Even the most politically apathetic Americans are aware that tensions in our country have been steadily increasing, with rising fears that we stand to reach some sort of unimaginable boiling point where it all comes crashing down. While seemingly far-fetched and difficult to picture what it would look like in reality, discussions of a looming apocalyptic civil war are not outside of mainstream discourse.
The recent film Civil War speaks to this dread, though it dates back at least five years. A 2019 poll from Georgetown University found that the average voter believed the US was two-thirds of the way to “the edge of a civil war.” A 2024 Marist poll found that 47 percent of Americans feel that a civil war in their lifetime is likely, with Millennials and Gen Z most likely to agree.
While it seems unlikely that a civil war will be erupting anytime soon, the fact that half of the country thinks one is likely is not a cause for optimism and speaks to the possibility of a looming catastrophe if something is not done to alter the present course. Every empire in history has ended, and even the prophetic American painter Thomas Cole, predicted that America’s end would come via empire and eventual civil war in his epic five-part series, The Course of Empire.
However, such decline is not a law of nature, akin to gravity. Nations are not plants that wither with the seasons due to the inexorable forces of nature. The question then becomes what makes a healthy nation, and what leads to decline and collapse á la Thomas Cole?
Fortunately, the twentieth-century American sociologist Frank Tannenbaum, who one might think of as a proto-Robert Nisbet, insightfully, yet succinctly, laid out the logic of social harmony and disharmony in a series of essays published under the name The Balance of Power in Society. These essays are chalked full of timeless insights into the nature of social order and disorder that can serve as relevant guides to understanding our chaotic times.
In the titular essay, Tannenbaum argues that there is a fixed amount of social power in society and that this power is exercised by social institutions carrying out their proper functions. When these functions are encroached upon, one institution gains power at the expense of the others and social disharmony is the result.
In Tannenbaum’s words:
Man as we know him is … not merely the product of society, he is the very child of a complex institutional system that conditions his survival and sets the stage for the drama of life itself. These institutions, prevailing through time, manifest themselves in almost infinitely variable forms, but always fulfill the same role—the structuring of incommensurable human experiences.
Tannenbaum broadly classifies these perennial institutions as the family, the church, the state, and the market. These institutions, when properly carrying out their functions, establish existential meaning, order, and security in the lives of those who participate in them. Tannenbaum notes that these institutions are inevitably in conflict with one another because their claim is totalizing on the person. Each strives to be considered what Nisbet would call someone’s primary social reference group. However, this conflict does not result in total war and the breakdown of the social order because, in a healthy and balanced society, a group’s members are not siloed into one group or another, but rather exist as members of all of them simultaneously.
There will inevitably be conflicting visions and jockeying to secure power within society by the various institutions. Tannenbaum is clear, however, that this is not a fluke, but rather an essential component of life itself. In his words, “Conflict is part of the process of institutional life itself, and the end of the conflict would really signify the end of life itself.” For similar reasons, he attacks dialectical theories of history and class struggle which results in some end state of “eternal rest—that is, death.”
Tannenbaum lays out what might be considered a liberal vision: “In a well-balanced society, where the institutions keep each other in check, man lives in comparative peace. His great problems are relative, his conflicts are over details, and the opponents live together as friends, belong to the same club, go to the same church, and marry into the same families.”
However, when one institution begins to lay claim to the functions of the others, the end result is disharmony and insecurity. In a harmoniously ordered society, each institution shields members from predation by the other. But when one—the state in our times—begins to centralize social power by stealing the proper functions of the others, the balance is destroyed and persons in turn become mere individuals at the mercy of the state.
To borrow the language of international politics, this leads to a security dilemma which one might characterize in terms of “offensive realism” or the “tragedy of great power politics”—only applied on a domestic level. Just like all the other institutions of society, the state is comprised of people and is not a monolithic entity existing in the ether beyond. This means that this institution can be captured and controlled, and given the ever-increasing power that it wields, everyone is motivated for their “tribe” in the most vulgar and unintegrated sense, to control it, lest the other side have it and they be powerless and at the other’s mercy.
Tannenbaum vividly describes the end result of this imbalance, which bears such a striking resemblance to our current state of affairs as to verge on the prophetic:
When one of these institutions … becomes so strong as seemingly to threaten the very survival of the others, then the issues cease to be petty, capable of compromise, and the arguments become preludes to civil wars and revolutions. The contentions between the partisans of one or another institution take on an ideological character, the contrasts between them seem absolute, and the petty quarrels become symbolic of the greater conflict. People begin to talk as if the end were in sight, as if doom were awaiting them at the next turn, and hope of peace—the older peace—fades, and with it tolerance, gentleness, and human sympathy. Life ceases to be important or to have any special value. The cause, whatever it may be, or whatever its name, takes precedence over all else, and men make ready for death—either their own or the death of their enemies—as if the earth were not sufficiently broad to contain them both.
Civil war and revolution come almost as a relief, for now it seems that the issues will finally be settled, for all time. In that situation there is no compromise and rebellion, revolution, and civil war are a logical, inevitable, and supposedly necessary consequence of the claims to absolutism in the name of one of these institutional interests.
Though published in 1946, this description is on the mark for where the “vibes” of the moment are. Compromise seems increasingly impossible as visions of the good seem to deviate further by the day and tensions mount. In light of these tensions, it makes perfect sense why people speak of civil war, not really through a hope of disaster, but as a relief valve for the ever-increasing pressure.
This tension has emerged precisely as Tannenbaum predicted, as the federal government has radically centralized nearly all aspects of social life under its purview at the expense of the other core institutions of society. The family, as an institution, is in extreme decline and frequently is absolutely powerless before the state. Similarly, having been robbed of nearly all practical functions by the state, the church faces a precipitous decline in attendance and will likely see it go lower. Meanwhile, the market has become infected by so much rent-seeking and financialization that it can hardly be said to free or exercising its proper functions either. Nor is it likely to as total government spending continues to climb north of 36 percent of GDP.
Tannenbaum discusses in detail the process by which local control exercised via legitimate representation is replaced by bureaucrats from the distant center.
However, at the time of writing, Tannenbaum did not think that the US was at risk of civil strife. In another essay, On Political Stability, published in 1960, he reflects on the conditions that led to revolution in France and Russia, but not in the US and UK.
The crucial factor, he argues, was the degree to which social power was concentrated or dispersed. “What these monarchial tragedies set forth,” he argued, “was that centralized government is its own greatest enemy, that the more absolute it becomes the less resiliency it possesses.”
In contrast to extreme centralization, the US and UK have historically possessed a very great disbursement of power, not only among the non-state institutions, but among the lower levels of community government as well, whatever form they manifested:
Enduring political power needs to be built upon the locality as the prime unit, and it matters relatively little whether it is controlled by a great lord, a little lord, a knight, many yeoman, or a few burghers in a town. … What does matter is that the shires and boroughs are competent to assert their views and maintain them through their own chosen leaders. If the locality is not strong enough to maintain its leaders against the King, the central government, or the dominant party, it has no political influence in the end. This is the substance of political power.
Tannenbaum discusses in detail the process by which local control exercised via legitimate representation, whether by nobility or locally chosen citizens, is replaced by bureaucrats from the distant center, who naturally have no loyalty or investment in the place whose interests they are supposed to be upholding. “Local leadership has been replaced by a bureaucracy which, like a spider’s web, covered every nook and corner of the land … politically, this is the point of no return. When the communities’ natural leaders have been replaced by appointed officials responsive to a distant ministry, an irrevocable step will have been taken. … The country is now ruled rather than governed.”
Remarkably, Tannenbaum identifies the local political party machines of the US as being an essential aspect of representation of local interests in national politics that defend local interests, even if the local machines were themselves sometimes corrupt.
There are numerous other precinct insights in these two essays, along with some others in the above-mentioned collection, especially discussing labor unions. However, let us now turn to the state of America today.
Under Tannenbaum’s analysis, today’s nearly ubiquitous “vibe” of impending doom and sense of Manichean apocalyptic conflict is perfectly understandable in light of the rapid and increasing centralization of power by the state. A person integrated across the fabric of the various institutions of society can feel secure knowing that numerous mediating institutions, and the power that they wield, will protect him from being oppressed by each other, not to mention assistance with the difficulties of daily life. In contrast, a mere individual stands naked and powerless against the power of the state. Even political parties have changed dramatically, with local party machines replaced by a nationalization of politics.
It is little wonder then that more and more people feel that the stakes are growing ever higher every election. In simple logic akin to structural realism in international relations, people can never truly know the intentions of other political actors and therefore live in fear of what will be done to them if “the other side” comes to power. Naturally, this incentivizes each side to seize the power of the state to ensure it will not be used against their own “side.”
Tannenbaum noted that in American politics, one side never wins “unalterably” and, therefore, the other side also never loses “unalterably.” Thus, all sides are invested in the continuation of American political institutions, rather than resorting to arms.
Yet, the situation has obviously changed since Tannenbuam was writing in the middle of the last century. It is not uncommon to hear people on both the left and the right speak of their fear that the other side is planning to institute a permanent dictatorship in some form or another (which, following realist logic, will eventually lead to the idea that one must institute the dictatorship first as a defensive measure).
This situation is what brings about the yearning for relief via civil war to purge the growing tension once and for all. It is extremely dangerous, and while it seems unlikely that civil war will be breaking out soon, if this attitude continues to fester in the years to come, we will surely end up in a dark place.
The only long-term solution is ultimately disarmament. Power must be restored from the centralized state to the various institutions of society where it properly belongs. The only way to stop fighting over control of the nuke that is the state is to disarm it. Numerous obstacles, both institutional and ideological, will hinder this from happening. But if it does not happen, the future of the American constitutional system as we know it is very much in doubt.
