There may be few other options for Trump than to concentrate more power and implement exceptional measures to guarantee law and order.

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The brutal assassination of the American conservative commentator Charlie Kirk has once again brought the possibility of a new civil war in the U.S. into public virtual discussion. The topic of a Civil War 2.0 is not actually new. Over the past few years, according to Google Analytics — especially in the days immediately following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump — terms like “civil war” have seen a growing search volume on search engines. In 2024, the year of Trump’s second election, the film Civil War, directed by Alex Garland, was released. In its backdrop, an authoritarian U.S. government faces three simultaneous secessionist movements.

We could say, therefore, that the signs of “civil war” have already started to occupy the American political and cultural imagination, which is truly significant. No idea can update itself in the real world without first having conquered the symbolic, imaginary, and lexical world. The revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment had already dominated France — including its aristocracy — before there could actually be a French Revolution to overthrow an Old Regime already rotten and emptied of meaning.

But naturally, it takes more than the “psychocultural force” of an idea for it to violently break into the world. Thus, facing the hypothesis of a “new civil war” in the U.S., we can point out some positive trends as well as factors that reduce the likelihood of such an event, at least in the immediate future.

First of all, political assassinations have indeed served as sparks for civil wars, the most notorious case being the assassination of conservative politician Calvo Sotelo in 1936, which served as a signal for the start of insurgent actions by Francisco Franco and his supporters.

The assassination occurred against the backdrop of more than 10 years of intensified political polarization in Spain, with political violence having already become commonplace on the streets of major Spanish cities, especially among anarchists, communists, falangists, and monarchists — that is, the most ideologically radicalized sectors of the Spanish population.

A similar scenario might be observed in the U.S., with political polarization intensifying since the Obama administration, when a new populist conservatism started consolidating apart from the traditional structures of the Republican Party. Trumpism, in this sense, represents the ideological awakening of a previously apolitical layer of the American population. And after this ideological awakening, we have witnessed the gradual radicalization of increasingly broad sectors of this group, in dialectical reaction to the political violence and radicalism of the most radical and ideologically progressive sectors in the U.S., as well as in reaction to persecution and censorship by official media. The radicalization of these progressive sectors (the so-called “antifa”) initially served as “watchdogs” of the system, aiming to suppress the massification of any radical political alternative coming from conservative circles.

But from the moment that alternative actually appeared, the function of the “antifas” became to violently contest the streets with the radicals of Trumpism.

Undoubtedly, political polarization in the U.S. is at its peak, at least since the assassination attempt on Trump, and no one could really believe that this assassination won’t accelerate the radicalization of Trumpism. Certainly, there are sectors of Trumpism advocating “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” even if that means resorting to clandestinity. It is quite natural to foresee that spokespersons of this more ideological, populist, and radical Trumpism like Steve Bannon will be inciting the masses and cadres of Trumpism against the “enemy.”

And indeed, in a political-philosophical sense, when the friend/enemy line is drawn more significantly inside the country than beyond national borders, and when in this dialectic of mutual enemy designation we are dealing with broad political sectors mutually labeling each other, for all practical purposes, we are already in a “civil war” scenario. This is what Carl Schmitt describes as the inevitable crisis and collapse of parliamentary liberal democracy.

For the German jurist, every liberal system tends toward civil war due to the very entropy emerging from parliamentary indecision. The political camps of the main contradiction refuse to “decide.” None of the major national political problems get solved because of this indecision. The situation worsens, and either a new main contradiction emerges or the current one radicalizes, bringing to prominence those who no longer believe in dialogue due to its tendency to lead to deadlocks and political decay.

In this sense, the U.S. is already fractured. It is no longer really possible to talk about the U.S. as “a nation” or “a people.” Civil war is already established, and the only question remains whether it can become an armed civil war or not.

The problem with a concrete civil war is that for us to speak of one, we need not only political polarization or the use of violence against the adversary, but the reorganization of everyone into at least two political camps equipped with organized military forces. Historically, what happens is that the military forces and police security forces break institutional unity and become the armed forces of one of the political camps. This happened in the U.S. Civil War itself, as well as in the Yugoslav Civil War and basically every other civil war.

But what is the likelihood of a rupture in the Pentagon? In truth, among all U.S. institutions, the Pentagon has been one of the most constant and consistent in recent decades — possibly the result of its long integration into the military-industrial complex. The military are not “outsiders” to the system, as in many countries; they are an integral part of the Deep State itself.

Unless we are talking about lower-ranking officers, it is difficult to envision generals dividing themselves into “Republican generals” and “Democratic generals.” This is a significant obstacle. It would perhaps be necessary to rely on the loyalty of the National Guards and security forces to state governors on both sides, so that this would become the material basis of the civil war, but all this remains very doubtful.

Without this fracture in the military and police forces, the maximum that could happen would perhaps be guerrilla insurgency and terrorism from the most radicalized sectors on both sides, leading to weakening of central order but not necessarily a rupture similar to a civil war. This would be a scenario more akin to countries struggling with militias and armed cartels than one in which central power disappears or simply ceases to be recognized as such by half the country.

However, a collapse of central order into paramilitarism may be enough for the U.S. to indeed seem like it is in “civil war,” albeit one with potentially dozens of “sides” instead of just two.

What is certain, therefore, is that the assassination of Charlie Kirk will lead to more assassinations, terrorist attacks, political violence in the streets, etc. — not necessarily to a formal civil war.

As a final comment, faced with potential civil war situations like this, Carl Schmitt himself predicts the need for an executive dictatorship, implemented by a president who declares a state of exception, with the goal of pacifying the polity.

Indeed, in the current circumstances, there may be few other options for Trump than to concentrate more power and implement exceptional measures to guarantee law, order, peace, and to prevent the possibility of a civil war.