Civil War vs. Secession

People have been throwing around the idea of a new “civil war” in the US, like in the 1860s.
We should be so lucky.

Our Civil War was a regional conflict. Everybody knew where the North ended and the South began. We didn’t have pro-slavery people operating as saboteurs in the North, nor vice-versa. Both sides raised a military and fought pitched battles. It should more properly always be called a “war of secession”.

But if it were to happen now, here, it would be neighbor against neighbor, more like The Troubles in Ireland. Personal scores would be settled. You’d have no personal safety. No security in your person or effects.
People in our country like to think we’d emulate the pioneers, return to isolated rural outposts, but those would be expensive to maintain and impossible to defend; we’d probably all end up stuffed into urban areas, converted office buildings which can more efficiently be heated. Social order would collapse and deliveries of food, fuel, electrical power would be disrupted all over the country.
Don’t forget, everybody in our country has guns, even the Lefties armed themselves in the last decade. (Your best bet as an entrepreneur would be to commandeer an ammunition factory, IF we still have any here; otherwise, learn to make bullets). additionally, the prisons would be emptied AND our troops, trained in violence, would be coming home, too. There’d be a LOT of killing. Why bother just robbing someone when you could, with impunity, just eliminate the owners and take everything they have?
if only the Right COULD peaceably, or even via limited military operations, secede from the Left, or vice-versa! Kurt Schlichter wrote a book envisioning something like that: both coasts of our country firmly in control of the Left: no meat, no private transportation, speech police—while “flyover country” in the middle remained gloriously free.
That would be the best we could hope for, but the more likely scenario is house-to-house fighting all over our country. It would start in the cities, but then bands of the strong would set out to loot and pillage the rural areas and isolated rural houses. If your rural home were torched or even broken into, and you don’t have the skill to rebuild, you wouldnt be able to just call a contractor; assuming you survived the attack, you’d have to hope you could find a cubicle in some overcrowded urban apartment building or former office building, where at least there would be (maybe intermittent) heat.
It’s enough to make you wish for “peace in our time”, no matter WHO the civil authorities are.