One of the many controversies precipitated by the January 6th unrest at the Capitol has been a terminological controversy around words like ‘sedition’, ‘insurrection’, ‘coup’, and even ‘civil war’. Of course, these disputes are not simply terminological. They play a vital role in framing ideological and practical stakes, signaling alignments and issuing normative judgments, while suggesting concrete political consequences.
The term ‘civil war’ looms especially large because of the enduring effects of the US Civil War on the material, racial, and imaginary landscape of American politics. But it also stands out because it has been explicitly and menacingly deployed by the participants (and enthusiastic spectators) of the storming of the Capitol themselves. One viral image showed a Trump supporter carrying a confederate flag through the halls of congress. Another features three men in black hoodies with the words “MAGA Civil War – January 6th 2020” emblazoned on the front. In the days following the event, Rhode Island congressman David Cicilline publicized a voicemail he received in which someone threateningly states: “if you impeach him, civil war is on buddy.”
Outside the MAGAsphere, a general sense of alarm is leading others to wonder aloud about the prospect of civil war. As one columnist in the Chicago-Sun Times put it: “There are some people who believe we are nearing a civil war in this country. I think it may have begun.” Social media, for its part, is replete with allusions, varying in degrees of irony and seriousness, to the civil war which is underway or soon to come. Others still, particularly on the left, push back on the notion of impending conflict, and seek to alert us to another danger on the horizon, namely the reinforcement of familiar (but deleterious) neoliberal-securitarian governance, freshly legitimated by its chimeric opposition to right-wing authoritarianism and a Biden-led restoration of ‘dignified’ ruling class social mores and rhetoric.
Whether or not one agrees with the deployment of the term ‘civil war’ in this instance, its frequent appearance speaks to increasingly salient antagonisms in the polity. Disaffection on the left and right with a tired and corrupt political establishment, ever-diminishing economic prospects for the majority of people (exacerbated by the pandemic), culture wars and epistemic fractures all attest to the intensity of these antagonisms. Last summer saw what may have been the largest protest movement in American history against structural racism, white supremacy, and the regime of police-power that upholds and enforces it. Conversely, far-right white militias (and their compatriots with badges) have increased in prominence and have continued to heighten their aggressive presence.
I cannot say where this intensification of antagonisms is leading. My interest here lies in the question of whether ‘civil war’ helps make the conjuncture more or less intelligible. I think it can shed light, not because these events themselves should be properly called civil war, but because the concept frames the existing antagonisms and conflagrations in their properly irresolvable character.
Disputes over what constitutes civil war are not new. In his Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), David Armitage points out that “civil war is an example of what philosophers term an essentially contested concept, so called because their deployment inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users.” (CW, 18) I think there are at least two principal reasons why civil war is an especially contested political concept.
The first is its use in designating a wide array of socio-historical phenomena, from revolutions to sectarian violence, anti-colonial wars of liberation, genocides, regional secessionist struggles, and even worker insurrections and communes (Marx called his 1871 pamphlet on the Paris Commune The Civil War in France). “Only by ignoring the multiple histories of civil war,” Armitage notes, “would it be possible to define it.” (CW, 18)
Secondly, there has been a relative paucity of philosophical writing on civil war. As Armitage observes, there “is no great work titled On Civil War to stand alongside Carl von Clausewitz’s On War or Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution”. (CW, 18) In Giorgio Agamben’s words, “there exists, today, both a ‘polemology,’ a theory of war, and an ‘irenology,’ a theory of peace, but there is no ‘stasiology,’ no theory of civil war.” (S, 1) Foucault, too, claimed that “Civil war is… philosophically, politically, and historically, a rather poorly developed notion.” (PS, 13)
One result of this conceptual ambiguity – and quite simply of approaching it in the abstract – is the tendency to use ‘civil war’ as a generic coverall for extreme partisan tension and violence. While that understanding is not wholly mistaken, we ought to, as Foucault argues in his lectures on The Punitive Society (1972-73), be more specific. The biggest error many make in conceiving of civil war, he claims, is one he attributes to the persisting influence of Thomas Hobbes: incorporating and confusing civil war with the anarchic ‘war of all against all’, which either pre-exists or follows the collapse of civil society. Situating civil war outside the civitas – as ‘natural’, ahistorical, and spurred by hostile passions rather than irreconcilable political forces – renders the qualifier ‘civil’ mostly unintelligible. Therefore, if civil war is to be a meaningful and illuminating concept, it must be understood as emerging endemically to the ‘civil society’ in question, rather than as an exogenous or arbitrary shock to it.
The endemic structural antagonisms that make America into an ongoing, latent civil war are not new. But history repeatedly reminds us that structural social antagonisms do not necessarily portend political confrontation, and durable regimes can manage and even exploit them with the proper ideological and governmental mechanisms. The transition to open hostility, which goes beyond episodic outbursts and stochastic violence, requires above all that informal complicities and alignments coalesce into well-organized factions. Despite Foucault’s characterization, Hobbes knew that “factions are the source of sedition and civil war.” (OC, 123) We understandably associate civil war with heightened violence. But faction is defined by unity as much as it is by discord.
It isn’t clear yet to what extent such factions are forming. Keeanga-Yamattha Taylor highlights the deepening “convergences between the Republican Party, white supremacists, and white militias… as well as between those groups and the police.” Moreover, reports indicate that three Republican congressmen helped coordinate the siege on the Capitol. A “Million Militia March” has been called for Inauguration Day.
But we’ve also witnessed US corporations abandon the GOP in the aftermath of January 6th, and it is generally preferable for the capitalist order that the social field consist primarily of alienated (governable) individuals and private corporations rather than organized political factions of any kind. Yet, when forced to choose between a more concerted, forceful left and a militant, racist far-right, this same order has proven time and again its readiness to tolerate and even partner with the latter in its effort to suppress the former. If political conflict on the order of civil war develops in the US, it is unlikely to take the form of a protracted struggle between the neoliberal establishment and the convergent forces which made themselves visible at the Capitol. Their opposition is mostly illusory. More plausible, it seems, is that the attenuating authority of civil institutions which perpetually and purposely fail to address salient problems or ameliorate people’s lives is met with a correlative (but not guaranteed) activation of the real antagonisms which are cleaving the American polity.
Owen Glyn-Williams
Owen is a philosophy PhD candidate and instructor at DePaul University. He works on Early Modern and contemporary political philosophy, and the relationship between politics and civil wars.
