Is America heading for civil war?
A clutch of books makes an alarmingly persuasive case
that the warning lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861
Edward Luce
MAY 31 2022
https://www.ft.com/content/9c237473-603d-4196-8a32-0f135c900612
In the
summer of 2015, America caught a glimpse of how its future could unfold. The US
military conducted a routine exercise in the south that triggered a cascade of
conspiracy theories, particularly in Texas. Some believed the manoeuvre was the
precursor to a Chinese invasion; others thought it would coincide with a
massive asteroid strike. The exercise, called Jade Helm 15, stood for “homeland
eradication of local militants”, according to one of the right’s dark fantasy
sites. Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, took these ravings seriously.
He ensured that the 1,200 federal troops were closely monitored by the armed
Texas National Guard. In that bizarre episode, which took place a year before
Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, we see the germs of
an American break-up.
As with any
warning of impending civil war, the very mention of another American one sounds
impossibly alarmist — like persistent warnings from chief Vitalstatistix in the
Asterix comic series that the sky was about to fall on Gaulish heads. America’s
dissolution has often been mispredicted.
Yet a
clutch of recent books make an alarmingly persuasive case that the warning
lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861. The French philosopher
Voltaire once said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities.” As the University of California’s Barbara Walter shows in
her bracing manual, How Civil Wars Start, US democracy today is checking all
the wrong boxes.
Even before
Trump triumphed in the 2016 presidential election, political analysts were
warning about the erosion of democracy and drift towards autocracy. The
paralysing divisions caused by Trump’s failed putsch of January 6, 2021, have
sent it into dangerous new territory. Polls show that most Republicans believe,
without evidence, that the election was stolen by Democrats backed by the
so-called “deep state”, the Chinese government, rigged Venezuelan voting
machines, or a feverish combination thereof.
In This
Will Not Pass, a book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander
Burns, Joe Biden is quoted telling a senior Democrat: “I certainly hope [my
presidency] works out. If it doesn’t I’m not sure we’re going to have a
country.” That a US president could utter something so apocalyptic without
raising too many eyebrows shows how routine such dread has become.
In 1990,
the CIA correctly forecast that Yugoslavia would break up within two years
because its politics was hardening into ethnic factions. In 2022, America’s two
parties are increasingly sorted along racial and identity lines. Republicans
are white, small town and rural — the party now holds just one truly urban
congressional district in New York’s Staten Island. Democrats are now almost
entirely urban and multi-ethnic. The habits of a normal democracy in which the
losing party forms a loyal opposition are vanishing.
More than a
third of Republicans and Democrats today believe violence is justified to
achieve their political ends, compared with less than a tenth apiece in 2017,
the year Trump took office. His rhetoric opened the floodgates to separatist
feelings. When one party loses, its voters feel as though their America is
being occupied by a foreign power. America, Walter points out, has become “a
factionalised anocracy” — the halfway state between autocracy and democracy —
that is “quickly approaching the open insurgency stage”. Violence stalks
America’s political language. As Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist, writes in
The Next Civil War, a richly imagined jeremiad about America’s coming disunion,
the country “is one spectacular act of violence away from a national crisis”.
How did
America reach this pass? Take your pick of grim milestones — Newt Gingrich’s
scorched earth approach to his term as polarising speaker of the House of
Representatives in the 1990s, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that handed the
2000 election to George W Bush, America’s unhinged response to the 9/11
terrorist attacks, the FBI’s fateful probe into Hillary Clinton’s almost
comically trivial emails, Democrats attributing Trump’s win to Vladimir Putin,
Trump’s attempt to uproot every guardrail within reach, or Congress’s failure
to unite on the need to punish a violent assault on itself. America’s
democratic backsliding is like Ernest Hemingway’s famous observation on going
bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Burns and
Martin provide a diligently researched and often illuminating chronicle of
America’s recent political degeneration. Much of it boils down to the absence
of character. As the dust settled on last year’s Capitol Hill assault —
composed of an almost entirely white rabble of retired policemen, nurses,
property developers, doctors, lawyers and small-business owners carrying
confederate flags, nooses, Smith & Wesson handguns, stun devices,
firecrackers, handcuffs, chemicals and knives — Republican leaders breathed a
sigh of relief. The Capitol may have been littered with glass; its corridors
smeared with fecal matter. But the Trumpian spell had been broken. This
“despicable human being” had “finally discredited himself”, said Mitch
McConnell, the Republican Senate leader. Kevin McCarthy, his counterpart in the
House, said Trump’s actions were “atrocious and totally wrong”.
Three weeks
later, McConnell voted to acquit Trump for what he had called a “failed
insurrection”. McCarthy backtracked even more, heading to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s
Florida retreat, to renew his fealty. In the intervening weeks, he had
concluded that his only pathway to becoming Speaker was with the blessings of
the disgraced ex-president. “Trump was on life support,” said Adam Kinzinger,
one of just 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him. “He [McCarthy]
resuscitated him.” The authors brand McCarthy as “perhaps the most ingratiating
figure” in the Republican party. There is fierce competition for that honour;
South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, among others, is hard on McCarthy’s heels.
It was not
absurd to hope that Biden’s folksy touch would lower America’s fever. It was
nevertheless forlorn. America is even more bitterly separated into imagined
rival nations that it was under Trump. Biden did not help matters by promising
to restore bipartisan normalcy — a pious hope shredded under Barack Obama —
while also vowing to be a transformative Franklin Roosevelt-style president.
With a 50:50 Senate, this was never realistic. Joe Manchin, the obstinate West
Virginia Democrat, who has blocked Biden’s big reform bills, did not hold the
balance of power in FDR’s Washington.
Democrats
thus retreated into their by-now routine ethnic division of spoils. Biden
treated his cabinet selection as an “identity politics Rubik’s Cube”, write
Burns and Martin. Far from dangling the hope of a new generation, his
vice-president, Kamala Harris, has been “fixated on real and perceived snubs in
ways the West Wing found tedious,” they write. Their party faces likely
decimation in this year’s midterm elections in November, which will set up a
crushingly depressing 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump. A popular Trumpian
T-shirt says: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat”.
More
seriously, the number of rightwing militias in the US has exploded in recent
years. White supremacist sentiment has also penetrated US law enforcement
agencies, says Walter. The numbers of armed potential insurgents is a multiple
of the left insurgent groups, such as the Black Panthers, and Symbionese
Liberation Army, that caused such panic in the early 1970s.
How would a
21st century US civil war actually happen? Nothing like the first time. Unlike
the 1860s, when America was neatly split between the slave-owning confederates
and the north, today’s separatist geography is marbled. Unlike then, America’s
armed forces today cannot be outgunned. Even in a country that, uniquely, has
more privately owned guns than people (at more than 400mn), many of which are
military-grade, it would be no contest. Yet America, of all countries, knows
that asymmetric warfare is unwinnable. Think of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Think,
also, of how America was born — its revolutionary army lost almost every
encounter with Britain’s vastly better equipped redcoats. Yet, with the help of
the French, America’s guerrilla forces prevailed. Now substitute today’s
federal army for the redcoats. Armies have a terrible record of pacifying
restive populations. Every casualty breeds 10 more rebels.
“They will
slip in and out of the shadows, communicating on message boards and encrypted
networks,” writes Walter. “They will meet in small groups in vacuum-repair
shops along retail strips. In desert clearings along Arizona’s border, in
public parks in southern California, or in the snowy woods of Michigan, where
they will train to fight.”
The
Democrats face likely decimation in this year’s midterm elections in November,
which will set up a crushingly depressing 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump
Walter’s
book lays out America’s possible roads to dystopia with impressive concision.
Her synthesis of the various barometers of a country heading to civil war is
hard to refute when applied to the US. But she mars her case with a number of
basic errors. Nowhere near 60 per cent of the world’s countries are “full”
democracies, as she claims. Nor is India a “strictly secular democracy”. Its
constitution celebrates rather than shuns all religions. Her book is
nevertheless indispensable.
None of the
writers offers a simple antidote for America’s continued democratic slide.
Their remedies — find ways of making multi-ethnic democracy work, get money out
of politics, teach civics to American children — have the air of wishful
afterthoughts, rather than serious game plans
Though
Canadian, Marche is poignantly aware of the degree to which global liberty
rides on what happens to America. In spite of its inaugural hypocrisies, no
other nation was founded on the creed that it could live with — and indeed
thrive on — fundamental differences between strangers. Marche concludes with
these stirring words: “It would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American
experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human
beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction.
That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.”
Yet the
warning signs have become impossible to ignore. At the end of their book, Burns
and Martin quote Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former prime minister, on
America’s tendency to self-soothe with familiar homilies. They are no longer
helpful. “You know that great line that you hear all the time: ‘This is not us.
This is not America’?” Turnbull asks. “You know what? It is actually.”
How Civil
Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F Walter, Viking, £18.99, 320 pages
This Will
Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future by Jonathan Martin
and Alexander Burns, Simon & Schuster, $29.99, 480 pages
The Next
Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche, Simon and
Schuster, £20, 239 pages
Edward Luce
is the FT US national editor
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