Where will America’s Civil War be fought? Romantic fantasies have obscured our real class conflict

This talk can’t be blamed on the hysterical age of Trump — for Obama-era Democrats, there was Chuck Thompson’s Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession. But Trump certainly prompted a renewed flurry. In 2017, the New Republic published “It’s Time for a Bluexit”, making the argument — an odd one, from the point of traditional New Deal liberalism — that inter-regional transfers of wealth from rich people in Democratic states to the poor in Republican areas, transacted through programmes such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, were unfair to affluent Democratic taxpayers. In the essay, this latter group was also referred to as “the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way”.

Such talk is matched on the Right these days, with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene the most recent to suggest that states opposed to Biden’s immigration policies might secede from the Union. And there is a history of fictional fantasies pitched towards this end of the political spectrum, with militia types and survivalists on the Right. Who else would be the target audience for America’s rich tradition of trashy novels in which God-fearing patriots overthrow the secular humanist tyrants of the coastal cities? A gentler vision of American Balkanisation was provided for the hippie counterculture by Ernest Callenbach in his 1975 novel Ecotopia, which posited a utopia created in the year 1999 by the secession and merger of the north-western states of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington.

How seriously should we take this talk of a new American civil war? Not very. It is best understood as a symbolic allegory for conventional politics, in which the bullets cast by the two sides merely symbolise votes, in the same way that the giant mutant ants or alien invaders in Fifties science-fiction movies symbolised communism or corporate conformity. But even as allegory, it gets modern America dead wrong. Because though our political divides are as vicious as ever, they would not manifest themselves as a civil war between states — but instead as civil warfare within them.

The actual American Civil War of 1861-65 occurred in an era so radically different from today that it may as well have been the Middle Ages. And it was part of a broader 19th-century upheaval in the Western hemisphere involving unstable post-colonial states that had won their independence from the British, Spanish and Portuguese empires. The Federal Republic of Central America (1823-41) broke up into the current states of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. An alliance of Anglo-American settlers and local Tejanos led Texas to win its independence from Mexico in 1836. Texas was then a sovereign state until it was annexed by the US in 1845, and then joined the short-lived Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865.

But while there have been many coups and revolutions and uprisings in Latin America, there have been no serious attempts to change the borders in the Western hemisphere since the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70), in which Paraguay lost nearly half of its territory to its neighbours, and the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the US detached Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam from Spain. Modernisation and industrialisation have turned formerly weak and unstable regimes into more consolidated countries. And even during America’s most fractious moments, the chances of genuine schism were slim. The purpose of the often-violent “massive resistance” to civil rights on the part of segregationist politicians and allied white supremacists was to maintain the repressive Jim Crow racial order established in the late 19th century, not to renew the South’s failed bid for independence.

It is true that federal authority is contested today, in some cases by city and state governments of various political complexions. So-called “sanctuary cities”, districts run by Democratic political machines which see population growth driven by illegal immigration as helping their political dominance, have often ordered their police forces to refuse to collaborate with federal immigration law enforcement authorities. Meanwhile, the federal courts have become involved in the question of whether the state of Texas can aid in the enforcement of federal immigration law along the Texas-Mexico border — something that the Biden administration and urban Democrats oppose precisely because it might be effective in slowing the infiltration of illegal immigrants into the US. But these are jurisdictional disputes, rooted in struggles over national immigration policy. Neither California nor Texas has plans to secede, join the United Nations, adopt its own currency, or even to send its own team to the Olympics.

In fact, regional polarisation in general is declining in America. For a century after the Civil War, America’s two-party system mirrored the conflict — the Republicans were the party of the North and the Union, the Democrats were primarily the party of the South, based in the former Confederacy. In the Seventies, I asked a reactionary Democrat in Texas why, if he was so conservative, he did not join the Reagan Republicans. His answer: “We vote the way we shot.”

However, over the past half century, the two parties have exchanged constituencies — or, to put it another way, the Northern party and the Southern party have remained the same but exchanged names. In its constituencies, if not its policies, Trump’s Republican party is the party of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson: the historic leaders of the coalition of rural Southerners, Midwesterners and working-class “white ethnics” in the Northeast. Biden’s Democratic party, meanwhile, is based in former Republican regions — New England and the parts of the Midwest and West Coast settled by New England Yankee Protestants.

But even this current pattern of blue Democratic states and red Republican states creates a misleading picture of state-on-state political division. County maps of election results show that there are no red or blue states. There are only blue metro areas, floating in oceans of red, from coast to coast. Demonstrating their detachment from reality, America’s academics and journalists, who overwhelmingly belong to the minority of Americans who are progressive urban Democrats, call this the “urban-rural divide”, as though most Republican voters are farmers or residents of small towns.

In fact, the major political divide in the US is within metro areas — between the dense downtowns and expensive inner suburbs where college-educated elites and their disproportionately foreign-born servants and service workers dwell, and the less expensive outer suburbs and exurbs where most working-class Americans of all races now live. Hipsters living in downtown micro-apartments with the help of trust funds from their parents, or NGO salaries, may look down their noses at suburban and exurban “sprawl”. But home ownership in low-density neighbourhoods continues to define the American dream for the multi-ethnic working class.

This class divide in America manifests itself as a territorial division only because the political system is based on local governments, Congressional districts, and state-wide elections for the Senate. Big cities and universities are Democratic simply because that is where most of the economic and social elites live; the same areas often voted Republican when the Republican party was the party of the rich and college-educated. Meanwhile, today’s Republican-leaning working class lives in the outer suburbs and exurbs of every metro area, in every part of the country.

This is the most important political struggle in the contemporary United States. A new American civil war would be fought in every metro area between neighbourhoods — between, say, Left-wing Democratic Manhattan, with its extremes of rich and poor, and working-class and middle-class New York City boroughs that tend to vote for Republicans such as Staten Island and parts of Queens and Brooklyn. Of course, the New York City civil war would not last very long. Not once the working-class police, first-responders, nurses, building maintenance personnel who commute from the outer boroughs and tend to vote Republican abandon Manhattan to anarchy. That would leave the rich who could not flee to second homes in the Hamptons cowering in their high-rises as criminals and looters took over the streets, burning and looting….

But I will say no more, until I speak to my agent. I have an idea for a screenplay.