Actually, We Are Already in the Middle of a Second American Civil War
Same players, same goals, same stakes … how will it end this time?
- It is no coincidence that the Confederate Flag is the symbol of the MAGA movement.
- It is no coincidence that today’s most radical Red States are former members of the Confederacy.
- It is no coincidence that all of our radical Red States want to hide from American children any accurate depiction of the reasons for, and consequences of, the first American Civil War — the one that the Confederacy started and then lost, at a cost of over 620,000 lives.
- It is no coincidence that today’s second Civl War — just like the first one — is being funded by rich property owners (then: plantation owners, now: tech billionaires) who believe any extension of rights and liberties to new constituencies is a threat to their financial interests.
- It is no coincidence that the “way of life” today’s Confederates want to return to demands the subjugation of one arbitrarily-defined group of humans (then: slaves, now: women, blacks, people of color, gay and trans people, immigrants … a long list!) by another arbitrarily-defined group of humans (then: white males, now: white males).
In my recent post about the end of the American Century, I described five agendas of the Trump 2.0 Administration. One of these I called the “New Confederacy Agenda (aka the Project 2025 agenda)”. In this post I want to build upon that that short description because, clearly, this New Confederacy agenda is driving much of what is going on in Trump World right now.
When we imagine a Second Civil War, our imaginations tend to fail us. We envision the cinematic features of the First Civil War: the formal secession, the “boys” slaughtering each other in their blue and grey uniforms, the great generals astride their steeds, the massive battles like Gettysburg and Bull Run. Surely nothing comparable to that is going on today, is it?
The reason we have trouble seeing that our Second Civil War is already underway is because it looks, so far, quite different from the first one, at least on the surface. This is because it is being fought with vastly different weapons on a vastly different battlefield. But underneath these differences are disturbing and consequential similarities: the same players (the former Confederacy vs. the former Union), the same goals (political subjugation and economic plutocracy vs. democratic inclusiveness and majority rule), and the same stakes (democracy vs. fascism; rule-of-law vs. rule-by-autocrat).
One major difference between the first and second American Civil Wars is the aspirations of the rebels. Whereas the first Confederacy only wanted to remove itself from the United States, today’s rebels want to take over all of the United States, forcing any so-called Blue States to become carbon copies of their current “Laboratories of Autocracy” like Texas and Florida.
Another big difference is that the rebels this time are not simply walking away from the Constitution. Rather, they’re exploiting its omissions and ambiguities, using a corrupt Supreme Court (source) to codify a series of Constitutional “reinterpretations” that create the (false) impression that they are in fact the keepers of our democratic legacy, giving to themselves the right to tell the rest of us what the Constitution really means.
But the biggest difference that separates our modern rebels from the 1860s rebels is the industrialization of lying as a political tactic. Rebels in the First Civil War talked a lot about honor and virtue. They felt it was dishonorable to lie (source). Today’s rebels have no such qualms. Indeed, they have allowed the obliteration of any distinction between truth and lies to become a core principle of their political identity (source). This they learned at the knee of the most prolific pathological liar the history of American politics: Donald Trump.
Trump’s great lesson: you don’t lie once to get people to believe your lie, you lie constantly to get people to believe nothing.
So far, this embrace of lying over truth-telling has produced one major win — the reelection of Donald Trump. The torrent of lies unleashed during the campaign left America’s political truth-tellers — you know, the “free press”, those guys given special dispensation in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights — mute. As a frustrated Democratic Party advisor put it way back in 2022, the mainstream media has shown a stubborn reluctance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, to report that one political party is fundamentally more dangerous than the other:
“For reasons I cannot explain, there are those in the establishment media world who still cling to this notion that Democrats and Republicans represent two different-but-equal sides of the same coin. That it’s important for the American people to be presented with “both sides” as if they carry equal weight.” (source)
This bias in the media became a real boon to Republicans, as it encouraged the public to believe there was no real difference between a political party that operates outside the boundaries of the Constitution and one that operates within its rules and restrictions. This provides a smoke screen behind which our New Confederates were able to pursue their rebellion unimpeded by any true accountability or public alarm over the unique threat they posed.
The result, as we have now all seen, was the return of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States on January 20, 2025. So here is a second major difference between the first and second civil wars: this time around, Jefferson Davis has become President of us all.
As pollsters and pundits have rummaged through the wreckage of the 2024 election, two findings have stood out. First, the result was much more a Harris loss than a Trump win (source). And second, the American people were subjected to a firehose of lies and disinformation about the Democratic Party and its Presidential candidate (source). Since the mainstream media did little to counter or debunk those lies, the election became a referendum on a Democratic Party and standard-bearer that did not exist in reality, but only in the fevered fear-mongering messaging of the opposition. As Democrats were demonized and pilloried time and again, the Republican standard-bearer enjoyed a free ride in the media, benefiting from a steady stream of media sane-washing and suspended fact-checking. In the end, Trump eked out one of the narrowest change-election wins in American history. But the damage was done. The Confederacy was moving into the White House.
Even before Trump 2.0, most Red States and most Republican members of Congress had already seceded from the Union
Secession is usually defined procedurally. It is a process by which one government, legally subservient to a parent government, declares its intention to sever that relationship and become an independent political entity. This is what eleven American states did in 1861: they held legislative sessions, they voted to secede, they informed the parent government of their actions. We might call this de jure secession.
But what we are seeing today is a different kind of secession — different, but no less consequential. It is selective secession from adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law. It doesn’t say “we have separated from you”. Instead, it says “we now control you, and we will decide which of your laws we will follow, which we will ignore, and which we will replace with laws more of our liking”. Call it de facto secession.
The Second Civil War is being fought over the same question as the First Civil War: Will we strive for equal rights and privileges for all citizens within a democratic republic, or will we adopt a white supremacist, authoritarian, repressive regime to enshrine a minority’s belief that all people are not created equal?
In case you are not aware just how racist, authoritarian, and repressive the Confederacy was, I suggest you read this.
So far, the Confederates are winning. But their future prospects are not good.
The current shambolic and chaotic behavior of the Trump 2.0 Administration is a function of too many pigs at the trough and too many incompatible agendas (source). Part of the reason for the chaos is the enthusiasm with which many of Trump’s minions (if not the detached and disinterested President himself) are trying to enact every authoritarian, racist, nativist, science-denying, and just plain looney proposal found in the pages of the “Secession Guidebook”, aka Project 2025.
Even now, Democrats are failing to comprehend the severity of the threat. This is not the good old days that too many Democratic leaders in Congress seem to long for. This is not a time for “bipartisanship” or “finding common solutions”. This is not a time for writing “a strongly worded letter”. It is not a time for clichés. We are in the middle of a war, and Democratic Party leaders seem only recently to have noticed.
Unlike Democratic voters, who are essentially apoplectic, too many Democratic leaders have failed to internalize the reality that Republicans no longer have any interest in prolonging America’s democratic experiment. Republicans’ only real concern about democracy is how quickly they can replace it. But today, 100 days into Trump 2.0, they are finding it’s not so easy. In fact, they may be setting themselves up for a brutal reckoning, not from the Democratic Party, but from the American people … the very ones Trump and the GOP first recruited with lies and false promises, and are now in the process of gleefully betraying.
At this point, what is the Republican Party FOR?
The Republican Party, just like its Confederate forbears, represents the interests of wealthy property owners, but derives its political power from a base of Americans who support the Party precisely because it rejects inclusiveness as a core principle. Republicans will never invite more “diverse Americans” into their tent because their followers vote for them precisely because they explicitly exclude “those people” from the tent. They are the modern successors of the white supremacists and racists who fueled the first Civil War and have been endemic in American society ever since.
But the Party seems to be stuck between the plutocratic demands of its billionaire donors and the racist and authoritarian demands of its Trump-enthralled MAGA base (source). This circle cannot be squared within the current system of American democracy, which is supposed to marginalize extreme political movements, not promote them. So today’s Republican Party, just like its Confederate forbears, has opted to replace the system rather than live within it. And the American public, thanks to a concerted campaign of voter suppression, relentless lying, vast sums of money, and a conspiracy-mongering right-wing media, fell for the con.
One thing our still-functioning judiciary has been trying to tell us is that America’s Constitution is not a menu: you don’t get to pick and choose which provisions you will abide by and which you will ignore.
It’s an all or nothing deal. So when the Trump 2.0 Administration declares war on America’s citizens and immigrants, Republicans in Congress conveniently ignore the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against policies that “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” as well as the Fifth Amendment’s declaration that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. In doing so, they are openly violating their oaths of office and defying the Constitution of the United States. They are saying “this Constitution doesn’t meet our needs on this point, so we will just ignore it.”
So far, this blatant subversion of the US Constitution is simply “hanging out there”. I believe it is fair to say that when the Supreme Court rules (as it must) that this Administration must undo one or more of its blatantly unconstitutional reaches, the Administration will refuse. And that will be the metaphorical “opening shot” of the next phase of this Civil War. It will be our Fort Sumter moment … and we literally have no idea what will happen next.
Let’s for a moment look ahead with optimism and assume democracy can once again prevail against the forces of evil, greed, hatred, destruction, and cruelty that the Republican Party and Donald Trump represent today. What should we do next? How should the United States deal with these modern Confederates, once they have failed again?
How do we rid ourselves of these troublesome secessionists?
All US office holders take an oath when elected or appointed to public office. These oaths universally contain a pledge of allegiance to the Constitution.
When Republicans pass laws that are blatantly unconstitutional, they violate their oaths of office and place themselves outside the bounds of American democratic governance. They are declaring themselves Rebels. They should be treated as such.
A political party is not a person. It’s a organization. In its official capacity, it oversees and directs the flow of money from donors to candidates. The Party decides which donors to pursue and which candidates to support. All of this normally happens within the framework of laws and processes that has guided American elections without incident for decades. Replacing that framework with one in which the candidates get to choose their voters, rather than the other way around, is a project that goes well beyond normal political-party business. That the Republican Party has chosen to embrace this project, and that it has resulted in the ascension of perhaps the world’s most despicable human being to the American Presidency … twice … is the defining political crisis of our time.
So what can be done? As we’ve seen since January 6, individuals can be indicted, convicted, and incarcerated for sedition (charged as seditious conspiracy), which is defined in the US Code as a conspiracy to overthrow or obstruct the functioning of the government by force, which was clearly a major factor on January 6. But treating the Republican Party criminally, as a participant in a seditious conspiracy, faces a problem: the Party is not a person who can be held accountable for a crime.
The American people failed to stop the Republican secession in 2024. We now face a situation in which the rebels have won the latest battle of the war, the 2024 Presidential election. They have taken over the federal government and are attempting to disassemble it so it can never defeat them again.
I think it is fair to say that if this secession had been orchestrated by competent traitors, it would be over by now.
We have seen how pathetically vulnerable our system of government is to a self-coup (aka autogolpe, for linguistics fans). But luckily, our modern Confederates are not competent (source). They are basically grifters at heart, only cosplaying as government officials as they unleash a flurry of policies and orders aimed to enrich themselves while issuing an endless stream of fuck-you’s to the American people: taking away healthcare for millions, collapsing a robust economy, ending research on childhood cancer, firing all the air traffic controllers, accelerating global warming, poisoning our air and water, selling off our national lands, sending armed thugs throughout American towns and cities, snatching people off the streets and rendering them to foreign black sites, defying judicial rulings and injunctions, and on and on and on. Just one insult after another (source). This is basically government by Triumph the Insult Dog.
Ending a civil war goes beyond defeating the rebel army on the battlefield. It starts there, and that is why a massive repudiation of Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections is a necessary first step. Let’s assume that happens (at this point, regaining the House seems highly likely, the Senate will be much tougher).
But the country must go further. Not only must we defeat Republicans up and down the ballot in 2026 and 2028, we must hold our secessionists accountable for the damage they have wrought. This almost happened with the trials of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators during the Biden Presidency. But thanks to Trump’s reelection and the Supreme Court’s offer of blanket immunity for “official acts”, a newly-energized President Trump now seems intent on punishing America as severely as possible for not loving him as intensely as his narcissism demands. He is an unrestrained mad man who has always been his own worst enemy. It is likely he is simply planting the seeds of his own political demise.
If the 2026 and 2028 elections are going to be the rebels’ Appomattox, the resulting Democratic majorities must launch something akin to the era of Reconstruction that followed the First Civil War. As that first attempt at reconstruction failed dramatically, we must do better this time.
Here’s one possible scenario for ending the Second American Civil War once and for all.
- Democrats must win the House in 2026 and the Senate and Presidency in 2028.
- The Senate majority must contain at least 50 Senators who will vote to eliminate the filibuster.
- With the filibuster gone, Democrats must pass, and the Democratic President must sign into law, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. These laws will render illegal most of the electoral shenanigans Republicans have adopted in their quest to overthrow democracy.
- Next up, assuming the votes are there and the Republicans are effectively marginalized, is to pass a national women’s healthcare bill that guarantees access to all reproductive services, including abortion, as a civil right for all Americans, wherever they live. Democrats should confirm the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment as the Constitution’s 28th Amendment, while they’re at it.
- At this point, Democrats must feel motivated and empowered to enact a number of other reforms that are likely to be necessary to finish the job of making the United States secession-proof. These would include SCOTUS reform (to de-politicize the Supreme Court), social media reform (to hold social media publishers accountable for poisoning public discourse), electoral college reform (to make sure it is no longer possible to win the presidential election without receiving a majority of the nationwide popular vote), and Senate rules reform (to eliminate the “tyranny of the minority” that currently disrupts the Senate’s ability to function as majority-driven democratic institution).
- Finally, if Democrats really want to put the Republican secessionists back in their box, they might want to consider perhaps the most important reform for returning America to a functioning democracy: vastly limiting the role of money in politics by overturning Citizens United, increasing transparency in campaign funding, limiting SuperPACs, and eliminating dark money contributions to political parties and candidates.
One item remains once this Second Civil War is ended. The leaders of the rebellion must be held accountable, far more successfully than the leaders of the First Civil War were.
Democrats need to engineer a purge
Following the explicit instructions in the 14th Amendment, Section 3, a post-war majority needs to remove from Congress and State legislatures any office holders who took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution but then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government.
The Constitution is clear:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” (emphasis added)
Schoolyard bullies don’t back off until someone punches them in the nose. The same applies to Donald Trump and his insurrectionist Administration. Trump is having his nose punched repeated by the American Judicial System. He is refusing to back down. But Trump’s followers who sit in Congress need to know that insurrection has consequences for them as well: if they voted to overturn the election on January 6, 2021, they engaged in insurrection against the Constitution they swore to uphold. The price for that is expulsion for Congress and a lifetime ban from holding public office. That is the only lesson the bullies leading the Second Confederacy are likely to heed.
