The next US civil war is already here – we just
refuse to see it
On the edge of civil war? The political problems are
both structural and immediate, the crisis both long-standing and accelerating.
The right has recognized that the system is in
collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right
factions
Stephen
Marche
Tue 4 Jan
2022 10.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it
Nobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see
what’s coming.
On the eve
of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most
dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when
Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed
that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had
no weapons.
In
Washington, in the winter of 1861, Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy
Adams, declared that “not one man in America wanted the civil war or expected
or intended it”. South Carolina senator James Chestnut, who did more than most
to bring on the advent of the catastrophe, promised to drink all the blood
spilled in the entire conflict. The common wisdom at the time was that he would
have to drink “not a thimble”.
The United
States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot
bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the
crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has
become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are
increasingly impossible.
The legal
system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is
in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%,
cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to
federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation
for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable,
messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable
television, in the malls.
The
consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to
be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol
police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred
Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he
had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s
not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral
system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of
election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the
aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.
The problem
is not who is in power, but the structures of power.
Under such
conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and
the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming
one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate
Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it
was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not
who is in power, but the structures of power.
The United
States has burned before. The Vietnam war, civil rights protests, the
assassination of JFK and MLK, Watergate – all were national catastrophes which
remain in living memory. But the United States has never faced an institutional
crisis quite like the one it is facing now. Trust in the institutions was much
higher during the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act had the broad support of both
parties. JFK’s murder was mourned collectively as a national tragedy. The
Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press
reported presidential crimes; Americans took the press seriously. The political
parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption.
You could
not make one of those statements today with any confidence.
Two things
are happening at the same time. Most of the American right have abandoned faith
in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the
gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure
out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of
the name every year.
An
incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in
2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by
2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will
contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages
overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a
Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and
still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of
the American people.
The right
is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the
forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many
police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become
unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.
The white supremacists in the United States are not a
marginal force; they are inside its institutions
Michael
German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists
during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police
departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism
guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the
terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police
could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.”
The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism,
but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are
not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.
Recent
calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias
or policing techniques. The protesters are, in a sense, too hopeful. Activist
white supremacists in positions of authority are the real threat to American
order and security. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power,
they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their
political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence,
and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says,
‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the
government says, ‘Oh my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I
will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it
isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official
security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”
Anti-government
patriots have used the reaction against Black Lives Matter effectively to build
a base of support with law enforcement. “One of the best tactics was adopting
the blue lives matter patch. I’m flabbergasted that police fell for that, that
they actually support these groups,” German says. “It would be one thing if
[anti-government patriots] had uniformly decided not to target police any more.
But they haven’t. They’re still killing police. The police don’t seem to get
it, that the people you’re coddling, you’re taking photographs with, are the
same people who elsewhere kill.” The current state of American law enforcement
reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces
that provoke domestic terrorism.
Just
consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white
supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military
Times.
At this
supreme moment of crisis, the left has divided into warring factions completely
incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment. There are liberals who
retain an unjustifiable faith that their institutions can save them when it is
utterly clear that they cannot. Then there are the woke, educational and
political elites dedicated to a discourse of willed impotence. Any institution
founded by the woke simply eats itself – see TimesUp, the Women’s March, etc –
becoming irrelevant to any but a diminishing cadre of insiders who spend most
of their time figuring out how to shred whoever’s left. They render themselves
powerless faster than their enemies can.
What the
American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any
imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long
ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the
filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before
it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will
use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already
rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.
The right
has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right
has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the
Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.
There will
be those who say that warnings of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is
that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions. Imagine going
back just 10 years and explaining that a Republican president would openly
support the dictatorship of North Korea. No conspiracy theorist would have
dared to dream it. Anyone who foresaw, foresaw dimly. The trends were apparent;
their ends were not.
It would be
entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system,
to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root
out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare
its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate
and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There
is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything
will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It
won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary
nation. If history has shown us anything it’s that the world doesn’t have any
necessary nations.
The crises the US now faces in its basic governmental
functions are so profound that they require starting over
The United
States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit, and I don’t mean that as some
kind of inspirational quote. I mean that, if it is to survive, the United
States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit. The crises the United
States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they
require starting over. The founders understood that government is supposed to
work for living people, rather than for a bunch of old ghosts. And now their
ghostly constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the
spirit that animated their enterprise, the idea that you mold politics to suit
people, not the other way around.
Does the
country have the humility to acknowledge that its old orders no longer work?
Does it have the courage to begin again? As it managed so spectacularly at the
birth of its nationhood, the United States requires the boldness to invent a
new politics for a new era. It is entirely possible that it might do so.
America is, after all, a country devoted to reinvention.
Once again,
as before, the hope for America is Americans. But it is time to face what the
Americans of the 1850s found so difficult to face: The system is broken, all
along the line. The situation is clear and the choice is basic: reinvention or
fall.
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