America’s Second Civil War: The 4th and 5th Generation Siege on Our Constitutional Republic

Donald Vandergriff

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As a retired enlisted Marine, Army Major and lifelong student of warfare’s evolution, I’ve spent decades dissecting how conflicts morph from battlefield clashes to shadowy battles for the soul of a nation. The American Civil War of 1861-1865 was a brutal affair of massed infantry, cannon fire, and state armies—a classic second-generation war, where lines were drawn, uniforms donned, and victory measured in acres of blood-soaked earth.

This is America’s second civil war, a insidious 4th and 5th generation warfare (4GW/5GW) campaign that pits cultural saboteurs against the Judeo-Christian foundations of our Constitutional Republic. It began not with musket shots, but with the quiet docking of a ship in New York Harbor in 1933, carrying the exiles of the Frankfurt School to Columbia University.

Their mission?

A calculated “long march through the institutions” to erode Western culture from within, one classroom, one headline, one policy at a time.

This isn’t hyperbole; it’s the distilled essence of my analyses on Substack, where I’ve chronicled how Democratic elites and their cultural Marxist allies wield 4GW tactics—non-kinetic, decentralized assaults on legitimacy, identity, and cohesion—to fracture the body politic.

William S. Lind, the godfather of 4GW theory (along with retired Marine Colonel G.I. Wilson) and a frequent contributor to Traditional Right, warned us of this in his seminal works like On War, a collection of columns from the Iraq debacle onward. Lind described 4GW as warfare by non-state actors who collapse states through cultural subversion, not conquest—precisely the playbook unfolding here.

In my own posts, such as “4th Generation Warfare: The Insidious Evolution of Far-Left Strategies in American Politics”, by (Donald E. Vandergriff, 27 August 2025). I detailed how this war exploits divisions via relentless propaganda, turning neighbors into enemies without firing a shot. Lind echoes this in his Traditional Right essays, like “The View from Olympus” (June 13, 2025), where he laments the military’s drift into ideological quicksand, mirroring the societal rot he first diagnosed in the 1980s.