This article in The Week argues that civil wars can take a variety of forms, so we shouldn’t be overconfident that one is impossible just because we don’t have an obvious geographic basis for one.

• The original U.S. civil war is a somewhat obvious example of a geography-based conflict. Although, I see it as less of a territorial dispute and more of an economic and class conflict, rationalized and manipulated by racial and religious ideology.
• Yugoslavia in the 1990s was an ugly conflict between ethnic and religious groups who were interspersed geographically. Rwanda isn’t mentioned but I understand it to be similar, although I don’t fully understand either of these conflicts.
• The English Civil War “that raged from 1642-1651, pitting the crown against parliament, cities and towns dominated by a rising commercial middle class against the aristocratic countryside, and the staid religious convictions of the ruling class against the theologically driven radicalism of more demotic religious sects.” Okay, I’m almost completely ignorant of this one, because I was only taught U.S. history in school and haven’t gone back to study this one on my own. Perhaps the Crown whipped up a crowd of supporters and said something like, “Hey, why don’t you guys go over there and storm Parliament and have a portrait painted (no cameras yet) of yourselves naked except for a pair of Viking horns”?
• I did read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, but I always thought that book was false advertising because it was 99% about the French side. I’m not an expert on the French Revolution (not mentioned in the article) by any means, but I understand it to be mostly a class conflict – a revolt of the poor and working class against an exploitative aristocracy. The conditions that could spark something like this would seem to be ripening in the U.S. as wealth and income inequality get objectively worse, but watching Bernie Sanders (who to be clear, advocates peaceful income redistribution to avoid the heads rolling) lose last year convinced me the propaganda here has been so successful for so long among the working and middle classes that this is unlikely. Put another way, our working and middle classes misunderstand the cause of our suffering and have been convinced to support the people causing it, or at least enough of us do that we are hopelessly divided for now. Bernie tried and failed twice (and before that, Ralph Nader tried and not only failed but set the cause back by 20 years), but maybe a more charismatic or more skilled Bernie/Nader will come along in the future, and conditions will have worsened in the meantime.
• The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I understand this as a group with an ethnic and religious identity wanting regional autonomy, and a central government fighting that, leading to a long, low-intensity insurgency and counter-insurgency conflict. This is happening all over the world (the south of Thailand is just one example I am familiar with), but I don’t see obvious parallels in the United States. The repression of the war on drugs and mass incarceration have some echoes of this perhaps, with the Black Lives Matter movement emerging as a somewhat organized, nonviolent form of resistance. Perhaps it could turn violent if something like the Black Panther movement of the 1960s were to re-emerge.
• Not mentioned in this article is the increase in right-wing militia groups. Their rhetoric is violent, anti-government, sometimes racist although I don’t believe all these groups identify as racist or white supremacist. It’s not exactly clear to me what they want other than disorder.
• The Spanish Civil War “that shattered the Iberian Peninsula into a multitude of factions — from anarchists, Stalinists, and anti-clerical absolutists on the left to fascists and Catholic authoritarians on the right — between 1936 and 1939.” Again, my formal education was a complete failure and I am ignorant of this one. Maybe Biden has been fooling us and he will now reveal his true colors as the new Franco/Mussolini/Catholic authoritarian/Emperor Palpatine/Voldemort clone. After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Now, continuing this line of thought, who could Joe Biden appoint as Grand Inquisitor? My first thought is Mike Pence. However, an Inquisition will need to be good at things like contact tracing, isolation of victims, and disposal of bodies, and Pence failed his audition as head of the coronavirus virus task force. So I’ll go with Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, who just might have the right combination of political skills, religious fervor and psychopathy to get the job done.