We Are Living Through a New Cold War, and It’s a Civil War

Some of us remember the Cold War with Russia, and all of us have, hopefully, spent some time learning about the Civil War. What we’re living through right now is a combination of the two. We are living in a Cold Civil War.

I think we all feel it—and have felt it for maybe a decade. I first articulated this when I was talking to the publisher of Skyhorse Publishing. We were talking about Melania Trump’s autobiography, which he published. He said that they had a challenge with the cover. It was a high gloss, all black dust jacket, and huge swaths of them had been vandalized. Somewhere in the “shipping and handling” phase of production, between when they left the printer and arrived at the end user, some bad actors were smudging the covers with greasy fingerprints.

It wasn’t just a random book here or there but many, many of them—almost as if it was coordinated. He had a pretty good idea where along the chain it was happening, but it was impossible to prove. So, it was just an unnecessary cost to him.

When I heard this, I thought about the people who were doing this. This was their own first lady; and they hated her so much—and perhaps saw her book as such a danger to their cause—that they were vandalizing someone else’s property. I realize that, in their mind, they would say things like, “This is not my first lady,” or, “This act of vandalism was worth it to fight my enemy,” and so forth. But their “enemy” was their own countrywoman, married to the president of the country they live in.

It was then that I saw that we are in a war—but not a real war. The vandals weren’t killing or shedding blood; yet these people clearly felt they were “at war,” and that justified their actions. The “war” is definitely like a “cold war”; and since their actions were against their own country, it’s also a “civil war.”

Then I started to notice that this analogy goes far beyond that one event.  

Let’s start with the similarities to the Cold War. Two primary means of “cold combat” during the cold war were propaganda and proxy wars. The use of propaganda in a cold war is obvious, and I could spend the rest of my word count giving examples of how both sides of this current Cold Civil War are using information and misinformation. I hope this is clear enough to everyone.

Barnes & Noble is a great example of the propaganda tactic. I remember walking into a B&N right after Trump was elected the second time, and I felt like I was walking into the headquarters of the resistance. Every book on display was anti-Trump or in favor of some issue that Trump was against. Conservative author Eric Metaxas recently released his best-selling book Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World, and B&N has done everything in their power to bury or not even carry the book. Finally, when it became a New York Times Bestseller, they caved in to the need to make money—but still in a muted way. 

The proxy war concept may take a bit more thought. A proxy war is where the two primary countries who are at war incite and support smaller, local groups or nations to fight on their behalf, thus avoiding direct war with each other. Think about how that might be playing out in our country, where the leadership on both sides are inciting subsidiaries to wage a war—and even, in many cases, inciting them to violence.

An example of a proxy war would clearly be the whole ICE conflict in Minnesota earlier this year. The powers at the top incited local groups to actual physical battles against the other side. And like in any good proxy war, they supported it with resources and gave it cover when necessary. We see the same thing with protest violence at rallies and partisan gatherings and in political assassinations, successful or unsuccessful.

Moving to comparisons to the Civil War: the first and most striking comparison we can make is that, in 1861, there was a clear geographic line of demarcation between the two sides—the Mason-Dixon line. There also was a clear issue: slavery. Now, I’m sure if we were alive at that time and living within 20 miles of the Mason-Dixon line, we would see that the line of demarcation was not so clear. And I’m sure people back then would have said that this war was about more than slavery. But the Mason-Dixon line and the issue of slavery have survived as the understood points of separation for the two sides in our first Civil War. It’s hard to draw that clear level of distinction between the two sides in our current Cold Civil War. Still, we can try.

But even before we talk about geography and what we’re fighting for, let’s just name the two combatants to our current Cold Civil War. In our nation’s first Civil War it was simply the North versus the South. Nowadays, we say the Left versus the Right, or we might say Conservatives versus Liberals, or we most often say Republicans versus Democrats. This last one is tricky because a lot of Republicans are reluctant to completely associate themselves with Trump and a lot of Democrats are reluctant to completely associate themselves with the radical socialism of the new Democratic Party. 

So, labels are a bit malleable in this new Civil War—as is the geography. But there are some geographical markers here. For 50 years we’ve been looking at the map on election night and seeing it in color: the blue versus the red, and the pattern hasn’t changed. All the blue is on the coasts and in the major cities of the Midwest. The red is everything else. From the point of view of geographic land mass, the blue seems to take up a much smaller space than the red; but population-wise, it’s evenly split. So, geographically, we could almost say that the densely populated areas are the home of the Left/Liberal/Democrat and the less densely populated areas are the home of the Right/Conservative/Republican.

There’s something worth noting about the fact that the two sides are almost evenly split in terms of population. That’s the only reason we can have a war at all. As with the last Cold War, there was a sense that the two sides were rather evenly matched. Same with our first Civil War. If both sides were not reasonably matched in power and numbers, then one side would have just attacked and overwhelmed the other. Without some parity, you can have invasions and genocide, but you don’t get war. It’s the evenness of both sides that makes a Cold Civil War even possible.

Now we come to the most interesting part of this whole Cold Civil War idea. What’s the issue at stake? We could throw out a lot of issues—like racism, gender identity, climate change, immigration, and economic inequality—but these all seem like subcategories. They wax and wane like so many “flavors of the day.” Can we point to any one thing that is at the heart of all these differences?

As I’ve said in these pages before, the most striking difference between Democrats and Republicans is the question of belief in God. As my recent article showed, studies unequivocally bear out the fact that Republicans are becoming more Christian and religious while Democrats have been trending strongly less Christian and less religious. These demographic shifts make it easy to say that the fundamental issue dividing the two sides in this Cold Civil War is simply traditional Christian values and belief in God.

And there is so much one could say on that topic. But wait! There’s a new development that threatens the paradigm. In the last few years, we’ve seen an interesting thing happening with the Left: they’re embracing Islam. The fight for a Free Palestine, Gaza, the election of Zohran Mamdani, and the very recent primary victory of Abdul El-Sayed on the Democratic ticket—along with the presence of other high-profile Muslims in the Democratic Party—may begin to bring “God and religion” back to the Dems.

I imagine that the nones, the atheists, the former Christians, and the fallen away or far-Left Catholics who currently make up the Democratic Party have not thought this through; in many cases, those on the Left are fighting against what they see as a false moral superiority, an ethical rigidity, and heavy-handed proselytization by Christians. But with the Democrats embracing Muslim candidates and causes, they are—knowingly or unknowingly—in the midst of embracing the most heavy-handed proselytizers and ethically rigid people of faith on the face of the Earth.

Suffice it to say, this Cold Civil War is taking an interesting turn.