the opposition.

So. . . candidates become more extreme, more partisan, and less compromising.

This political polarization also has a geographic dimension. The South, Rocky Mountain states, and Plains states become increasingly conservative. The Northeast and West Coast become more liberal.

The population grows in its hatred and contempt for the population of the other, and more so when each uses the federal government to force its ideology on the other.

Think of India before the Partition of 1945, when it was split into three regions. The central region we now know as India, and the outer region we now know as Pakistan (in the west) and Bangladesh (in the east).

Also note that about 1 million people in India died in cultural conflicts before the Partition. Their conflict was religious, but Americans may soon discover that the Republican and Democratic tribes can function very much as religion, including their capacity to motivate young men (mostly) to violence.

The fact of the matter is that my crystal ball has never been particularly accurate.

Well, actually, I do not have a crystal ball. I am drawing inferences from my study of history in a field that is so complex that it is extremely difficult to make any predictions from available evidence. That is a weakness.

Yet, societies have fallen into internal conflict before and will again. It happens enough to suggest the road to civil conflict is easily taken - more easily than some people may think.

The first necessary ingredient to this type of conflict is to have two (or more) factions that are extreme in their position and contemptuous of the opposition.

We've got that.

http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/