The possibility of a second US civil war is becoming ‘increasingly plausible’ according to a new study – with additional insurrections even more likely.
There are also ‘striking similarities’ between the 1850s – the decade before the first civil war – and today, according to the team from California State University, San Bernardino.
The American Civil War broke out on April 12, 1861, and lasted until April 26, 1865. It followed the secession of 11 Southern states following decades of arguments over slavery.
However, other issues that sparked the conflict included government reach, states rights and taxes.
Writing in the journal Administration and Society, the team said: ‘Here, our purpose is to compare the zeitgeist of the divisive decade before the Civil War on the one hand with today’s hyper-partisan era on the other, demonstrating the two periods do indeed have extensive, striking similarities.’
In the US of today, society is again split over many issues, such as abortion, immigration, gun ownership, identity politics and, almost four years on, the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
On January 6, 2021, supporters of the then-president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building, the US’s equivalent to the Houses of Parliament, claiming the previous November’s election had been ‘stolen’.
Nine people died as a result of the insurrection, either during or after the event.
To assess what effects the current political atmosphere may be having on society, the team used a form of social capital theory. Proposed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, it considers the network of relationships between people who live and work in a society, and how they enable positive social outcomes.
However, the researchers inverted that theory to assess negative social capital.
‘In this study, we used a social psychological conceptual framework – social capital theory – to examine the likelihood of full-scale civil war by comparing the pre-Civil War period with the present,’ they said. ‘The parallels are striking.’
Political mistrust is a large, looming issue present both in the 1850s and today, as are taxes and states’ rights.
While perhaps not a surprise, the study does not offer much hope for a peaceful nation in the coming years.
‘We argue the likelihood of protracted social and political conflicts lasting decades – if not generations – are essentially inevitable and will engulf public administration as well,’ the team wrote.
‘Only the exact course of this bitter division remains to be seen.’
However, the one bright spot is that while a civil war is becoming ‘more plausible’, the researchers said it remains unlikely.
Other unrest is not however.
‘At least for the foreseeable future, more likely are trajectories moving toward other types of social unrest short of civil war – ongoing civil strife, additional insurrections, decades-long intraregional political gridlock causing widespread administrative dysfunction, and even a failure to relinquish power,’ the team concluded.
‘The negative social psychology has already had an extraordinary impact on public administration and is unlikely to decrease in the near term – it may yet increase exponentially as it did in the 1860s.’
