People always post stuff like this like it's a profound statement but it's just goofy. Most 20C and 21C civil wars do not look like the Troubles either and many of them look more like Spain or non-Eastern theater ACW than they do the Troubles. https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1300253861106524161

Hate to keep being the "read Kalyvas" guy but if you're going to do "well Actually" civil war commentary you gotta read Kalyvas, who emphasizes along with others that the Troubles are in fact highly atypical of "civil wars" then or now
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636410490914022

Most of the forms of violence relevant to current patterns that we expect to see in a 20-21C democracy with an advanced, highly urbanized economy - Troubles, Years of Lead, interwar street violence - are either edge cases for civil war or not categorized as civil war at all

What the civil war literature *is* a good reminder of, however, is that historically much of the violence in most civil wars occurs not in high visibility urban areas but in rural areas where it is most poorly documented, which is often true of other forms of violence too

E.g. much of the reason the pre-BPP Civil Rights Movement is thought of as exclusively nonviolent is because armed self-defense often played the most prominent role in smaller towns and rural areas where media and federal attention was the weakest

Rather than asserting that the US is heading for "civil war" and then making misleading assertions about what civil war "really" is, it would be wiser to look at the lesser-known patterns of conflict in actual US history and similar countries undergoing similar types of crises.

So far we do *not* see the kind of patterns of violence typical of regular or irregular civil wars. @arisroussinos has made a good case for why the Troubles and other periods of conflict in Ireland could be a good analogy but that's all the more reason to think of non-CW cases

Also remember that whatever patterns of violence take place, too much of the thinking about this is looking at it from a top down perspective on the "master" ideological cleavage rather than seeing how crisis will interact w/ localized dynamics https://twitter.com/Dan_E_Solo/status/1300822330193649664

"Beat people where they're at"