How America’s next Civil War could unfold: ‘It’s looming – the battle lines have already been drawn’

Famous for its craft beer and indie bookstores, the city of Portland in Oregon is not an obvious place for the United States to start fraying at the seams. A haunt of Millennial hipsters and downsized tech bros, it prides itself as a vegan-friendly, eco-friendly, migrant-friendly beacon of progressive America.

One person many Portlanders have never felt friendly towards, though, is Donald Trump, and when he unveiled his “zero-tolerance” immigration policy back in 2018, protesters took to the streets. So too did the Far-Right Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys movements – which is how Alexander Reid Ross, a Portland academic who studies political violence, got some first-hand experience of his specialism.

“A big fight broke out between about 150 right-wingers and 75 anti-fascists, and at one point, about seven right-wingers were crowded around one kid giving him a real stomping,” he remembers. “I rushed to push them away, at which point one of them punched me in the face.”

Ross backed off, but then went back into the fray, warning the mob that they risked killing the man they were beating. “Later, the guy who was being stomped said I’d probably saved his life.”

Footage of the incident can still be seen on YouTube – one of countless clips of violence from the Trump years, which also saw the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the storming of the Capitol in 2021.

Similar scenes of unrest also feature at the start of the new film Civil War – which takes the concept of America’s political fracturing to its logical extreme. In director Alex Garland’s new dystopian blockbuster, the enemy isn’t Russia, Islamic terrorists or AI, but the American people themselves, who have taken up arms against each other.

The movie is fictional, but with widespread fears that November’s presidential elections may plunge America back into turmoil, many are already hailing it as a cautionary tale. Some have even questioned the wisdom of Hollywood releasing it in the current climate, fearing it may stoke tensions further.

“Is an action blockbuster that feeds into the violent fantasies of neo-Confederates, anti-government militias and MAGA morons a good idea?” asked one contributor to a discussion thread on Reddit. “I personally don’t think so.”

Such jitters aren’t uncommon – according to a 2022 poll by YouGov and the Economist, 40 per cent of Americans think a new civil war is “at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years”.

Perhaps wary of stirring such tensions further, in the film Garland is at pains to avoid saying what has sparked the conflict, or who the combatants are. As he told a recent preview of the film at Texas’s SXSW festival: “We don’t need it explained – we know exactly why it might happen, what the fault lines and the pressures are.”

All viewers learn is that 19 states have seceded from Washington’s rule, led by a (somewhat unlikely) alliance between Texas and California, sparking a war that has left the country in ruins. Even the film’s central characters are ostensibly neutral observers – a team of journalists, led by a seen-it-all war photographer played by Kirsten Dunst, who drive across the nation in a bid to interview the embattled president (Nick Offerman).

Indeed, the film is as much about journalism as it is about war – a profession which, even in the cynical Trumpian era of fake news, still seems to hold some romance for Garland. Dunst and her team are utterly fearless, following soldiers into bouts of very close-quarters combat. Their bravery gets them remarkable pictures – although if this correspondent’s experiences of covering real-life wars for The Telegraph are anything to go by, the chances of them still being alive to collect their Pulitzers at the end of it all would be limited. Also slightly rose-tinted is the way their car has “PRESS” emblazoned on it. In most modern conflicts – especially civil wars in 21st America – that is as likely to get journalists into trouble as out of it.

Nonetheless, Garland leaves viewers in no doubt that the movie is inspired by real-life US events. The president is an authoritarian who has scrapped the FBI – an apparent reference to Trump’s own legal run-ins with the Bureau. The war’s original frontline is Charlottesville, Virginia – scene of fierce clashes between Far Right and anti-fascists in 2017 at the notorious “Unite the Right” rally, in which one anti-fascist protestor was killed.  And while there are no obvious rednecks vs woke standoffs, one soldier who holds Dunst’s team at gunpoint asks pointedly, “what kind of Americans are you?”

So could such a scenario happen in real life? Might America see a second Civil War, with MAGA supporters and liberals replacing Confederates and Yankees, and the culture wars as the faultline rather than slavery?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, America seems as divided on this question as on any other. For every doomsayer, others point out that the US has weathered similar upheavals in the past. Take the 1960s, for example, which saw the counterculture revolution, the anti-Vietnam War protests and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Could things really get even worse than that?

Garland, for one, seems to think so. Social media, he says, has turbo-charged the tribalism of US politics, with both sides portraying each other as not merely wrong, but evil.

“Left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state,” he told SXSW. “But we’ve made it into ‘good and bad’... it’s f–cking idiotic, and incredibly dangerous.”

Ross, who has studied Far Right movements in his work at Portland State University, believes that the risk of war has ebbed compared to 2020, when a “low-intensity conflict could have been feasible”. But he too is far from complacent.

“A lot of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol are now in jail, and that has taken the wind out of their sails a bit,” he says. “But if Trump gets re-elected, he wants revenge – he’ll pardon all the Proud Boys, and they’ll come straight back to places like Portland to fight people again.”

A rematch of past street brawls isn’t the only looming flashpoint. Trump may yet face jail for his role in the Capitol riot, which would infuriate his supporters. If re-elected, he has threatened a mass deportation of illegal migrants, and to cut federal to Democrat-run cities with rising crime rates, branding them “anarchist jurisdictions”.

He continues, also, to use language often compared to Hitler’s, vowing to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”.

Meanwhile, the culture wars still rage over issues such as abortion rights, the teaching of race and gender identity politics in schools, and border control, with different states taking matters into their own hands. Republican-run Texas, for example, has refused to comply with a Supreme Court order to remove razor wire along the Rio Grande, citing President Biden’s failure to halt illegal immigration.

There is also a widening urban-rural divide. In rural areas of Oregon, for example, conservative voters want to secede to neighbouring Idaho, unhappy at being lumped in with liberal Portland.

In a recent article for London’s Chatham House think tank, Bruce Stokes, an Associate Fellow in the Americas Programme, argued that the US was now “more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s”.

“I don’t think we’re going to see armies of blue and grey-clad soldiers fighting it out,” he tells me, referring to the uniforms worn by the Unionists and Confederates. “But if you look at a whole series of issues, from abortion to LGBT rights and the death penalty, you get a divide that is similar to the old Civil War ones.”

While formal state-vs-state conflict seems unlikely, what could happen is a messy Northern Ireland-style Troubles. Rather than the conventional military forces that square off in the film, there would be gangs and paramilitary groups carrying out tit-for-tat killings.

“I am not saying someone is going to assassinate Biden or Trump, but all kinds of other legislators and officials have no security,” says Mr Stokes. “Could some politically-deranged person assassinate one, which then has a copy-cat effect?”

This is far from a rhetorical question. Last November, David DePape, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, was convicted of the attempted kidnap of former Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile a California man, Nicholas Roske awaits trial on charges that he plotted to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump nominee, at his home in 2022.

The risk of bloodshed is made much easier by America’s ultra-liberal gun laws. Many Far-Right militias in the US are already heavily-armed, as seen by the assault rifles they carried during protests in the Trump years.

Ross believes that Left-wing groups may also now tool up if trouble flares again. He fears the growth of American versions of Far-Left groups like Italy’s Red Brigades, which killed nearly 50 people in kidnappings and robberies during the 1970s and 1980s.

“Left-wing protesters suffered a lot of police brutality during the 2020 protests, and that can end up just sending people into traumatic spirals that can unleash enormous violence,” he said. “I do worry that if Trump gets elected again, it could spawn new left-wing formations who will not be constructive at all.”

Just as the Soviet Union is said to have funded the Red Brigades and other European terror groups, warring factions in America might get covert support from Washington’s enemies abroad, for example Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

While they would be no match for the state directly, they could shelter within sympathetic civilian populations, as the IRA did during the Troubles. In extremis, insurgent movements might even get backing from local National Guard units and sheriff’s departments, which often cherish their independence from federal government.

One man who fears the risk of civil war more than most is Mark McCloskey, a lawyer from Missouri. During the height of the BLM demonstrations in 2020, he and his Patricia wife Patricia pointed weapons at protesters who marched through their private neighbourhood. Photos of the stand-off, in which Mr McCloskey carried a rifle and his wife a pistol, came to symbolise how close America was getting to open conflict.

Mr Closkey, who has since run for Republican office and been hailed as a hero in conservative circles, told me some likely “tipping points” he sees for a future conflict. They included an attempt to jail Trump, dramatically increased gun control measures, and “BLM type riots which would be met by armed resistance.”

He added: “I could go on and on as to what the average person sees as political system that is intentionally weakening our country – open borders where illegal immigrants get funding and rights that are denied to citizens, rampant drug use killing more Americans each year while states push to legalize drugs, the promotion of anti-family lifestyles... the war against religion. So, yeah, I can see a civil war looming on the horizon. The battle lines have already been drawn.”

Garland’s film has already sparked lengthy online debates about how such a conflict would unfold. And this being the divided America of the 2020s, no discussion is complete with some predictions about which side would win.

“I see a working class and rural sort of alliance facing off against a laptop-class urban elite,” wrote one Reddit poster. “Of the two, I can guess who is tougher, more self-reliant and probably has military experience and knows how to use guns. It’s not the investment banker in the Hamptons or the HR executive for a tech firm in Silicon Valley.”

In a civil war, though, a military victory doesn’t mean a moral victory – especially when the arguments are over complex issues like values and identity. Stokes, who at 74 is old enough to remember the US student protests of the 1960s, cautions radicals of all persuasions to be careful what they wish for, be they Portland anti-fascists or Virginia Trump die-hards.

“I remember back in 1968, there was a lot of loose talk among young college people like me about how we might have to have a revolution. A romantic Marxist sense of overthrowing the old order and installing a new one. We forgot that when that happened in Russia, there was a lot of terror afterwards.”

Civil War is in cinemas now