Is America Headed Towards a Second Civil War?

It is no secret that Americans are fiercely divided between liberals and conservatives with a few million people known as independents hanging out in the middle. The division is both wide and deep, and it is growing wider and deeper.

Neil Howe is a demographer, historian, and author, and he has remarkable success in predicting the future. According to Tyler O’Neil at The Daily Signal, Howe “says a civil war in the U.S. is far more plausible than most people think, and he dismisses the reasons Americans often discount that possibility.” 

In 1997, he published a book with Bill Strauss, “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy – What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.” In that book, he suggested five catalysts for a major crisis – and four of the five have already come to pass.

“One of our events was a crisis over the debt, which would issue forth in a new tea party movement,” Howe tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.” He calls it “just completely random that we happened to use that phrase,” which the tea party movement adopted in 2010.

“The other one was a WMD [weapon of mass destruction] attack on New York City,” Howe says, noting the eerie parallel with Sept. 11, 2001. “The other one was the [COVID-19] pandemic, and the fourth one was Russia invading a former Soviet republic,” such as Ukraine.

The final potential catalyst? “A nullification crisis, where one or more of the states would actually nullify federal regulation, which would lead to a new secession movement,” Howe says.

Howe has a generational theory that “America should expect a major crisis about every 80-100 years, and we’re due for another ‘rendezvous with destiny’ such as the Great Depression and World War II.” Howe calls these happenings “fourth turnings.” “They force society to create a new order in the civic ‘outer world’ about 40 or 50 years after ‘awakenings’ drive people inward, seeking order in their spiritual ‘inner worlds.’”

Howe notes that “our politics have taken on this kind of Manichaean style, where the red zone and blue zone are so mutually exclusive in their sense of themselves, their agenda for the nation’s future, that it hardly even matters who’s leading the party.”

(“Manichaean” refers to the tendency to view one side as perfectly good and the other side as perfectly evil, and it traces back to a world religion that arose with the prophet Mani in the 200s A.D., which taught that the physical world is evil and the spiritual world is good.)

He cites Carl Becker, who authored an essay in 1941, “The Dilemma of Modern Democracy.” When most of what you’re talking about is the width of sidewalks and the diameter of sewer pipes, just coordination issues, democracy works really well,” Howe says. “But when you’re talking about issues that virtually define who you are, it doesn’t work. He said no one is going to accede to a vote count that goes 51% against you.”

“You are not going to give up everything you believe in just because you came up three votes short,” he explains.

This is not the first time that there has been a great division in America. Howe claimed that similar divisions took place “in the 1770s, the 1850s, and the 1930s.” However, the current polarization does not have neat lines of division like that of the U.S. Civil War. When The Daily Signal noted this fact, Howe replied that “blue cities in red states actually makes conflict more likely.”

“There are two ways in which we enter this fourth turning very differently from earlier fourth turnings, which are worrying,” Howe says.

First, he notes, “government is so huge going into this fourth turning,” while most fourth turnings require government to ramp up in order to face existential threats.

Second, he notes “the size and global power of our military” make the U.S. a central player in world affairs, so a U.S. Civil War will have massive ramifications across the globe.

“If it requires our forces around the world to stand down for six months, the entire world will remake itself,” he says. “The entire world, for better or for worse, depends upon our presence to be what it is.”

Howe also notes that during a civil war, one side often asks for external help: “This is a rule through all civil wars.”

The discussion then considered when such a civil war would start. In fact, there was no civil war during previous “’mini starter crises’ of 9/11, the tea party movement, COVID-19, and the Ukraine war did not ‘catch fire’ and ignite the massive existential crisis that defines a fourth turning.” The author’s answer was, “The survival of the country has to be at stake.”

“With regard to World War II, I think FDR made the case – it was very persuasive for the country – we did not want to be the only democracy left on earth,” he explains.

“This is the way incentives work,” Howe says. “You’ve got to feel everything’s on the line to push you to do something.”

Things have to come to a head in order to force people to come together and create a new order in society. How exactly that will happen is yet to be determined.

With all the evils in the world – human trafficking, child sexual slavery, gangs, drugs, and the new axis of evil (Russia-China-Iran) to name a few, I wonder if the new order in society will be brought about by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The signs of the times are becoming more frequent and obvious.

One of the most obvious signs is the way that people – including a sizable portion of residents of the United States – and nations are blaming Israel for not doing more to solve the problem with Hamas. They do not seem to understand that Hamas could stop the war with Israel today or tomorrow, but they do not want to stop it. They want to destroy the nation of Israel and destroy all Jews. That is their goal, and they make it obvious.

God will never allow the Jews to be destroyed as a nation. The Jews are God’s chosen people, and He will protect them with His power.