Lexington, Ft. Sumter, and...?

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John had this to say the other day -

Long before the latest shooting I started thinking about where the United States is in the cycle of its existence.

If I look at our Revolutionary War as the first civil war of the colonies, and I look at the Civil War of 1861-1865 as the second American Civil War, I must then start thinking about the possibility of Civil War III.

And I wonder where we are in the timeline leading up to what future historians may is the conflict that ended the United States.

My extremely amateur theory is that there is a point in time when the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. And there is also a point in time where nothing was going to avoid the revolution. I think the same question could be asked of the Civil War.

The question that makes me lose some amount of sleep is, what time is it?

Yes, indeed, what time is it?

I started to answer John's comment with the following -

When you have two opposing viewpoints, the point at which conflict is unavoidable is when neither side is willing to give. For the Revolution, Parliament was completely uninterested in bending to what the colonists (some anyway, perhaps a third) thought were perfectly reasonable objections. Once a politician gets a source of revenue (via taxes) they seldom wish to let go. Political power and money were the issues, in very simple terms.

The War Between the States, pretty much the same - the South wanted something and wouldn't budge on it. Some say that that thing was slavery. In my humble interpretation of events, the real problem was that the South perceived that they were losing power in the Federal government (which they were indeed as the North grew in population) and by making a balance of slave versus "free" states they would stay balanced with the North, assuming, I guess, that a slave state would have more in common with the old South than they would with the North. They couldn't keep pace in the House of Representative, only in the Senate could they hope to maintain parity with the North in terms of political power at the Federal level. (Yes, I am, perhaps, oversimplifying.)

Two sides with diametrically opposed view points, neither side willing to compromise any further or at all. But, as with the tax issue prior to the Revolution, it was really a economic issue. If you mess with someone's cash flow, you're going to have problems. Mess with someone's political power, same result.

These days it's a little tougher to gauge, in my estimation, the depths of the divisions we're currently seeing in our country. There are diametrically opposing viewpoints. One based on pure emotion, the other based more on logic and history. Not to mention the Constitution! But there is emotion on that side as well. Folks tend to get emotional when the loss of their rights is contemplated.

After thinking on it a bit, I had to go dig out some definitions. What exactly is a "civil war"?

James Fearon, a scholar of civil wars at Stanford University, defines a civil war as "a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies". Ann Hironaka further specifies that one side of a civil war is the state. (Source)

One could argue that the State of California, at least the duly constituted government of that entity, is already in semi-open rebellion to the United States Government. Refusing to enforce immigration laws and actually warning illegals of ICE raids. It's not throughout the state, only (seemingly) in those ultra-liberal coastal enclaves.

What happens when California runs out of Federal money? Their taxes are already exorbitant. Who will they turn to for cash when the well runs dry? Their are only two answers, they drop their opposition to the law of the land, or they turn to a foreign power for assistance.

No foreign power that I know of will offer cash without a certain quid pro quo. And what might that be?

To answer your question John, I don't know what time it is. But it's getting late...

I pray that it's not too late.

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I once lived in a place* where troops were deployed on every corner in sand bagged machine gun emplacements and armored vehicles prowled the streets of the capital in the expectation of massive civil unrest. It was a very dicey situation. One wrong move and who knows?

I would hate to see that happen here.

What say the readership?




* Read this. I was living in Kunsan at the time.