This was a popular item recently. It is a post about statistics, but the post got a lot of replies, because people think America is headed toward a civil war. Perhaps people with an interest in statistical methods worry about civil wars, in addition to methodological wars. It could also be that people fond of math know that society is fragile and it would not take much to topple it over. The distance between us and Somalia is not a big as we like to pretend.

Anyway, it is a good brain teaser. What would a civil war be like? The country is a vastly different place than the last time. The North is still richer than the south, but there is a Midwest, Southwest, West and Northwest now. More important, nothing is made in the Northeast anymore, other than trouble. The North is also the oldest part of the country, lacking a robust male population. By the standards of the last civil war, the North would be at a demographic, cultural and material disadvantage.

But that was then and this is now. Civil wars tend to be territorial and the regionalism of America is not what it once was. Lots of people from New England have moved south to the Carolinas, for example. Florida is full New Yorkers and is the retirement home to much of the Northeast. Northern Virginia is a region full of strangers, brought together by high paying government work. In event of war, people could move back to their home turf, but that seems unlikely.

There is also the fact that civil wars are almost always between the elites. The people are dragged into it by the warring factions at the top. In modern America, the elites have never been more unified. In fact, they are so united we now have one political party, the Uni-Party. The reason that you cannot tell the difference between the political opinions of Jonah Goldberg and Ezra Klein is that ideologically they are the same guy, with the same paymasters.

If there was to be a civil war in America, it would first have to start as a revolt and gain enough steam to be a genuine threat to the status quo. If a revolt grew into a serious threat to the interests of the ruling classes, then you might see some elements decide to throw in with the rebels. In all likelihood, it would be the younger, lower level members of the elites, looking for an opportunity to leapfrog their superiors. Alternatively, the revolt could quickly grow an elite of its own.

Of course, there is the racial angle. It is funny in a way, but the two groups convinced of the coming race war are blacks and white nationalists. The trouble with this idea is the time for a race war was sixty years ago. There were plenty of young black males thinking they had nothing to lose and plenty of young white males thinking they had everything to lose, Today, the only people thinking race war are mentally unstable black guys and white nationalists.

There is also the technological issue. The lesson of the last century is that conventional warfare was no longer a good way for settling disputes. Putting aside nukes, conventional weapons had simply become too lethal and too destructive. Prior to the Great War, winning meant gaining useful territory. Modern warfare means destroyed cities and fractured economies for both sides. In a civil war, modern arms would mean a terrible bloodbath for both sides.

New Englanders would love to re-enact Sherman’s march to the sea, but they would end up killing more allies than enemies. The economic cost to the North would be devastating. The degree of integration in a modern society would work against the instinct to destroy the other guy’s stuff. Throw in the regionalism issue above and conventional warfare with set-piece battles and troop formations is not going to serve the interests of anyone in the next American civil war.

There is also another problem. The US military is about 1.3 million people, but about 80% are in administrative and support roles. We have more people in uniform pushing buttons at a keyboard than carrying a pack in the field. Of that fighting force, about two-thirds are deployed at any one time. It is not an accident that our political class is not a fan of keeping large numbers of combat ready troops on US soil. In a civil war, the US military would probably disintegrate quickly.

Now, America has been waging non-lethal war on the world for a long time in the form of financial war and now information war. Economic sanctions are a form of warfare intended to create unrest in the target society. North Korea’s quest for nukes is the economic war we have been waging against them. The Bush people took steps to cut them off from the banking system and thus starve the regime of hard currency. That has made the elites of the regime much poorer and weaker as a result.

In a civil war, the tools of finance would come to bear. Assuming the civil war began as a revolt, the ruling class would first attempt to squeeze the rebels financially, by cutting them off from the financial system, making it hard to raise money. This means shutting down their PayPal accounts. Credit card processors would be pressured to discontinue service. When that failed, banks would be forced to close accounts and the seize assets of troublemakers.

This would also discourage members of the elite from getting any ideas about supporting the rebels against the senior elements of the elite. This would be augmented by the use of information war to undermine the moral authority of the rebels, thus starving them of ability to gain popular support. Humans are social animals and they instinctively seek to distance themselves from the taboo. That would mean using mass media organs to evangelize against the rebels.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. America, and the West, is teetering on the verge of civil war, but a modern, technological civil war. On the one side is the globalist elite, who have purged their ranks of anyone skeptical of the project. The brewing revolt is mostly the people willing to question the prevailing orthodoxy. The panic we saw last summer by the tech giants was motivated by a fear that the internet revolt was becoming a revolt in the streets.

This is the face of modern civil war.