Civil war is not coming

In two days at Shiloh in April 1862, the Union and Confederate armies altogether suffered 23,000 casualties, a shattering total that was the worst of the war to that point.

If we aren't on a path to the carnage of Shiloh, we are on a straight-line trajectory to a new civil war, at least according to commentators on the right and left, who can't agree on anything except looming violent conflict.

The New York Times podcast "The Argument" just posted an episode asking, "Is America Headed for a Another civil war?" Voices on the right have warned of a brewing civil war and speculated how Red America could win it. Political scientist Barbara Walter of the University of California San Diego published a widely praised book, "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them."

It is certainly true that our political debate is fevered and apocalyptic. It may be the case that we will experience more political violence, but it would hardly be unprecedented in our national life and wouldn't constitute anything remotely like a civil war.

The American Civil War was decades in the making, a clash between rival systems of political economy and ways of life with different moral underpinnings in two sections of the country marked by relatively clean geographic lines.

Mean tweets and barbed prime-time cable TV shows don't compare.

In her book, Walter makes a sustained case for the coming of a low-intensity civil war. Much of her material about internal conflicts in foreign countries, though, serves to demonstrate how different we are from such places.

Our political tribalism is nothing like the dispute between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, wherein the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy in the 1960s, leading to the exile of Tutsis who formed a rebel army and invaded the country in 1990. It bears zero resemblance to Lebanon's multisided conflict from 1975-1990, which included a dizzying array of religious and ethnic factions and foreign powers taking a large hand in the fighting.

Countries torn by civil wars are prone to endemic instability and divisions that go much deeper than disputes over the causes of inflation, how much federal money we should spend fighting climate change, or whether abortion should be legal.

The United States has a long-standing, widely respected Constitution, a durable two-party system, national elections that still hinge on persuadable voters in the middle, and a federal system that coheres while giving latitude to state and local differences. The same can't be said of Syria, Somalia, Congo, Tajikistan, or any number of other countries that are or have been beset by civil war.

There's no doubt that it is corrosive for Donald Trump to undermine faith in our elections, and he's not the only one. Democrats didn't truly accept his victory in 2016, and they would be even more loath to do so should he — or some other Republican — win in 2024.

There is indeed a violent fringe on the right, and as the Supreme Court prepared to overturn Roe, the left engaged in protests at the homes of the justices and vandalized anti-abortion pregnancy centers. All this may be a sign, not of impending civil war, but that a 40-year period of extraordinary civil peace may be fraying and giving way to the kind of conflict that hasn't been unusual in American history.

We have been riven by racial violence and labor wars. Most recently, in the late 1960s through the 1970s, the United States experienced a spasm of political violence — assassinations of major political figures, large sections of cities burning to the ground, and radical underground groups conducting bank robberies and bombings. There were thousands of bombings in the 1970s. An FBI spokesman called San Francisco "the Belfast of North America" in 1976.

But we have a long way to fall before we return to anything approaching this level of routine violence, let alone the Battle of Shiloh.