The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche; How Civil
Wars Start by Barbara F Walter – review
How far will America’s disintegration into
irreconcilable factions go? Two authors gaze into the near future of a failed
state, at times enjoying their doomsday prophecies a little too much
Peter
Conrad
Sun 16 Jan
2022 07.00 GMT
Zonked on patriotic zeal, Americans believe that
their country is an exception to all historical rules. The land of the free,
however, is currently hurtling towards a predetermined, apparently unavoidable
crack-up. Its governmental institutions are paralysed, and a constitution
devised for an agrarian society in the 18th century obstructs reform; its
citizens, outnumbered by the guns they tote, have split into armed,
antagonistic tribes. Given these conditions, the riot at the Capitol last
January may have been the rehearsal for an imminent civil war.
There is a tempting, titillating danger to this,
because sooner or later such prophecies will be fulfilled
Looking
down at this hot mess from chilly Toronto, the Canadian novelist and essayist
Stephen Marche grimly predicts: “The United States is coming to an end.” Such a
declaration could only be made by an outsider. To Americans, the idea of civil
war remains unthinkable, the words unspeakable: at his inauguration Biden vowed
to end “this uncivil war”, which implied that the only missiles being exchanged
were harmlessly verbal. As Marche sees it, the impending war will be a
continuation of the earlier one between Union and Confederacy, which broke off
in 1865 without closing the gap between races, regions and economic prospects.
To these human-made iniquities Marche adds the intemperance of nature: New York
is likely to be inundated by a forthcoming hurricane, and Californian forests
are already burning. In 1776 the founding fathers envisaged an egalitarian
renewal of humanity. Now the decline of the US warns that the anthropocene era
may be doomed. Marche, doubting that the walls erected by Fortress America can
keep out refugees, the poor and the rising oceans, suspects that this is “how a
species goes extinct”.
The Next
Civil War is fatalistic yet somehow elated as Marche vividly imagines the
“incredibly intense events” that lie ahead. He has done the required historical
research and conducted interviews with officials and academic experts, but he
can’t resist elaborating scenarios for conflagration and collapse which he
offers as examples of “the genre of future civil war fantasy”. One of these,
narrated with sour amusement, concerns an explosive dispute in a western state
where local protesters, riled up by a wily, cynical sheriff, do battle with
federal bureaucrats who have closed down an unsafe bridge. Another, which
resembles the plot of the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, follows an
evacuee from flooded Brooklyn who pauses to reflect that a sunken highway looks
“almost beautiful”. A third “thought experiment” tracks a nerdy loner who guns
down the US president in a Jamba Juice outlet, after which a commentator
solemnly describes the motive of misfits like this as a “desire for
transcendence”.
As Marche
says, “the power of spectacle is driving American politics”, and his “cultural
scripts” turn terror into lurid entertainment. He takes his cue from movies
such as Independence Day or Olympus Has Fallen, which stage the apocalypse as
an adventure ride; the difference is that this time no superhero flies or rides
in to rescue the republic. Marche awards “iconic status” to the atrocities of
9/11 but mocks the agitators in his own fable about the bridge as “ludicrous
fanatics” who seem to be dressed for Halloween or a rock festival: is he daring
them to do better? There is a tempting, titillating danger to this, because
sooner or later such prophecies will be fulfilled in action. Marche may be
enjoying his novelistic nightmares a little too much, possibly even smirking
from the safety of Canada as the US dismembers itself.
A similarly
excited anticipation of the end briefly disrupts Barbara Walter’s study, How
Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. Walter teaches political science in San
Diego, and she writes with dutiful academic sobriety as she compares her
disintegrating country to failing states in the Balkans and the Middle East.
She studies graphs, fiddles with data sets and deploys nonsensical jargon,
classifying the US as an “anocracy” because it is midway between democracy and
autocracy. But her droning lecture flares into life when she, like Marche, sets
herself to imagine what an American civil war would look like. Projected ahead
to 2028, the result resembles a hyped-up Hollywood pitch, with the synchronised
detonation of dirty bombs in state legislatures, a botched presidential
assassination bid, freelance militias patrolling the streets, and – worst of
all! – assaults on big-box stores. Like Marche, Walter is aware that political
warriors need the support of a “mythic narrative”, and she notices that some of
the insurrectionists at the Capitol carried Bibles: in the absence of a sacred
text, will the garbled synopsis of a disaster movie do just as well? After
these dramatic flurries, Walter calms down as she suggests ways of averting
conflict. Most of her proposals require constitutional change, which she must
know will never happen or will come too late; she also recommends reintroducing
the study of civics in American schools, as if those pious courses in communal
engagement could be an antidote to civil war.
Walter
admits that following the last election, when Trump refused to concede defeat,
she and her husband considered emigrating. They flicked through their flotilla
of available passports – Swiss, German and Hungarian as well as American and
Canadian – and decided on driving north to cross the border into British
Columbia. Ultimately they chose to remain in California, as Walter announces
after ritually reciting the national creed and thanking the US for “the gift to
pursue our dreams”. Marche concludes his book with a more guarded tribute to
the perhaps naive American “faith in human nature” and the constitution’s risky
“openness to difference”. He then explains why he is glad to live in Toronto:
Canadians, he says, “talk placidly and exchange endless nothings” rather than
bragging, ranting and abusing each other like their southern neighbours, and
they only have the weather’s “cold snaps” to contend with, not incendiary
social convulsions. In times such as ours, to be snugly domiciled in a boring
country is surely the best bet.
The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the
American Future by Stephen Marche is published by Simon & Schuster (£20).
To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply
How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by
Barbara F Walter is published by Viking (£18.99). To support the Guardian and
Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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