Guest Column: Irvine’s Kevin O’Leary — Is This Our Second Civil War?

Kevin O’Leary’s book “Trump and the Roots of Rage” 2016

 

Editor’s note: Irvine’s Kevin O’Leary’s substack has asked us to republish today’s column: subscrivbe to his Substack:

 

Several years ago, Fintan O’Toole penned an insightful piece in The Atlantic warning against the use of the term “civil war.” O’Toole grew up during “the troubles” in Ireland. He recalled his father coming home one day saying the actions being taken by the Protestants and British were pushing Ireland toward civil war. While “the troubles” were definitely a terrible time in Irish history, the bloodshed and strife never evolved into an actual civil war. O’Toole argued that the use of the words ‘civil war’ accentuated and deepened a conflict that brought misery to thousands.

The American Civil War was a horrendous struggle. In four years, more than three-quarters of a million soldiers died and hundreds of thousands were wounded. The economic cost, especially to the South, was enormous with ruins everywhere, a third of the region’s livestock destroyed and the value of its real property cut in half.

What we really have is a conflict between a broad majority of the American public and an elected authoritarian now consolidating the power of the federal government in an ever-escalating coup.

Before our eyes, we see the transformation of a legitimate government into a despotic one. A government that rules by fear; one that weaponizes the Department of Justice against the president’s political opponents and critics and deploys the nation’s armed military against civilians on the home front.

Both actions are alarming and unprecedented, and the supporting propaganda spews from the White House and congressional Republicans as if spoken by Squealer of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

I understand O’Toole’s warning, but, in a deep philosophical sense, we are engaged in a second Civil War. This struggle is much different than the original Civil War, but the stakes are just as high. Like the first, ours is a struggle over our very identity as Americans. Are we equal citizens or powerless subjects? Do we submit to an authoritarian ruler, give up constitutionally protected individual rights and the rule of law, and become his pawns? Citizens or subjects? It’s a stark choice.

In the first Civil War, the South seceded from the union in response to the electoral victory of Abraham Lincoln. A Republican Party that denounced slavery and threatened the South’s power in the Union had won the backing of a strong majority of northern voters in 1860. Succession caused the war, but it was the sharpening conflict over slavery and the fear of the growing power of the Abolitionists that had caused secession.

Initially, President Lincoln was preoccupied with maintaining the support of northern conservatives and border-state masters. At the beginning, he waged war, not to free the slaves and transform southern society, but to bring the Southern states back into the Union. His conservative posture proved insufficient.

In his masterful The Fall of the House of Dixie, Bruce Levine tells the story of how a war to preserve the status quo became a social revolution. Lincoln and the North “turned their guns on slavery in a deliberate, determined manner only once they concluded that doing so offered the sole means of winning the war. Only, that is, when the foe eventually proved more determined, united, powerful and able than anticipated and the war became more difficult, costly, and protracted than expected.” Eventually, Lincoln and the Republicans concluded: if the republic was to survive, the cancer of slavery had to be removed.

In the beginning, Lincoln and most Northern Republicans thought that many residents of the seceded states wanted to remain in the Union. Lincoln and his colleagues believed that moderate Confederates had been “outmaneuvered, stampeded, bullied by southern political extremists,” writes Levine. This proved to be an illusion.

Throughout the 2024 presidential contest, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris made a similar bet. She secured the endorsement of former Rep. Liz Cheney, a hardline Reagan conservative, and encouraged so-called moderate Republicans, especially women, to break with Trump and MAGA. This effort too failed.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has launched multiple assaults on the American republic. Among his strongman models is Vladimir Putin, the world leader he most admires and fears. Recently, Russian state media showed a propaganda video purporting to show an armored vehicle hurtling down a twisting road in Ukraine flying both the Russian flag and the Stars and Stripes.

How should we respond to the menace in the White House? President Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard and the U.S. military in American cities and his current campaign to find dirt on and prosecute political opponents (former National Security Advisor John Bolton, California Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James lead the list) marks a new stage in this struggle.

Greg Sargent reports in The New Republic that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging top Pentagon officials to prioritize using the military against illegal immigration. An internal DHS memo authored by Philip Hegseth, younger brother of the Defense Secretary and a senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, states “The U.S. military leadership (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and NORTHCOM) need to feel – for the first time – the urgency of the homeland defense mission.” (Emphasis added.) The goal, clearly, is to increase military involvement in domestic civilian law enforcement with the memo stating that L.A.-style operations may be needed “for years to come.”

In order to stop President Trump’s toppling of democracy in America, the defenders of constitutional democracy must become more aggressive and creative in both strategy and tactics. As Simon Rosenberg recently wrote in his Hopium Chronicles, when President Trump escalates, we must keep finding a higher gear.

Weekly protests and nation-wide street demonstrations, such as “No Kings Day” sponsored by Indivisible, are important and work as symbolic displays of resistance.

But they are not enough. Part of this is strategic: we need to move to the John Lewis playbook of active civil resistance and “good trouble.”

In 2025, we are in a similar position to Abraham Lincoln and the North in 1862. The war has begun, our side is losing, and we face an opponent who is determined, powerful, and ruthless. To win the first Civil War, Lincoln was forced to launch a full-scale social revolution – one that freed the slaves in the South and razed antebellum society.

When Lincoln’s cautious approach failed, Levine says he was left with three options. He could concede defeat and allow the slave states to withdraw from the union. He could continue prosecuting the war with halfway measures. Or, third, he could fight and win the war, only now making the changes necessary to win.

Choosing the latter, Lincoln accepted the “inexorable logic of events” – meaning the need for a far more aggressive military strategy (and generals such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman to carry it out) and a revolutionary policy of giving freedom to the slaves. Lincoln wrote, by “giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”

On January 1, 1863, twenty-one months after the first shots at Fort Sumter, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. His new pugnacious strategy turned the tide.


Nearly 100 years later, Rev. James Lawson, a close ally of Martin Luther King Jr., held workshops to train students in the philosophy and tactics of civil resistance. In early 1960, John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and others launched a campaign that combined lunch counter sit-ins, marches, and boycotts of downtown businesses. Accepting jail time for their offenses, the students overwhelmed Nashville’s jails and courtrooms. In one of the early successes of the Civil Rights movement, their six-month campaign ended enforced segregation in Nashville.

In both the case of Lincoln and Civil Rights heroes such as John Lewis, a determined, aggressive strategy eventually defeated an entrenched, intransigent opposition. Both victories led to a flowering of democracy in America. We must follow their lead.