If we did have this "civil war"...

[Ferguson97]

We're not going to have a true Civil War like we did in the 1860s for a variety of reasons:

The reason that the American Civil War was able to occur the way it did was because the South was dependent on slavery (economically and culturally) in a way that the North was not. And state borders made it very clear which side you were on, due to the fact that different states could set their own laws.

Contrast this to modern America, where red state vs blue state isn't as clear cut. Our political divisions are still based in geography, but it's urban vs rural. Someone in Cincinatti is more likely to share cultural and political values with someone in Boston than someone in a rural part of his own state.

So what would happen when Republican Georgia and the Capital's mayor and city council disagree on whether to side with Biden or Trump?  What happens when the police forces in New Jersey's conservative municipalities refuse to side with the Democratic Governor? Even if you got everyone to agree with it and redraw state borders, how do you logistically unite Philadelphia and Pittsburgh under the same government when everything in-between is technically a foreign country?

There's also the fact that America is a very RICH country. Yes, our income inequality is a disaster and many people live paycheck to paycheck. But from a global and historical perspective, we're rich. We are simply nowhere even close to the material conditions required for a civil war to occur. We'd have to be going on weeks without the majority of the country having access to clean water or electricity.

Despite our political divisions, people simply have way too much to lose by going to war with each other.