The Proud Boys have told us how they plan it
In the Guardian three scholars tell us how a civil war could unfold in the US. The first is Barbara F. Walter, political scientist and author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. She starts by pointing out that a second civil war here won’t resemble the first.
If a second civil war breaks out in the US, it will be a guerrilla war fought by multiple small militias spread around the country. Their targets will be civilians – mainly minority groups, opposition leaders and federal employees. Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they enforce federal law. The goal will be to reduce the strength of the federal government and those who support it, while also intimidating minority groups and political opponents into submission.
Some of that is already happening. It’s unpleasantly undifficult to imagine more of it happening until the fascists win.
We know this because far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have told us how they plan to execute a civil war. They call this type of war “leaderless resistance” and are influenced by a plan in The Turner Diaries (1978), a fictitious account of a future US civil war. Written by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, it offers a playbook for how a group of fringe activists can use mass terror attacks to “awaken” other white people to their cause, eventually destroying the federal government. The book advocates attacking the Capitol building, setting up a gallows to hang politicians, lawyers, newscasters and teachers who are so-called “race traitors”, and bombing FBI headquarters.
It sounds like a video game. It sounds like “fun” if you like that kind of thing. I can easily imagine a lot of people joining in not on ideological grounds but just because they like that kind of “fun.”
The guerrilla war targetting minority groups was pretty much how the Ku Klux Klan operated, and the KKK was very successful in its aims of chasing black people out of the South, or keeping them down if they stayed. I’ve read that the KKK was one of the most successful terrorist organisations that ever existed.
That kind of unrest can have the populace calling for an authoritarian government as in 30s Germany.
That’s probably the playbook if a Democrat is in the White House. If Trump (or another fascist) gets in, they can simply run a repeat of what they tried to do on 1/6: overt violence designed to trigger counter-protests, leading to violent confrontations in the street that “justify” sending in the troops to “restore order” (and, oh, suspending some civil liberties to do so, naturally).
One of the things that went right for America on 1/6 was that leftist groups didn’t take the bait and give MAGA the confrontation they wanted. MAGA vs. Capitol Police wasn’t a good look for MAGA; MAGA vs. “Antifa” (doesn’t matter if it’s the “real” Antifa or just someone they pretend is) would have been a different story.
Of course, chances are the 2024 election will be settled tomorrow…
Trump could always eat one cheeseburger too many…
Not that it makes much of a difference as far as policies are concerned…