I think the left's advantage is is this is either
A) quick, or
B) Slow rolling
If its quick, like a couple weeks or months, the left is advantaged because they are more organized, more tied into the power structure, and have the immediate manpower advantage.
The FBI can quickly lock things down, police can arrest people, BLM can pressure people into compliance, Facebook can quickly track down everyone and direct people to it. Any economic problems can be papered over by the ability to borrow infinite amounts of money.
At a slow roll, the government can deal with small things coming up here and there. Organized government power can deal with a crisis every 3-4 months.
Where the right can have a window of opportunity is something that lasts more than 6 months and less than, say, 6 years. That gives time for the right to actually organize a meaningful resistance, and after 6 months or so the Lefts ability to print infinite money becomes more questionable. However, the longer it goes, the more foreign assistance can be built up, and eventually replace domestic production and stockpiles.
Though, the idea that formal military can trivially destroy insurgents is, well, not born out by facts. Lets take the Iraq War, 2003-2011.
So, at the basic level, that war was about 26,000 insurgent dead vs about 5,000 coalition dead. So, that's about 5-1 casualty ratios. So, favorable, not not necesarily favorable to the degree some are suggesting here. However, that isn't really the whole story, is it? That's missing a huge chunk of the actual military force deployed, the Iraqi security forces. Those suffered about 18,000 dead. So, total counter insurgency casualties were actually about 23,000 vs 26,000 casualties. So, actual military casualties for the entire counter insurgency operation were 1.13 to 1.
So, Iraq, despite our immense material advantage, ended in a final casualties of about 1-1. Which is, well, terrible. Especially considering that, on top of immense material superiority, we had an immense numerical superiority. The insurgency apparently at its peak consisted of about 80,000 people. Against them were 120,000 coalition troops, 600,000 Iraqi troops, 200,000 police, and 500,000 militiamen.
So, numerically the insurgents were outnumbered 18-1. And inflicted 1-1 casualties. That is a truly impressive performance. Or dismally poor performance on the American side.
Air power and space power require relatively safe areas to operate out of. They operate fairly infrequently. Pushing fighters to do more than 1 sortie a day is difficult. Airstrikes take quite a while to actually attrition out an enemy. Remember after all that destroying ISIS took 3-4 years to carry out by airstrike. Meanwhile, with trucks, anywhere can be attacked anywhere else in the US in a couple of hours, maybe a couple of days.
Like, to use the earlier example of Nellis air force base, lets say you were using it to do, something. Its really not in a great location to hit anything: bombing ranges for most fighters are still I think in the 600 km ish range, so you can reach out to about Tuscon, Salt Lake, San Diego, or Fresno. So, we'll say its doing bombing missions against Mormon rebels.
So, you launch a bombing mission against Salt lake. How long does it take the Salt Lake Rebels to respond? About six hours by highway. At marching pace, about 20 days. So, you need a blocking force. Your most basic mortar has about a 1-2 km range, so you need to try and keep people at least that far away. Given the airbase itself is about 10 km wide, your talking about a defensive perimeter about 40 km long. For a single airbase. Realistically, the Achilles heal of the base is Las Vegas: you either want to infiltrate the city (suburbs come almost right up the the airfield, so a good place for mortar or rocket attack) or just to cut off necessary supplies.
So, holding the air base is really about holding a Los Angeles to Las Vegas corridor. Which is committing to an about 1,000 km defensive corridor, which is about equivalent to the entire area of insurgency in the Iraq war between Bagdad, Mosul, and Ramadi.
So, I would not be surprised if defending this area involved the order of 100,000 men, to hold it very weakly. This would be in line with expectations of previous missions to hold such large areas.
But, it is true, Air Power can be very devastating. If you have a million men defending the airfields. Los Angeles Metro does have the raw population to do so: 10% conscription gets you to some 1.3 million raised from the city, while Utah at a similar mobilization can only manage about 300,000. Of course, if we can manage to beat the Mormon militia while requiring only half the numerical superiority we enjoyed against the Iraqi insurrection, so only 10-1 numerical superiority, well, that implies the pacification of Utah only requires about 3 million troops. Maybe a million will be able to manage. But, it also seems here that at Utah were reaching the edge of Los Angeles capability for power projection on its own resources. At least as long as the flanks remain unsecured.
Of course, securing Arizona and up to Northern California stretches out the front line more, to about 2,000 km. And moves more front lines so that you can't, at least easily, operate all your air power out of Nellis to cover your fronts. You need to spread out, eye balling it, to about 6 front line airbases. Which makes massing air power on any one front more difficult. And this anaysis of front length assumes the Mexican and ocean facing boarders are inherently secure. Securing the coastline and Mexican Boarder as well adds some 2,000 km more frontage. Where probably talking here then about 4 million men needing to be mobilized to hold everything securely, between naval forces, air forces, border patrol, response armies, police, etcetera.
Which is, well, actually doable with California's population. 40 million people, 10% mobilization, 4 million soldiers. Assuming costs of about $40,000 per soldier per year, about $160 billion in personnel costs. Probably a trillion dollars a year to equip to a reasonablish degree and maintain some reasonablish tempo of operational activity. About 30% GDP.
So, its not unreasonable to figure California could project power out to about Utah and its northern boarder. At which point, the population of the neighboring states is about 15 million, so can potentially raise about 1 million against California. Which puts them at a 4-1 disadvantage, but that's probably more like a 2-1 advantage on the actual front with logistical and occupational limits. This might not be enough superiority to really launch agressive offenses, which generally perfer local superiority of at least 3-1, and ideally more like 10-1 or 20-1.
A major push against Wyoming, the weakest, need the amassing of about 600,000 troops to do a lighting war against it to get local 10-1 numerical superiority. The push into Wyoming also puts the troops next to states that could potentially have collectively raised an additional 400,000 troops, relatively fresh, to commit to the counter attack. This seems to be setting up for a disaster. Certainly, the last time the US enjoyed less than a 2-1 advantage, Vietnam, where we only enjoyed an in the field numerical advantage of about 1.6-1 advantage.
Vietnam and and Iraq are not really stories of small, advanced, elite armies killing huge numbers of rebels at huge casualty ratios: its the story of huge, advanced, elite armies trading more or less 1-1 casualties against armies a 1/3 their size and a 1/10 as well equipped, and still mostly losing.
Ignoring the allied troops I think gives a completely skewed view of the actual balance of power in these wars, and thus dramatically overstates how effective the US troops actually are.
edit: hopefully this isn't too rambly, this was a "thinking out loud" post.