Experts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.
Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.
“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”
This is true, but there’s more to it than that.
Around the time I first joined Lemmy a user on here recommended a book to me titled “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.”
I’m oversimplifying the contents, but civil wars tend to be more common in countries that are in a status that is between autocracy and democracy. Overwhelming authoritarianism and overwhelming democracy are stabilizers that make it difficult for infighting that contests the leadership of the country.
There’s a lot of ways to interpret the current atmosphere and where we are on that scale. I don’t feel confident in my ability to judge it.