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MY P.O.V. - We are not in a civil war in the nineteenth-century sense. There are no massed armies, secession conventions, territorial front lines, or sustained battlefield death tolls, yet. The traditional metrics historians use indicate that America has not crossed into open armed conflict.
But that framing misses the true danger. Civil wars do not begin with artillery. They begin when a society loses agreement about who has the right to rule, who has the authority to enforce the law, and which institutions are legitimate, “no Kings”. By this measure, the United States has already entered something far more destabilizing than street violence and partisan hostility. We are playing the overture to a second civil war.
This conflict is not yet kinetic, but it is being fought everywhere. It is being fought through nullification, selective law enforcement, lawfare, mass protest, bureaucratic obstruction, financial diversion, and ideological loyalty tests. All the while, the population sits on 500 million guns and billions of rounds of ammo. The pen will not be mightier than the sword.
The first weapons are not cannons and rockets, but courts, prosecutors, NGOs, school districts, regulatory agencies, activist networks, and politicians pretending to work for the common good. What makes this moment dangerous is not the absence of violence, which is gaining velocity, but the presence of something deeper: vastly different competing sovereignties, philosophies, and loyalties. When different regions, institutions, and populations obey different versions of the law, the foundation of national cohesion crumbles, even as the appearance of normality persists, mostly.
This country increasingly functions as a loose confederation of hostile jurisdictions, each with its own version of justice, legality, and legitimacy. A person can be a criminal in one state and a protected class in another. A federal statute can be enforced in one jurisdiction and openly ignored in another. A court ruling can be obeyed in one city and defied in the next. This is not a healthy expression of one nation under God.
The United States still flies one flag, mostly, but it no longer shares one legal reality. It has drifted into an uncivil war, a conflict between bureaucracies, ideologies, and moral systems embedded inside the same government, where different parts of the country behave like rival gangs deciding which laws count. Usually, that law is determined by how much money is taken from the system through graft, corruption, fraud, and misappropriation. Because without that gravy train flowing from the great white father in Washington, the rebellion falls apart.
At the heart of this fragmentation is a deep split in how Americans understand the purpose of government itself. One vision holds that law must apply equally, that federal authority is legitimate and supreme, that courts resolve disputes, and that borders and enforcement are necessary for a functioning society. The opposing vision holds that certain groups deserve exemption because of their culture, and that law itself is a form of oppression. Identity, like immigration status, sexual orientation, or skin color, overrides statutes, and noncompliance is morally justified. In practical terms, this means that if someone belongs to a politically protected category, enforcement is optional, whereas if they belong to a politically disfavored category, enforcement is aggressive.
The historical parallel is not the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, but the decade before it. In the 1850s, Northern states nullified federal fugitive slave laws, while Southern states demanded enforcement. The Supreme Court lost legitimacy in its attempt to settle the dispute. States began choosing which federal laws they would recognize. That breakdown of legal consensus, not battlefield clashes, made war inevitable.
Today’s version of that crisis is playing out over immigration, federal policing, and regulatory authority. Blue states and sanctuary cities pass laws instructing their officials not to cooperate with federal agencies. Governors and mayors openly defy federal mandates. Courts are increasingly treated as partisan instruments due to political litmus tests applied by both the left and the right when appointing judges. Among a certain class of lawyers, judge shopping has become more prevalent than Walmart shopping. Federal law says one thing. Local law says another. There is no unanimity on who has final authority despite the Constitution being very clear on this matter.
This is not a marginal phenomenon. More than three hundred cities and counties, along with over a dozen states, now maintain formal policies that block cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, data sharing, detainers, and task forces. All the while, continuously asking the federal government to allocate more tax dollars to their favorite protected classes of non-citizens or rogue elements.
Nowhere is this more evident than in immigration enforcement itself. Federal authorities attempt to enforce the laws on the books, and they are met not merely with criticism but with organized obstruction. Protesters block access to detention facilities. Local officials refuse to honor detainers. City governments instruct employees not to share information. Activist networks mobilize to physically interfere with operations. In effect, a large network of non-state actors and local governments has taken it upon itself to obstruct federal laws. That is not civil disobedience; it is an insurrection. By some comparisons, Jan 6th was a mere stroll through the Capitol. That “insurrection” was one day; this one is every day.
This parallel regime is not cost-free. Billions of dollars flow through entities that exist only because enforcement is stalled. From housing and transport services to legal processing, document preparation, and “case management,” a vast ecosystem of contractors and nonprofits now depends on continued disorder. When federal authorities attempt to restore normal enforcement, these networks react not merely with advocacy but with coordinated resistance, because stability threatens their revenue. What began as a humanitarian concern has hardened into an economy of permanent manufactured crisis, funded by our taxes into perpetuity.
The cultural engine driving this fragmentation is what academics increasingly describe as suicidal empathy, compassion severed from borders, reciprocity, consequences, and selflessness. When enforcement itself is defined as violence, anyone targeted by law becomes morally protected regardless of what they have done. Deportation becomes fascism. Prosecution becomes persecution. Non-compliance becomes justice. Empathy mutates into altruism without limits, and altruism without limits becomes self-destructive. A society that cannot say no, cannot draw lines, and cannot enforce rules ceases to be a society. It is a form of civilizational collapse.
This inversion becomes even more unstable when it collides with incompatible moral systems. Many of the people being defended in the name of compassion come from cultures in which gender non-conformity, or religious dissent, can be punished by imprisonment or death. Yet Western activists who define themselves by LGBTQ rights and feminism often extend blanket protection to ideologies and communities that reject those principles entirely. This is not altruism but suicidal stupidity on a scale worthy of hundreds of thousands of Darwin Awards.
A liberal society can welcome immigrants, but it cannot import legal and moral systems that deny the basic rights that the Judeo-Christian ethos and Western values have fought for centuries to achieve. When activists refuse to draw that line, they will ultimately sacrifice themselves to the very people they claim to defend.
With the rule of law fractured, enormous sums begin to move through political ecosystems that no longer answer to democratic accountability. Hundreds of billions of dollars now flow through NGOs, homelessness programs, immigration services, equity initiatives, healthcare subsidies, and housing grants. When cities and states move into open non-compliance with federal law, these networks gain control over massive public budgets, discretion over contracting, insulation from oversight, and political leverage through activism. In every insurgent system in history, public funds have served as the fuel that sustains resistance to central authority. What begins as doing good metastasizes into a partisan patronage system.
A crucial accelerant in this soft civil war is selective outrage. Crimes and tragedies that fit a political narrative are amplified and weaponized in the MSM, while those of equal or worse tragic outcomes are ignored. Enforcement errors are treated as proof of tyranny. This asymmetry does not merely polarize; it delegitimizes law itself. When justice is perceived as ideological rather than universal, every arrest, prosecution, and court ruling becomes political. At that point, institutions lose the consent of the governed.
One of the most corrosive features of America’s soft uncivil war is that it is not being fought only between left and right. It is being fought between the public and the permanent governing class. Voters can change the occupants of the White House and even the composition of Congress, but they struggle to change the behavior of the system itself. The modern American state is no longer governed primarily by elected officials. It is governed by an interlocking web of agencies, courts, contractors, nonprofits, and bureaucracies, i.e., the deep state, whose power does not depend on elections and whose survival depends on complexity, massive tax dollars, and the status quo.
This is why elections feel increasingly disconnected from outcomes. Presidents run on border enforcement, spending restraint, and institutional reform, yet the machinery of government continues to operate in the opposite direction. Enforcement is blocked by litigation. Budgets expand through omnibus bills no one reads. Agencies make laws to suit themselves. The result is not gridlock but managed dysfunction. A system that feeds on disorder has no incentive to restore order.
Congress is part of this system, not a check on it. Procedural control, committee power, budget negotiations, and continuing resolutions allow a small number of institutional actors to quietly determine what can and cannot happen, regardless of what voters demanded at the ballot box. Political survival in Washington is not built on solving problems; it is built on administering and sustaining them. Immigration chaos, homelessness, healthcare inflation, and regulatory bloat are not merely failures of governance; they have become durable power structures and are important, but not nearly as important as insider stock trading. This is not democracy; it is the rule by apparatchiks and cheaters.
This creates a profound democratic fracture. When the electorate votes for change and the system produces the same old, citizens conclude that elections no longer matter. It pushes people away from civic participation and towards apathy. When the government no longer reflects the governed, legitimacy collapses even if the formal structures remain in place. That loss of faith is the high-octane fuel of societal breakdown.
Large segments of the American left have come to view their own country not as a flawed democracy but as a fundamentally illegitimate system built on racism, patriarchy, and oppression, despite the historical facts to the contrary. In that worldview, anything that undermines American authority is morally elevated, even if it leads to chaos and anarchy, with nary a thought for what might come next.
America has not yet entered a shooting war. But it has entered something just as dangerous: a civil war over legitimacy, law, and money. When empathy is weaponized against enforcement, when ideology overrides behavior and morality, and when corruption sustains resistance and protest, the republic becomes ungovernable. History is unambiguous about what follows. Either the United States restores one law, one system, and one standard of rights and enforcement, or it will continue drifting into something far darker. And you don’t believe we are on the eve of destruction?
(Eliot Cohen has served on the Neighborhood Council for 12 years, served on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino, and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a featured writer for CityWatchLA.com.)
