Three new books make an alarmingly persuasive case that the warning lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861.
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.Stephen Marche writes in “The Next Civil War” that the US is one act of spectacular violence away from national crisis.
The United States, 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 its political language. As Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist, writes in, a richly imagined jeremiad about America’s coming disunion, the country “is one spectacular act of violence away from a national crisis”.
. 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, SmithWesson handguns, stun devices, firecrackers, handcuffs, chemicals and knives – Republican leaders breathed a sigh of relief.
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 than 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.
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 , many of which are military-grade, it would be no contest.
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.
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