The American Civil War Has Already Started

The Left must understand what is happening, and more importantly, how to fight back.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

by Ben Cohen

The January 6th hearings have made one thing abundantly clear: the MAGA movement is at war with American democracy, and it won’t stop until it wins or dies.

Many Americans are still in denial about what this means. They still believe the democratic system is working, that Democrats can still win elections if they get enough votes, and that the legal system will protect democratic institutions.

This is a fiction that the January 6th hearing is dismantling, piece by piece, revealing the stark truth about America’s internal strife. Combined with the Supreme Court’s shocking attack on civil liberties, organized acts of violence from right wing paramilitary groups, and an extremist propaganda network openly promoting violence and electoral conspiracy theories, it is now clear that America has entered the first stages of civil war.

Jan. 6th was a declaration of war

Week by week, the January 6th committee has built a rock solid narrative about the events at the US Capitol in January of 2021. With first hand testimony from MAGA supporters all the way up to Trump’s inner circle, it is now clear that the storming of the Capitol was carefully planned attempt to overthrow a democratic election.

Testimony from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson has revealed that Donald Trump knew his mob of supporters were heavily armed and was repeatedly warned that encouraging them to march on the Capitol would be disastrous. Trump ignored these warnings and even tried to join them. When told about the mob chanting “hang Mike Pence”, Trump told White House aides that he believed his Vice President “deserved it”.

The committee has also shown that Trump pressured state officials to invalidate his defeat who were then threatened with violence if they did not comply. As the Times reported:

Using sworn in-person testimony from Republicans and videotaped depositions from other officials, the panel showed how the former president and a group of allies laid siege to state lawmakers and election officials after the balloting in a wide-ranging plot to reverse the outcome. The campaign led to harassment and threats of violence against anyone who resisted.

This isn’t a partisan take on the hearings, or hyperbole. We are hearing from Trump’s own people that he tried to orchestrate a violent coup to oust a democratically elected President. Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, said this yesterday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California:

“At this moment, we are confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before — and that is a former president who is attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic.”

“He is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man, even after all we’ve seen, they’re enabling his lies,” she continued.

“As the full picture is coming into view with the Jan. 6 committee, it has become clear that the efforts Donald Trump oversaw and engaged in were even more chilling and more threatening than we could have imagined.”

Cheney voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and supported his agenda wholeheartedly while he was in office. For someone with her credentials to say this is a shocking indictment of just how bad the situation really is.

A coordinated attack

The Supreme Court’s decisions to undermine the Voting Rights Act, overturn Roe vs Wade, and more recently gut the federal government’s ability to curb harmful emissions is more evidence that we are in the midst of a highly coordinated attack on civil society. The far right’s decades long infiltration of the US legal system means Americans are now doomed to live under minority rule for generations to come.

If the right can’t win elections, it will rig the system to disenfranchise minorities. If that fails, it will then resort to violence to overthrow those elections. With increasingly organized paramilitary groups tied to Trump and the GOP willing to use violence, this problem isn’t going way — it is getting worse. With Democrats losing their grip on the legal system, they are increasingly powerless to do anything about it.

There is now only one political party committed to preserving democracy in America, and another dedicated to ending it. It is important that Americans understand that the country isn’t heading towards a civil war, it is already in one.

The right has understood this for some time and has already won several crucial battles. Most on the left however, still believe they can work within the system to save it. Democrats have wasted crucial time trying to work with Republicans to preserve the integrity of America’s democratic system. While Liz Cheney and a few other Republicans are willing to fight for it, the vast majority are afraid of Donald Trump their own voters. The right in America has been itching for violence against liberals and liberalism, and their political representatives won’t lift a finger to stop them.

Democrats can no longer afford to bring mean tweets to a gun fight. They must resort to new tactics if they want to survive, and more importantly preserve democracy for future generations.

The new rules of war, and fighting fire with water

Stephen Marche has written a fascinating piece in the Guardian laying out the characteristics of the current political crisis in America. While he doesn’t believe the conflict can currently be described as a civil war, he argues that it is rapidly heading towards one. The right, he argues, has the electoral system, the courts, and a big monopoly on violence. But far from being helpless, the left actually has huge advantages of its own that it can deploy in the battle for the future of the country.

“Two essential facts of the 2020 election should give leftwing partisans hope,” March argues. “Biden-voting counties amounted to 70% of GDP, while 60% of college-educated voters chose Biden. That is to say, the left-democratic wing of America is the productive and educated part of the country. One way of looking at the American political condition of the moment is that the leftwing part of the US has built the networks that have left behind the rightwing part. The networks are the left’s strength.”

These networks, Marche argues, are better funded than their right wing counterparts, and more technically sophisticated. He writes:

The struggle over abortion has already revealed how the divide plays out. Anti-abortion factions control the pseudo-legitimate court system and the poorer states in the Union. Pro-choice factions have responded, first of all, with their superior financial resources. Oregon started the Oregon Reproductive Equity Fund with $15m. New York is establishing a fund to make the state a “safe haven”. California governor Gavin Newsom plans to add $57m to the state budget to deal with out-of-state patients.

At the same time, pro-choice organizers are turning to technology. The Atlantic recently reported on networks using “encrypted, open-source Zoom alternatives” to provide women with support for their procedures. Already, anonymous web access to self-managed abortions is available, just as it has been for many years in some restrictive jurisdictions.

With Big Tech and Big Money, the left has the ability to fight hard against the right. And it is time, as Marche argues, for those who want to continue living in a democracy to “pony up”.

Confronting Republican extremism with force would be a strategic disaster for Democrats. They must resist the urge to counter violence with more violence at all costs. They have fewer guns and are generally are less prone to violence, so they must fight on grounds favorable to them. They cannot fight fire with fire. They must fight it with water.

Spend the money to change the system

If enough money is spent on the right elections, Democrats can create enough wiggle room to start undoing the GOP’s structural advantages. The window will be small, but with enough coordination and enough determination, they can score crucial victories that can force the right into a minority position with no power.

The changes necessary are becoming increasingly clear, as is the sequence. Firstly, the Democrats must have enough resources to hold onto the House and the Senate this November. After the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe vs Wade, the unfavorable landscape for Democrats heading into the midterms is likely to shift. Liberal groups must organize like never before using their extensive networks and resources at full capacity. If Democrats manage to expand their majority in the Senate, the filibuster must be eliminated. Then they must start ramming through radical legislation at breakneck speed.

Firstly, the Supreme Court must be packed to ensure a liberal majority. Then, the Democrats must enshrine voting rights into federal law to ensure elections are free and fair moving forward. With the system stabilized, they can then move onto abortion rights, environmental law and so on without fear of them being undone by a radical minority.

The right is going to fight this tooth and nail, and will resort to acts of violence to preserve their power. The left needs to understand that this will happen regardless of how big or small their actions are, so there is no downside to acting decisively. 

War time measures

The most important factor for the left is their mindset going forward. If they cling to notions of bipartisanship, reaching out across the aisle, and hoping that the other side sees sense, they are going to lose. This is a war, so it is time to start treating it like one.

In war time, nations can turn their society and economy around on a dime. In order to defeat the Nazi war machine, Great Britain transformed itself at breakneck speed going from a broadly free market economy to a highly controlled command economy. Britain converted vast amounts of land into arable allotments in order to feed the population, reduced private fuel consumption by 95% in order to keep their military supplied, and increased military spending from 2% of GDP in 1935 to 60% in 1941. When your survival is at stake, you tend to fight very, very hard to stay alive.

The left must now organize as if their survival is at stake. Because the grim reality is that it is.

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