The recently released trailer for “Civil War,” an upcoming movie from indie studio A24, has spurred discussion about a hypothetical civil war in America. The trailer follows a former conflict journalist, played by Kirsten Dunst, as she and her crew try to make sense of a country plunged into uncertainty and chaos when 19 states secede.
The first and most urgent mission of any secessionist movement is securing its own territory, not marching outward. And that’s very difficult, even for a government under normal circumstances.
Think about it this way. You’re the leader of a secessionist state. You raise a militia or fall in on military units that defect to you. Is your first action bringing that military elsewhere to fight? Or securing your own territory, to which you have a tenuous and contested claim, and which is objectively very difficult to do in any organized sense of things?
It’s obviously the latter.
Take Georgia as an example — a state that has seceded in the past, and secedes again in the movie. Secession would plunge it neck deep into a massive, bloody, state-wide battle between those seeking to uphold secession and those hoping to remain part of the U.S.
Assume one could muster the military force necessary to take and hold Atlanta — hundreds of thousands strong, at least, who all need to be fed, equipped and resourced — or to surround Atlanta and bring it under siege, without worrying about threats from Savannah or Fort Moore. This process would take months at least and result in heavy casualties and entail starvation among a civilian population.
Though a civil war can feel frighteningly possible in the U.S. in 2024, it remains extremely implausible. These wars are by far the hardest and bloodiest, and no sane American would trade a Biden-run or Trump-run government for months or years of war, starvation, environmental catastrophe and plague — let alone the social costs that would be incurred by the victor