Motus Mentis

Michael Vlahos, who for years now has been discussing with John Batchelor the possibility and growing likelihood of a third American civil war, now has a new article up at The American Conservative. He writes about the steps that lead to a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, at which point the outcome is determined by a struggle of force. We are well along the way, and may already have crossed the “event horizon”.

Does all this talk of civil war seem overheated? Ask yourself: looking at the current chasm in American politics, the fundamentally incompatible visions of America the two sides hold, the degree of dehumanizing hatred they show for each other, the bloody damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power, can we imagine some way forward in which the Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?

Of course not. This fight continues, and intensifies, until either one side is destroyed, or we work out some kind of divorce.

I repost below a post of my own, from June of this year, about the forms of civil war, and the nature of “event horizons”.
 

In David Armistead’s fascinating and insightful book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the author distinguishes three kinds of civil war: “successionist”, “supersessionist”, and “secessionist”.

Successionist civil wars are those that are fought over which individual shall sit atop a nation’s institutional hierarchy. The king dies. Who will succeed him? In this sort of war the body of the nation’s government and institutions are not at issue, only which head shall wear the crown. History is replete with these conflicts, such as the War of the Roses.

In supersessionist civil wars, the form of the nation itself is at stake. The population has divided itself into two bitterly antagonistic parts, fighting not over the crown, but for the territory the nation occupies. Such a civil war might pit a monarch and his loyalists against rebels who want to replace the whole system. Think of France in 1789, or Russia in 1917.

In a secessionist civil war, the population occupying one part of the nation’s territory declares itself a separate body, and seeks to sever itself from the rest — taking the territory along with it. That’s what happened in America’s so-called “Revolutionary” war.

What’s the difference, then, between a revolution and a civil war? After reading Armistead’s book, it seems to me that “revolution” is just a name that the victors sometimes give to a successionist (e.g., 1688), secessionist (1775), or supersessionist (1789) civil war that the rebels win. It makes the whole thing sound more “glorious”.

Civil war, then, is a genus with (at least) three species. This raises the question: if we are heading into another civil war in America — Civil War III — what type is it?

We generally haven’t had problems with succession in America, until recently. Elections have been ugly at times, but we’ve always had a peaceful transfer of power. (That’s no small thing!) But starting with the 2000 election, that’s been changing — and the election of Donald Trump has been bitterly contested since the day it happened.

What has also been happening in recent decades, and accelerating briskly, is the division of the American population into two distinct bodies. One seeks to conserve and restore the traditional nation and institutions, while the other despises it all, and wants it gone. It seeks to displace or replace the founding ethnic and cultural stock, the Electoral College, much of the Constitution, and the fundamental American idea of a limited government that exists only to secure our natural rights, while maximizing liberty otherwise. Because the two factions disagree not merely about questions of leadership and policy, but about the very axioms of nationhood, citizenship and the purpose of government that define the polis itself, there is no basis for comity or compromise. Moreover, the visceral antipathy between the two sides grows deeper, and more dehumanizing, every day: we’ve already reached the point where many people, especially on the Left, reject any possibility of comity or fellow-feeling for their political and cultural opponents. This all falls very squarely into the supersessionist category.

When things really get hot, however, the nation may well break apart — it’s far too big to be well-governed at the level of centralization that has already occurred — and a general bloodbath might perhaps be averted by some sort of regional, secessionist process. It’s hard to see how that can work, though, as Red and Blue are so hopelessly intermingled, county by county.

Here’s something else to think about: when you’re heading into a civil war, you don’t always know, at the time, that you’ve crossed the point of no return. To say when a civil war actually became inevitable is only possible in retrospect. Because I’ve “never metaphor I didn’t like”, I’ll draw one from astrophysics:

Surrounding a black hole is what’s called the Schwarzschild radius. In a sense it’s the “surface” of a black hole; it’s the distance from the singularity at which the gravitational pull becomes so intense that the escape velocity equals the speed of light. Once you cross it, you can’t get out: nothing, not even light or information, can escape. All spacetime paths within the Schwarzschild radius must pass through the singularity itself. But this fateful boundary isn’t a hard surface of any sort — in fact, if you are falling into the black hole yourself, you might not even notice as you cross it. It’s just that once you have, you are headed for that singularity, whether you like it or not. There’s no turning back.

What all this means is that it’s too soon to know what species of civil war the next one will be, or whether it might still be avoided. (I’m not very optimistic about that, but I suppose we may still be flying just outside the fatal boundary.) Only time will tell. As I’ve written before, a civil war is nothing to hope for — but keep your powder dry.