Saw a dear friend of mine over the weekend and she worried about an impending civil war. I don't think there will be one, but I'm wondering what other peoples' thoughts are.
The specific scenario she proposed was:
1. President Trump resigns / is impeached / is assassinated / loses the primary / loses the election / otherwise leaves office.
2. In retaliation, the Nazis etc. organize and remove (by whichever means) the Democrats in a given state or states, for example Mississippi and then the rest of the Deep South.
3. Enough of the rest of the country is on board or not actively off board that the military is split.
4. Hence, civil war.
My feeling is that the Nazis and their various ilks aren't as geographically concentrated as slavery proponents were leading up to the Civil War. As they are necessarily cowards, it's obviously hard to pinpoint an exact geographic distribution, but I have found
one resource that I feel is useful. Take for example those the Southern Poverty Law Center labels "white nationalist" or "neo-Nazi": at best there's a vague Rust Belt preponderance, but overall they look like scattered grains. Certainly "neo-Confederates" and "Ku Klux Klan" have a southeastern preponderance but it's hard to see any single denomination rising to the level of dominating a state without unification, and there isn't enough overlap on this map to my eyes for that to happen.
But let's say they do, or threaten to. How might the federal government respond?
My thought was that the specific generals President Trump has elevated to significant positions would take a hard line against the Nazis, with or without civilian support. Obviously none of them served in WW2 itself, but let's go down the list. McMaster is extremely well known for his criticism of civilian leadership in the Vietnam War and his anti-insurgency tactics, and he has proven effective in the political realm as well (c.f. Bannon and Gorka getting the boot). Mattis is famously well read, he's certainly ill-disposed to Iran (famous for their Holocaust denial), and he's shown already that he's willing to contradict the President in public. Kelly has a lot to say about threats to our way of life, but they are uhhh kind of universally about brown people, so let's call him a known unknown.
Combine that with a Congress where people as far right as Senator Rubio are unequivocal in their condemnation of the Nazis, and my take is that the overwhelming majority of the infrastructure (nukes, planes, tanks, quartermasters, etc.) would side with the United States. Deprived of this infrastructure and without a solid geographic base, any number of small arms armed insurgents would not be enough to trigger a full blown civil war. Significant bloodshed yes, civil war no.
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So what do you think? Is another civil war imminent, and if so what sort?