Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.
One, there are a few counties on Oregon that want to redraw the boundary so that they become part of Idaho. This, I think, is only mildly serious.
The second is the border of Indiana and Illinois, which is serious enough that the Indiana state legislature has voted to create a commission to work on it. It was a bipartisan vote, too. Because there are a number of rural counties in Illinois that would like to join Indiana, and two urban counties in Indiana that say if the option is on the table they’d rather be part of Illinois. Such a thing would need both states to agree and then send it on to Congress, but ultimately I don’t think anything will come of it.
When you look at state funding, these urban counties are sending more tax dollars to their respective state capitols than the states are spending in their counties. In the case of these rural Illinois counties, the state is spending between $5 and $6 per tax dollar collected. Does Indiana really want to take on such welfare queens? And give up some of their few donor counties in exchange? It seems hardly likely!
That’s the rub all across the US. The urbanized areas are subsidizing the rural areas. Are the rural areas prepared to do without such subsidies? They can say “the cities can’t live without the food we grow”, but the entirety of human history shows that the cities always come out ahead in these transactions.
With out current structure of governments, as we get around/over 80% urbanization, the rural areas will just get steamrolled and want to break away due to a lack of agency. If you study people in the "western Idaho" area and on the Oregon coast, it would be easy to see that they are two different nations.
Also,do you have e a source for the 5x tax collected number? The 5x seems really high. I couldn't find one for Indiana, but Illinois shows it's <2x.
https://news.siu.edu/2018/08/081018-research-shows-state-fun...
Shows that on average it is about 3x. There are more detailed per-county numbers available in the actual study.
The real losers are the suburban counties surrounding Chicago. Cook County is only slightly shafted.
The military have the tanks, the air support, the logistics, the surveilence net, the miscelaneous support equipment, and all the training to use everything.
A split within the military, that gets real ugly real fast.
And then, because there were demonstrably some absolute sadists demonstrably present in the armed forces during my lifetime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hooded_Man), perhaps the conscientious objectors will be convinced to fight anyway, to stop the sadists.
It also matters what such a civil war be about — Is it between those who would seize power and those who would prevent it? Is it the same borders as the old Civil War? Is it city-vs-rural?
If there is one (still an if), and if it is Trump vs. the constitution… it's still not impossible for such a conflict to be without a single shot fired. Conversely, if it's between two groups of cities neither of which will consent to the other's choices for president, it could have every major city in the US reduced to radioactive debris.
But yeah, there also was a lot of physically strong young people to choose from.
Our expectations are so low that we ignore the real things that qualified people have done, to pretend that an anti-science wacko has some semblance of sanity.
strong bodies are lackin' wisdom.
Or:
Who do not smoke, not drink, has never lived.
