Things are truly awful in the US, so is this the time to get pedantic? Well, maybe. I posted on bluesky that I was more worried about events in Minnesota than in/re Greenland.
In the ensuing discussion, I got some pushback--that the US is already in a civil war and any suggestion that it isn't means that I am minimizing what is going on here. This is giving me flashbacks to the Jan 6 is a coup or not a coup arguments. In the aftermath, I argued that the events of January 6th were an insurrection and, yes, an autogolpe (self-coup) and not a coup d'etat. The latter has two dynamics that were not present that day--the involvement of significant elements of the coercive arms of the state (military, secret police, etc) and an effort to change who is in power. I argued that this put the attention in the wrong places as the focus should have been on the White House and Congress, not the military.
This time? Why is this not a civil war? Again, two key ingredients are not yet present with one more important than the other. First and not quite as important: scale. Thus far, the violence is quite limited even as it is appalling and awful. Civil wars are large scale things, and, yes, we social scientists usually use numbers to distinguish between categories of events. For inter-state wars, we tend to use 1000 battle deaths. For civil wars, we use all kinds of numbers, but even if we set it as low as 25, I am not sure we are there yet. Second, and most importantly, civil wars are two-way affairs (or more so, as we saw in Bosnia and Syria and elsewhere), and the violence in the US has been an entirely one-sided thing--the state is engaging in much violence against protestors, but the other side of this, the anti-Trump, anti-ICE forces are not using any significant violence against the government's forces .... thus far.
Which makes what is happening in Minnesota, Chicago, Portland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere state repression (you can call it state terrorism). And that is truly awful and part of the US becoming an autocracy (although democracies repress as well). Again, this is important for both social science reasons and accountability reasons. For political scientists, it allows us to compare this to similar events in the American history and around the world (Tianamen Square?) to note key dynamics and make predictions and policy recommendations. For accountability, calling it a civil war suggests there are two sides that may have some responsibility here. And, damn it, we know that this is being entirely driven by Trump and his regime. The violence is very one-sided, with all of the responsibility for the bloodshed in the hands of Trump, ICE/DHS, and the Republicans (as they hold power in the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court).
Does this mean this is not serious, that I am minimizing the event? I sure as hell don't think so--when the power of the state is being used to kill and kidnap and deport without any due process, so very capriciously and so much by one ethnic group aimed at others, it is very, very serious indeed.
If people want to use "civil war" for rhetorical purposes, go right ahead. It is not my job to tell people how they should resist these abuses of power, this persecution, and, yes, these massacres (are massacres a scale thing? I am not sure). I am not going to tone police folks, but I am also not going to change how I talk about this stuff online. I seek to analyze, to explain, to compare, and to contrast. And being consistent with the usual scholarly use of terms is helpful in those efforts.
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