There are bonkers theories about a new American Civil War: there are predictions of it, even computer games based on it - and then there is reality.

But reality in America is looking a little bit different than it did before the passage of the Obama healthcare bill. Public discourse has reached "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" levels and, watching it all from the outside, I am wondering where it all ends up.

There has been an outbreak of vandalism - bricks through politicians' windows; there have been threats of violence and a lot of violent language. Democrats, in response have begun to accuse mainstream Republican commentators of stoking up the violence, and in turn they have accused the Democrats of trying to provoke a violent reaction.

All this has made me consider in a new light something said by an oil-man who consults for one of the biggest companies in the world. Last summer he told me:

"We run a mainframe computer simulation of the global political and economic situation, modelling various outcomes of the resource crunch that begins in the back half of the 2010s. And no matter which way we tweak it, it always comes out with the same result: civil war in America in 25 years's time."



For obvious reasons, given that the said company is a global player, they were not very interested in publicising the scenario.

In this oil company scenario the driver is not ideology but simply resources. As explained to me, the question becomes whether the world's biggest consumer of petroleum based products can move away from oil dependency fast enough; and in the scenario the answer is no because its political institutions are too consensual. That is, even where you get politicians who are prepared to act decisively, there are so many checks and balances - state-level opt-outs, Supreme Court, Congressional filibuster, corporate-controlled media etc - that they can never implement the most painful decisions. And as a result the political system fragments once the oil gets scarce.

I am always wary of "ACW 2.0" scenarios because they are a recurrent fantasy for people who don't like the USA. Russian professor Igor Panarin, for example, predicted two years ago that the USA would begin to fall apart this year and that the dollar's role as a world currency would end last year. As summarised by the Wall Street Journal Panarin predicts:

"Economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough.. wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in."

(Panarin is a Dean at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Academy.)

Now let's look at current reality. In the aftermath of President Obama's healthcare bill there are three separate strands of conservative opposition brewing.

The most important is the revived Palin/McCain bandwagon that has hit Nevada this week and will move countrywide until mid-April. This is an attempt to ride the wave of the Tax Teaparty movment and turn it into an electoral rout for the Democrats in November's midterm elections.

What liberal commentators have taken offense to is the use of gun language and symbolism, with Sarah Palin's website indicating "target" Democrats using rifle sights superimposed on a map of America.

The next strand is the Teaparty movement itself. Though the movement is massive, peaceful and encompassing large numbers of grassroots Republicans, some demonstrators in Washington hurled racial and homophobic abuse and threats at Democratic Congressmen; and some placards carried the implicit threat of violence. This was then condoned and stoked up by some right wing radio show hosts.

Then there is the actual violence. Democrat Party office windows were broken in several states. Ten Democrat lawmakers have been offered police protection. This op-ed from the Washington Post contains a summary of the vandalism and the liberal response.

In this context Glenn Beck's on-screen post-mortem for the anti-healthcare bill campaign is worth watching. The tone is more in sorrow than in anger but contains the following commentary on the liberal media's response to the verbal abuse on Capitol Hill:

"Why are the Tea Parties always being labeled as terrorist? Why is it? "They're extremists, they're terrorists, they're hatemongers, they're dangerous!" What is it that these evolutionaries want? You'd pick up a gun? You ever thought of that? These people have. Because possibly, maybe the question should be asked: Maybe they're tired of evolution, and they are waiting for revolution."



At the end of the broadcast Beck calls for a return to rational discourse. But those like former Bush aide David Frum who have urged the movement to moderate its language in order to give elected representatives room for manouver have themselves been given short shrift.

What seems to me problematic is that the whole 24-hour furyfest is being conducted with almost no overt reference to America's history of political breakdown in the 1850s. Here's why it's worth bearing in mind.

James McPherson's The Battle Cry of Freedom, Allan Nevins' 8-volume Ordeal of the Union and Shelby Foote's trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative all remind us that the actual American Civil war was preceded by a long and complex political breakdown process accompanied by demographic change and economic modernisation.

It was not just "about slavery". It was about the emergence of a new political model of industrial capitalism in the northeast and Midwest and the rise of a political party that represented the new system, and had no support whatseoever in the slave-owning south. That, at the time, was the Republican Party.

As matters degenerated you saw the habitually rowdy electoral process give rise to more systematic violent acts, from the outbreak of political violence in Kansas, to John Brown's guerilla raid on Harper's Ferry, to the maiming of anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner by pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate.

Allan Nevins argued that by the late 1850s America contained "two peoples": culturally, socially and ethnically different (black slavery in the south plus 9/10ths of European immigrants headed for the North). McPherson explained that, to the white slave-ocracy and its plebeian supporters, the rise of industrial capitalism and its liberal values did look like a revolution:

"When secessionists protested in 1861 that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to preserve their constitutional liberties against the perceived Northern threat to overthrow them. The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North's had.... The ascension to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had turned irrevocably towards this frightening, revolutionary future."

I want to make clear: it would be totally wrong to extrapolate from all this any direct parallel with today's situation in the USA. But in the light of my oil-man's scenario there are pertinent questions worth asking.

The Obama presidency seems determined to confront a number of strategic challenges to the USA: having 32 million people with no access to healthcare was the first. Having 11 million undocumented migrants could be the next.

But Obama's project for America seems to have frightened large demographic slice of the population which did not vote for it. In that sense alone there is a parallel with the economic modernization context of the 1850s.

If America is faced with huge, painful choices contingent on the outbreak of global resource rivalry in the next 20 years you would not ideally want to go into such a period with politics so polarized along ethnic, demographic, social and cultural lines.

Yet, in less than a generation US politics have become polarized in a way the mainstream media and academia are still struggling to understand.

It is worth remembering two things facilitated the run-up to civil war in 1861. First, the breakdown of the party system. The Democrats split along pro-and anti-slavery lines and a plethora of small parties emerged. Second the emergence of mass political engagement, with huge rallies, a viscerally agitated press on both sides.

Again, without over-egging the parallels, you have mass engagement bigtime now, with high-turnout elections ever since the ideological divide opened up, and a raging blogosphere. And you have the possibility of a strategic split in the Republican Party along social and cultural lines, though at present the Palin strategy seems to be to conquer the GOP for the Teaparty movement rather than to split from it.

Where does it all end? The answer will be determined by whether America's constitution and two-party system can contain the new viscerality of its political life. There is a strong chance that it can. Above all because America is the global superpower and has a very strong Federal state machine.

If it does, the outcome may be a long pattern of ideological presidencies, Clinton, Bush, Obama and then maybe Palin; swings to the left and right contained by the ability of states to opt out of stuff they don't like and by Supreme Court rulings, impeachments, lame-duck Presidencies etc. It's not hard to imagine because it's what has characterized the period since the mid 1990s. Liberal metropolitian types would go on living their lifestyle and suburban religious fundamentalists likewise, without coming to any more blows than verbal.

But the fact remains the USA is a country with an unsustainable budget deficit, a role in the world that is being challenged by China; and it is addicted, economically, to a substance that is going to be in contested supply within our lifetimes.

Its political institutions are going to come under strain as a result and the 1850s are a reminder that once politics slides into viciousness, over fundamental strategic questions, it's hard to pull back.