Having in part one of this essay [1] given a worst case hypothetical scenario for the outbreak of the Second Civil War and presented an initial appearance of stalemate, I would like to take this particular section as an opportunity to provide the exploration of the strategic choices that would not only answer the question of the original source of conflict in our nation’s prolonged cultural warfare and the increasing unwillingness of liberal progressives to accept loss at the polls but also the longer and nearly equal division of the United States between the right and left.  What would be sought here is not only a way for government forces to put down the immediate rebellion, but also to address the longer-term causes of the immense division in the first place in the nearly equal divide among the American people as a whole.

Although the two sides are roughly equal in terms of population, in terms of area there is no such equal division.  The existence of enclaves of blue in many otherwise red areas and of areas of lighter red that are more evenly divided and darker red that are more uniform suggests that even among largely rural “Red America” there will be internecine struggle against more blue areas in larger cities and college towns, while there are a few blue areas of interest along the Mississippi Valley, the central Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, the Upper Midwest, New England, and areas along the Great Lakes as well as the Rio Grande Valley, northern New Mexico, Central Colorado, Los Vegas, and the Pacific heartland of the left coast.  It should be readily apparent to most observers, though, that the areas of blue are largely separated and scattered from each other.

Assuming that government forces would be able to control the littoral and riverine areas of the United States, this suggests a fairly obvious strategy for dealing with the widely separated progressive enclaves, and it is one that would be admirably well suited for dealing with the long term sources of political disagreement.  Rather than shooting a way block by block through hostile urban neighborhoods filled with people angry at a government that they believe does not represent them, it would be far more appealing in many cases to adopt a logistical strategy that would take advantage of the scattered areas of peak resistance and starve them into submission.  There is a great deal of historical precedent for this sort of action, but it is likely one that would require a particularly cold-blooded strategist to execute, even more so than most military strategies.

The most obvious precursor for this strategy within American history is the victorious strategy of the Union against the Civil War, which involved the deliberate destruction of the agricultural heartland of the South.  This strategy is the inversion of that one, in that it would set up a cordon around cities and hit them at their deepest vulnerabilities–roads, railroads, ports, and airports essential for the transfer of goods and the importation of food from foreign countries and rural hinterlands, aqueducts to bring water to thirsty areas, sewer systems designed to keep those cities clean, and power grids that transfer electricity from power plants in rural areas to urban customers.  All of these aspects of infrastructure could be straightforwardly subjected to interdiction as a way of bringing urban rebels to their knees, and, if they decided to continue resisting, would allow for the four horsemen of the apocalypse (conquest, warfare, starvation, and death) take their toll in overcrowded cities lacking the essential infrastructure of first world life.

A similar sort of logistical strategy would appear to be useful in dealing with the vulnerability of progressive elites on money taken from taxpayers.  A government committed to defunding tax-supported Progressive causes would find it possible to ease budget woes while simultaneously attacking its ideological opponents root and branch and denying them the resources they need to operate to the level that they have in recent decades.  Why should taxpayers, after all, fund progressive thinkers who seek to brainwash youth into disloyalty and decadence, and make them morally unproductive members of society?  The starvation and strangulation of liberal enclaves would not be pretty business, but it would likely be far less costly on a material level than direct military action, and it would be far more lasting too, as it would leave far fewer potential rebels and shift the long-term demographic balance of the United States as a whole.  I would like to discuss that further in the concluding section of this essay, but before I do, I would like to comment a bit on some of the more direct historical analogues for such a logistical strategy.

The logistical strategy is one that has been used with considerable success several times in history, and it is particularly useful against areas with a large urban population.  One thinks of the sieges of Jerusalem several times throughout history, or the long-term strategy of Sparta against Athens.  The fact that so many areas in Blue America are highly dependent on the rural areas outside for their water (Los Angeles, Portland), food (Hawaii), and electricity (almost any big city) suggests a special vulnerability to a logistical strategy.  The results of such a strategy would also be noteworthy.  In the Jerusalem of 70AD and the Athens of the Peloponnesian War there were intense internal divisions related to the hardship of their sieges, and contemporary cities under such sieges (like Leningrad in World War II) have not tended to fare well in such conditions.  For the ruthless leader intent on attacking the core population of hostility where it hurt most, the logistical strategy has a great deal of appeal, even if the results would be immensely tragic.  As to the long-term effects of such a strategy being used, we will save that for the conclusion of this essay.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016/11/30/a-pre-mortem-thought-experiment-on-the-second-american-civil-war-part-one/