This is brilliant. We’ve had an earlier post here on 2022-10-03, “Michael Anton—Conservatives and the Right to Revolt, which discussed an article in American Greatness where Mr Anton argued that the U.S. founding was based upon the right to revolt against tyranny, and that there is no reason to believe a tyranny that justified revolt uniquely existed in 1776 and never since.
There is a great deal of emotional manipulation based upon the terms “revolution”, “secession”, and “civil war”. In the French-speaking world, the “American Civil War” is called «La Guerre de Sécession», which I believe is more accurate since what was at stake was not control of the government of the United States as they existed prior to 1860 but rather the ability of states to leave the federal union and, if they wished, form a new union among themselves. The South never intended, and never wished, to take Washington and impose their rule over the states that remained in the Union—which would have been their objective in a civil war. Instead, they simply wanted to leave, and the Union wanted to force them to remain against the will of their citizens.
Similarly, the American Revolution was a war of secession against the British crown. None of the signers of the Declaration of Independence imagined, nor advocated, the invasion of Britain, deposition of the monarchy, and rule of the British Empire from Washington. I thus call the American “Civil War” the “Second War of Secession”.
I think that the dialogue between Tom and Malcolm, which seems to me entirely authentic, is correct in illustrating that there is no prospect of a U.S. civil war in the foreseeable future. There is simply no prospect of the Reds and the Blues fighting over who will rule the entire country and impose their will on the other. If it happened, it would be like a Monty Python war, with tanks flying the rainbow flag commanded by nonbinary officers running out of fuel on the battlefield because deliveries of diesel by despised deplorable rednecks had been halted.
The vast majority of Reds have no desire to impose their will upon the Blues—they just want to be left alone. But the Blues are not yet ready to accept this. So there are two options: inflict sufficient pain on them until they are willing to leave the Reds alone, or separate from them. I believe the latter is more likely, and that it will probably not shake down into two countries, but probably something more like twenty, with some kind of customs union and fairly porous borders among them, but local autonomy in each when it comes to how people choose to live. The population will sort itself out based on their own preferences, as they already seem to be doing, based on U-haul rental rates among various destinations in the present U.S.