As the "revolution" slipslides into "civil war" history offers a few reminders
It's usually the revolutionaries who win
It looks like we’re in a runup to the latter day American civil war everyone has been both phobic and fantasizing about.
Just last week we described the tumultuous entre-act of the new Trump administration as mimicking the patterns of social revolutions that hark all the way back to the beginning of the modern era.
But revolutions have consequences. In their gestational phrases they spark blowback, which in turn triggers internecine struggles that quickly morph into something that is no longer just political catfights.
Such recoil epitomizes the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’ well-known, but frequently misunderstood dictum that “war is a continuation of politics by other means”.
The revolution/civil war dyad actually applies directly to the majority of revolutions during the last three centuries. That includes the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the revolution against the Spanish monarchy in the early 1930s, the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, and the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911.
The victory of Mao Zedong in the much bruited “Chinese Revolution” of 1949 was actually the high water mark of the almost forty-year civil war that ensued with the collapse of Qing rule.
In fact, the term “revolution” itself may be something of a misnomer. The word, minted by ancient philosophers calling attention to the fact that “revolutions” almost always bring the political order right back to where it started, following the French proverb plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”).
Let’s be clearing before going any further, however.
No one is erecting barricades in the street – yet. No armed resistance to Trump’s (and Musk’s) famed Silicon Valley MO of “move fast and break things” has arisen – yet.
But there is a mounting crescendo of constant outrage among Democrats and legacy media aimed at almost everything Trump, and by extension Musk, are doing since he took office less than a month ago.
In fact, they even have a word for it – “constitutional crisis”, which echoes the terminology in more than a century and a half ago when the southern states began seceding from the union in the opening act of the American Civil War.
The Civil War turned out to be the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history with 600,000 people killed at a time when the national population was only 31 million, a third more than during World War II when it was 132 million.
The civil war meme was given some rhetorical heft recently when House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed to “fight in the streets” against what he denounced as “Trump’s extreme MAGA agenda”.
Jeffries, nonetheless, in the very same breath also asserted the fight was going to take place in the “courts”, and that is indeed already under way.
As of late last week Trump had already issued 54 executive orders, and as of Monday, February 10 eight had been blocked or put on hold by federal judges.
A recent CBS news poll, however, showed that over half Americans approve of what Trump is doing and agreed, regardless of whether they voted for him, that he is carrying through with what he promised during his campaign.
None of this daily drama naturally comes anywhere near what Stephen Marche in his chillingly realistic simulation of a very possible future called “the next civil war” which, he prophesied, “won’t be divided between organized sides, distinct ideologies, or ethnicities” but “between the forces of order and chaos”.
Published in 2023, Marche’s book predicted that the “civil war” would be ignited by some provocation on the part of right-wing “patriots” or “white nationalists”.
But now that the much maligned “right wing” won the White House through a popular as well as electoral college majority and has adopted most of the executive branch tactics their adversaries in the previous administration used relentlessly to sideline them, the left has shaken off its funk from the November election loss and is beginning to counter Trump’s actions with almost tit for tat precision.
In his book The Next Civil War Marche envisages a fractured America, whatever form it takes, as inevitable. He writes:
The first hard truth that needs facing is the most basic: that the United States no longer functions as a nation. The ideas that motivated its system no longer convince. The symbols that once unied its people no longer hold up. The country no longer makes sense.
He goes on to argue:
The dream of disunion is far from a mere thought experiment at this point. Serious people, more of them all the time, are imagining realistic scenarios, planning, and organizing. As the identity of the United States dies, new identities and new loyalties—loyalties to countries that don’t yet exist—are emerging.
Of course, the devil always cowers in the details. During the Biden era all the talk was about Texas seceding with much of the south and Midwest bundled alongside it. Now the chatter concerns California and possibly the entire West Coast.
Even while Trump has proposed that Canada be annexed as America’s 51st state, some politicians in the Northeast are seriously promoting the idea that New York and New England join secede from the United States and join with our neighbor to the north.
Marche makes this rueful observation:
The United States might well be better o as separate countries. How would it happen? For all the rhetoric of secession, for all the talk, almost no one, either in the media or in the political establishment, bothers with the specics. They simply assume that if enough people support secession, it will happen. That assumption is naive. Secession is not easy. Ask any independence movement. A national separation is a bureaucratic nightmare. Uncertainty over small questions of daily life like pensions and passports is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. How would the national debt be divided? Would dual citizenship be permitted? What amendments to the Constitution would be necessary to make secession possible? How would a state decide which country to belong to? What would the terms of new confederations look like? What would happen to the military?
What the secessionists, or “separationists”, miss on the other hand is that the putative present day American “civil war” is ultimately a class war.
Authors like Musa al-Gharbi, Michael Lind, and myself have made this point over and over in recent years, but the American intelligentsia doesn’t really seem or want to get it.
Probably because it’s almost impossible for them to accept that they’re the actual problem rather than the solution.
Class wars break out as sudden revolutionary outbursts that spawn abortive counterrevolutions that, in turn, seek safe harbor in certain regions until they are driven out.
For example, during the Russian Civil War (1917-23) following the revolution the anti-Boshevik “White Army” occupied much of Crimea, Ukraine, and Estonia.
Likewise, throughout the ongoing domestic strife in the wake of the French Revolution the monarchists fled to Brittany and Normandy.
Marche’s future “dispatches” – in reality war-gaming scenario resting on a certain conventional wisdom that is now dubious – are like the highly flawed 2024 dystopian Hollywood thriller Civil War suffer from the common misplaced assumption that the real struggle is between red states and blue states.
Ballot tallies from the last election should give the lie to that particular fallacy.
Most civil wars are ultimately won by those who have the strongest vein of ideological backing and a minimal measure of charismatic leadership. The significant, if not seismic, shift in support for him among most demographic categories in the last Presidential election should prove to be a strong indicator of what we can expect moving forward.
The progressive claim that Musk’s siege of the federal bureaucracy will instantly alienate the lion’s share of his newest acolytes is fast proving to be a mirage. Trump and his advisors were astute enough to realize it is the federal direct payment system, not the jobs of degreed civil servants inhabiting the Beltway, that should remain untouchable.
Trump is playing in a powerful manner the pure populist card without so far infringing patently on anyone’s civil liberties (other than immigrants), and it is that kind of strategy that gives him tremendous advantage right now – as Lenin’s play for the Russian peasantry rather than the urban proletariat as dictated by orthodox Marxist historical materialism did in the early 1920s.
Trump could still stumble and his early successes quickly unravel, but the phenomenon known as MAGA, which just until a few months ago was dismissed as an diminutive and dying demographic cadre of diehard demographic differentia, has now transformed itself into something much more multi-faceted and unprecedented.
The fact that the Silicon Valley Dukes of Digitania have all jumped on the Trumpian bandwagon is far more telling than America’s establishment liberals could ever imagine.
The New York Times, which dishes out a daily diet of op-eds decrying Trump’s destruction of “democracy”, routinely zeroes in on his regime’s targeting of Washington insiders and career civil servants.
According to Thomas Edsall, Trump’s “carefully calculated” rhetoric serves “to justify his administration’s assault on government, American values and core traditions since he took office on Jan. 20.” His “success in demonizing liberals and Democrats — casting the left as a grave threat to a substantial segment of the electorate — has proved crucial to his decision to turn regulatory and prosecutorial powers into instruments of revenge.”
Perhaps Edsall has a memory outage concerning Russiagate, Democratic party-orchestrated “lawfare” against Trump and his supporters, and particularly President Biden’s “dark Brandon” speech in September 2022, which performatively accomplished just about everything Edsall currently accuses Trump of perpetrating.
One side with its ideological animus against the other gained sufficient traction to begin suppressing the other with the election of Obama in 2008.
Although Obama carried forward many of the pillars of more traditional progressive politics associated with the Democratic Party, some scholars such as Onanga Ndjila, Amilcar Bareto, and Michael Tesler have contended that he substantively upended the policy landscape by forcing the kind of racialized, “identity politics”, which reached its climax with the George Floyd protests in 2020, overshadowed the Biden years, and has become the prime target of the current Trump administration.
It also fueled the political suspicion among those who elected Trump in 2016 that his 2020 election loss to Biden had been a slick, covert coup engineered by the “deep state”, a perception which almost guaranteed what occurred on January 6, 2021.
What goes around comes around is a trite observation, but it has a certain salience that cannot be easily dismissed.
The question persists as to what this all means for the near future.
That future is probably much closer than anyone realizes.
However, history also shows that even when revolutions slipslide into civil war, it is usually the revolutionary cadres that succeed in the end.