OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
The New Movie ‘Civil War’ Matters for Reasons
Different Than You Think
April 11,
2024
Credit...Illustration
by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times
By Stephen
Marche
Mr. Marche
is the author of “The Next Civil War.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/opinion/civil-war-movie.html
“Not one
man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it,” Henry Adams,
grandson of John Quincy Adams, declared at the beginning of the 20th century.
What may seem inevitable to us in hindsight — the horrifying consequences of a
country in political turmoil, given to violence and rived by slavery — came as
a shock to many of the people living through it. Even those who anticipated it
hardly seemed prepared for its violent magnitude. In this respect at least, the
current division that afflicts the United States seems different from the Civil
War. If there ever is a second civil war, it won’t be for lack of imagining it.
The most
prominent example arrives this week in the form of an action blockbuster titled
“Civil War.” The film, written and directed by Alex Garland, presents a
scenario in which the government is at war with breakaway states and the
president has been, in the eyes of part of the country, delegitimized. Some
critics have denounced the project, arguing that releasing the film in this
particular election year is downright dangerous. They assume that even just
talking about a future national conflict could make it a reality, and that the
film risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is wrong.
Not only
does this criticism vastly overrate the power of the written word or the moving
image, but it looks past the real forces sending the United States toward
ever-deeper division: inequality; a hyperpartisan duopoly; and an antiquated
and increasingly dysfunctional Constitution. Mere stories are not powerful
enough to change those realities. But these stories can wake us up to the
threats we are facing. The greatest political danger in America isn’t fascism,
and it isn’t wokeness. It’s inertia. America needs a warning.
The reason
for a surge in anxiety over a civil war is obvious. The Republican National
Committee, now under the control of the presumptive nominee, has asked job
candidates if they believe the 2020 election was stolen — an obvious litmus
test. Extremism has migrated into mainstream politics, and certain fanciful
fictions have migrated with it. In 1997, a group of Texas separatists were
largely considered terrorist thugs and their movement, if it deserved that
title, fizzled out after a weeklong standoff with the police. Just a few months
ago, Texas took the federal government to court over control of the border.
Armed militias have camped out along the border. That’s not a movie trailer.
That’s happening.
But
politicians, pundits and many voters seem not to be taking the risk of violence
seriously enough. There is an ingrained assumption, resulting from the
country’s recent history of global dominance coupled with a kind of organic
national optimism, that in the United States everything ultimately works out.
While right-wing journalists and fiction writers have been predicting a violent
end to the Republic for generations — one of the foundational documents of
neo-Nazism and white supremacy is “The Turner Diaries” from 1978, a novel that
imagines an American revolution that leads to a race war — their writings seem
more like wish fulfillment than like warnings.
When I
attended prepper conventions as research for my book, I found their visions of
a collapsed American Republic suspiciously attractive: It’s a world where
everybody grows his own food, gathers with family by candlelight, defends his
property against various unpredictable threats and relies on his wits. Their
preferred scenario resembled, more than anything, a sort of postapocalyptic
“Little House on the Prairie.”
We’ve seen
more recent attempts to grapple with the possibility of domestic conflict in
the form of sober-minded political analysis. Now the vision of a civil war has
come to movie screens. We’re no longer just contemplating a political collapse,
we’re seeing its consequences unfold in IMAX.
“Civil War”
doesn’t dwell on the causes of the schism. Its central characters are
journalists and the plot dramatizes the reality of the conflict they’re
covering: the fear, violence and instability that a civil war would inflict on
the lives of everyday Americans.
That’s a
good thing. Early on when I was promoting my book, I remember an interviewer
asking me whether a civil war wouldn’t be that terrible an option; whether it
would help clear the air. The naïveté was shocking and, to me, sickening.
America lost roughly 2 percent of its population in the Civil War.
Contemplating the horrors of a civil war — whether as a thought experiment or
in a theatrical blockbuster — helps counteract a reflexive sense of American
exceptionalism. It can happen here. In fact, it already has.
One of the
first people to predict the collapse of the Republic was none other than George
Washington. “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the
state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical
discriminations,” he warned in his Farewell Address. “This spirit,
unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature.” This founder of the country
devoted much of one of his most important addresses, at the apex of his
popularity, to warning about the exact situation the United States today finds
itself in: a hyper-partisanship that puts party over country and risks
political collapse. Washington knew what civil war looked like.
For those
Americans of the 1850s who couldn’t imagine a protracted, bloody civil war, the
reason is simple enough: They couldn’t bear to. They refused to see the future
they were part of building. The future came anyway.
The
Americans of 2024 can easily imagine a civil war. The populace faces a
different question and a different crisis: Can we forestall the future we have
foreseen? No matter the likelihood of that future, the first step in its
prevention is imagining how it might come to pass, and agreeing that it would
be a catastrophe.
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