Highly unlikely this is what the civil war would be like. It’s not a state v state thing necessarily although that might be a small part of it. In the first civil war, the south unified and its people largely supported the war, except their slaves. It’s unlikely something like that will happen again. It’s not impossible but unlikely.

What is much more likely is rural v city. Even in red states, cities are blue and will often vote for blue policies. Rural areas are where things get dicey. They’ve been largely left behind by the surge in industry and general expansion of the capitalist economy we currently have (they’ve had a lot of businesses (including grocery stores) close because more people are leaving, and their rural towns are frequently having their hospitals close leaving large swaths of areas where the nearest hospital is an hour away). As such, they’ve got a grudge against the cities. What’s likely to happen is rural counties and their local governments trying to cut off their food supply, starving the cities to win the battle. There’s tons more possibilities, but this one I think is the one that’s got the highest likelihood.

Another possibility that is scary, but is highly dependent on the party of the people in power, is the government using their power to actually strike the cities, like in Syria where Assad bombed and used chemical weapons on his own people. Syria is actually a pretty good example of what more modern civil wars are like, or can be like. Governments v rebels and militias, and cities v rural (although there’s much less rural land in Syria).

If you’re interested, the podcast It Could Happen Here has a great first season where they go over possible disasters including a civil war and a pandemic (it was actually made in 2019 so before covid). It’s really helpful and can teach a lot, especially for an outsider from across the pond. It also does a lot better job giving an explanation and actual sources.

Hope this helps since it didn’t seem like you were getting a real answer.

“Fuck yeah, secession!” Says the Texan from the comfort of their lounge chair, beer in hand.

These people are too comfortable to ever be willing to die for their stupid ideals. All it took was one MAGA idiot to get blasted on Jan 6th and then they all scattered like roaches. As soon as their lives were on the line, it was no longer a matter of grave importance. They all firmly believed that democracy was at stake, but were unwilling to fight for it to the death because they somehow must have known that it was bullshit, somewhere in the back of their pea-sized brains, they knew.

By the time Texas starts asking people to show up to mustering fields, rifle in hand, the facade will fall apart. Biden doesn’t need to do anything. This sideshow of bluster and saber-rattling will fall apart on it’s own.

Could they not at least bunch up a bit so it’s easier to build a wall around them?

I said this in another thread-

Most Americans aren’t interested or even capable of fighting in a civil war. When you live paycheck-to-paycheck, you’re not going to abandon your family to fight on the front lines.

And a huge percentage of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Texas would have to have a draft.

Good luck with that.

Can we just have a normal, boring year for once, please? I’m so tired…

Serious question. Couldn’t Texas just hold a referendum to scede?

Wait. The first civil war ended? /s

Eh. Something clearly needs to be done, and the concerns aren’t being addressed (and haven’t been for awhile). Congress and the senate haven’t done anything aside from attempt to impeach hunter Biden (from who knows what) or show off his dick.

Doubtful it’s any kind of civil war, but Texas (and other states) is being hit hard by the number of immigrants, and if the federal government can’t (or won’t?) do anything to curb it, makes sense that they will do something on their own.

Hm… I should get a gun. And a passport.

It’s not a totally unreasonable impression, but no, this will not turn into a second civil war. The Guard units of each state can be called up for federal duty. The National Guard is part of the US Department of Defense and thus ultimately answers to the DoD and the US president as commander in chief. The US military has multiple components, including regular services (eg the full time Army), reserve components (eg US Army Reserve) and National Guard components. The latter two are part-time military with one weekend per month training duty plus an annual training. Guards members and Reservists hold regular full time jobs.

The Guard units are deployable by the governors of their respective states, and so can be used in emergency situations like natural disasters. They have also been deployed against what have been perceived as riots that threaten lives and properties of the individual states.

However, they are subject to activation by order of the US president and they fall under the national command authority. Guard personnel take the same oath to the constitution as other military personnel, and cannot legally refuse federal activation. Guards personnel would be subject to courts martial and face potentially extreme penalties including being discharged from service under criminal conditions, being stripped of rank and benefits, and jail time in federal prison. This would be what we call a career limiting rule.

So, if push comes to shove, Biden can activate the NG and order them to stand down or to implement policies to maintain order. Thinking the NG units and in particular their commanders would disobey a presidential order because they just love their state governor and hate the president so much is getting into Turner Diaries levels of right wing apocalyptic fantasy.

I mean, isn’t this kind of keeping with the theme of US civil wars so far?

If I was creating a civil war bingo card based on history of civil wars in the US, “starts over how people with darker skin can be abused or not” would certainly have been on it.

From what I’ve heard, the supreme court decision was mostly about the feds having access to the border, and the ability to cut down the razor wire, rather than any specific opposition to the razor wire existing in and of itself. I would wager this whole deal is mostly just a kind of political play, to try and egg biden into doing something stupid, while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that everyone at the head of these states is doing something dangerous, anti-institutional, and counter-cultural, even though they’re all kind of inherently unable to do anything along those lines just as a matter of their positions.

Everybody’s correct when they say that the political divides in this country are less clear-cut, but I also don’t think that the radicalization that we’ve seen, as a matter of perspective from being in online space, necessarily reflects reality. I think if you look at most people, most people want social security of some kind, and want healthcare of some kind, and want drug legalization of some kind, and want us to stop fighting wars in some form. Those are all kind of generalities, because the specific mechanism by which people want those things achieved differs from person to person. It’s very fractured as a matter of course, as a matter of how our political system and society is set up, and the ruling class has taken advantage of this to enact a divide and conquer strategy, where they can selectively promote whatever ideological positions benefit them the most, and cordon everyone off into a relatively small set of solutions over which they have a high amount of control. Rather than, you know, what a good democracy might do, which is come to a compromise solution, that everyone but the most extreme propagandized radicals might be kind of okay with. There is a reason why lots of conservatives like communism, as long as you use the right words. Both parties attempt to be mostly “populist” parties. This is all kind of obvious, right, but people understate the degree to which it’s a deliberate thing, and the overstate the degree to which it’s been successful, you know, which isn’t surprising, because, again, serves the interests of the powerful. People aren’t, broadly, morons, people have realized that this is all the case. That’s mostly what the “radicalization” that you’ve seen online has been, people just realizing that they hate these shitass solutions that aren’t really compromise solutions. See how everyone is cripplingly disappointed with the democratic party, and also how, likewise, conservatives are consistently disappointed with their own party, as well, and for many of the same reasons, barring the extreme radicals.

Most people are focused on how the internet divides people into radicalized swaths and conspiracy theorists, which is true, but even the mainstream monopolized internet is kind of a good tool for mass mobilization. See the occupy movement and the arab spring for older examples, for more recent examples, maybe the george floyd protests, or the french retirement protests. The only risk of these is kind of that they more easily get co-opted as a result of their visibility, i.e. “defund the police” gets turned into an argument for “fund the police”. If you were an asshole, you could cite charlottesville, or jan 6th, for examples of internet mobilization, but those are relatively smaller scales of things, compared to the others, which were more popular, they just got disproportionate media attention relative to their size, and had disproportionate political effects.

I think if we’re looking at the true, extreme political radicals, we’re seeing them come about as a result of a kind of well-oiled engine. I’m not gonna say that this is an institutional kind of thing, and it’s maybe more of a third level effect of active decisions, but it’s still something that, nonetheless, has been deliberately constructed. 4chan is funded by a japanese toy company and a hands off japanese internet techbro, and is administrated by some former american military freak who’s deliberately organized the site. The more radical offshoots, that use the same source code, tend to be funded by oil money, and political action committees, but through second-level effects, where they fund some small level conservative actor, and then they prop up the space. Which churns out some radical terrorists that are capable of your more fucked up bombings, and shootings, and controlled and coordinated protests. And then you kind of get military people at almost every level of this, in lower numbers, who act to control the space.

I dunno what I mean to extrapolate from all of this, but yeah. There’s probably not going to be a civil war.

I don’t see how the national guard isn’t already federal, it’s the national guard, not the state guard. They get called up just like regular military for wars.

Cut off their money, court martial them, dishonorable discharge, take away their guns and vehicles. These belong to the military, not Texas.

At current, this is all posturing. If Biden does engage the military to stop them. Perhaps lock up the governors for treason, maybe it could escalate somewhat. If something did happen that was in the line of being more serious, it wouldn’t be a long incursion as long as the military obeyed the commander in chief. The national guard is absolutely no match for even a small slice of the might of the US military.

If something does happen, hopefully they’ll shut it down quickly and bloodlessly, maybe finally gather enough strength to enable some Germany type of anti-fascism laws.

We need to fix gerrymandering, we need to fix people screwing with elections. We need to put some strong protections against the propaganda and opinion pieces flowing out of all the news outlets. We need to force free non-political basic education to the entire f****** country so people can make some informed decisions about s***.

I’m tired of everybody looking at politics like it’s a f****** football game.

A lot of you all must be too young to remember. This isn’t a new thing for Texas to do. They threatened to secede at least once (maybe twice) while Obama was president. Once it was straight out of the North Korean playbook, claiming a training exercise the military was conducting was a cover for a military invasion of Texas.