Is civil war inevitable?

A metatheme of this blog has been whether or not ideological strife and rigid factionalism in the United States is leading toward open warfare. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote many years ago that as long as war has not broken out it is not inevitable and anyone who feels there is no difference between cold war and hot is either a fool or a knave. In the US there are two concrete examples where severe partisanship and social strife was defused short of open civil war, and one example where intractable division did lead to war. It is far easier to look back on historical facts and interprete causal factors than to identify those factors in the present for predicting future events.
First, in the 1930s there was a divide at least as strong as today. American nationalists and native fascists opposed home-grown socialists and Soviet-influenced communists with a large, angry middle in between. Any instances where violence did occur domestically was chicken-feed compared to what potential there was for open warfare. It could be argued two decisive factors kept the extremes from colliding, labor unions and sympathetic leadership in the federal government. Unions attracted people who wanted to work together for change and mitigated the potential for violence while FDR convinced the populace at large that we could fix problems. These two factors diffused the attraction of violent revolution preached by communists and at the same time diffused the power of reaction to demonize regular people. What was different then was that the financial elite lacked the media to mobilize enough regular folks in defense of their privilege.
Second, the divisions in the 1960s centered around Vietnam and movements for equality, social justice, and minority rights. America was a very different place then, both from today and the Great Depression. Economically, the sixties were practically the best of times. The promise and reality of the decade, and really ever since has been quite unexpected to say the least. As much as Americans romanticize individuality, leaders do have a strong influence on society. Even if prosperity and affluence were a driving force behind the rising expectations of many segments of society, the soaring and possibly utopian rhetoric of JFK played it's part. Violence against leaders, riots, and so on was widespread but still not on the level of a civil war. There was at least the possibility that different groups could still talk to each other. Or maybe it just looks that way because somehow we muddled through. Reaction or backlash largely existed at the grassroots level, disconnected from elites who were still often sympathetic to the New Deal and American ideals of fairness and equality. There simply were not enough fireaters to command a large-scale movement. The free and relatively objective media swayed the middle to the objectives, if not the means of protestors.
The Civil War was another animal entirely. Historians still hotly debate it, as they do the Great Depression and the 1960s. While this subject of comparison deserves a great deal more analysis than I can give it, there are a few aspects of the Civil War that stick out. First the disconnect between rhetoric and reality on both extremes. Second, why average/poor/working class Southern Whites so vehemently defended a system they only tangentially benefitted from, if at all. Third, the role played by a recent war of aggression in subsequent events. The issue, first, last, and all things in between was slavery, no matter how revisionists try to obscure this. The poor whites who actually took up arms to defend their de facto masters in defiance of self-interest or common sense really equate to the teabaggers of today. But, as Niebuhr would be the first to point out, people in a group rarely respond to rationality and pursue interests relevent to that group. Conversely, abolitionists in the North were just as clueless to reality and driven by moral concern without rationally thinking about what comes after slavery. Interests other than justice or even material well-being often trump these collective considerations. The Mexican War was the first time in American history that partisan interests were placed ahead of national interests by a faction holding national office. If you try to analyze the situation objectively (a difficult task indeed) the sectional divide was also between northern elites who wanted "progressive" capitalism, and southern elites committed to entrenched agricultural feudalism. Media was really neither free nor objective, political parties and sectional interests controlled newspapers and used them to express their points of view.
These factors will be explored in subsequent posts. It is morbidly poignant to think a full scale civil war will break out in the anniversary of the first, but events seem to be getting more ominous every day.