Americans who know anything about the country’s Civil War tend to dismiss warnings of a similar eruption. After all, the War Between the States was a war between states, a conflict with antagonists defined largely by geography. Were there Union sympathizers in the South? Pro-slavery citizens in the North? Sure. But the war was largely between Americans who inhabited specific regions of the still-new country. As pundits like to point out, that’s no longer the case; deep Blue cities are located in even the Reddest states, and the nation’s suburbs have been turning purple for several election cycles. That absence of a geographical division means another civil war is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
A book titled “The Next Civil War” begs to differ.
Lincoln Square recently interviewed the author, Stephen Marche. Marche’s essential thesis was that our notion of what constitutes “war” is outdated.
What counts as civil war isn’t cannons at Gettysburg but something closer to “Ireland in the Troubles,”…. Low-level clashes, targeted killings, the steady presence of fear — these don’t come with banners or declarations, but they tear at civic trust all the same. That’s why the term “political violence” undersells what’s underway: It’s governance by threat, a society reshaped by intimidation. Once fear becomes the organizing principle, there’s no real boundary left between war and politics.
Stuart Stevens, who conducted the interview, noted that Marche had documented the steady “sorting” that has given us two diametrically opposed “armies.” He began with a telling statistic: the party that once competed for nearly 40 percent of the Black vote under Eisenhower, now hovers at eight percent under Trump. Over the years, the GOP purposely collapsed its coalition, abandoning a “big tent” and diversity in favor of loyalty. Partisan rewards now go to those most willing to comply, and as Stevens writes–and as we can now all see– the result is a hollowed-out political class.
In the Republican Party, competence has been traded for obedience.
Blue state governors resisting the authoritarianism of MAGA and the Trump administration are–at least in Marche’s telling–engaging in what has been dubbed a “soft secession.” The result is an emerging patchwork that signals national fragmentation.
Marche reminds readers that authoritarian regimes around the globe provide ample evidence that control doesn’t equal competence. Meanwhile, democracy is fading every day, despite the lack of a formal death notice. More troubling, politically motivated violence is rising.
Reviewers have described “The Next Civil War” as a “chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction.” Marche conducted nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists–in order to produce a book predicting a terrifying collapse of the America most of us have inhabited. Marche also interviewed soldiers and counterinsurgency experts, asking what it would take to control the population of the United States, and he tells us that “the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels.”
Thanks in large part to a fragmented, partisan information environment that facilitates misinformation and propaganda, promotes conspiracy theories, and deepens suspicions and bigotries, MAGA Republicans inhabit a vastly different reality than the one Democrats and Independents occupy. Our divisions go deeper than geography. Marche concludes that the United States as we’ve known it is coming to an end, with the only question being “how,” and in his book, he offers several scenarios to illustrate the possibilities.
I’m not convinced.
Granted, America has never been Camelot. Our elected officials have always included grifters and blowhards and outright criminals; our public policies even today fall far short of the lofty–“woke”– aspirations of the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This country has always been an experiment, and people like Marche have evidently concluded that the experiment is failing.
Marche’s book is part of a burgeoning industry of doom and gloom. Although it’s important to understand where these predictions of disaster are coming from–important to recognize the severity of the threats to our always-fragile union– it would be a mistake to give in to those predictions, to give up in advance.
Remember, those “woke” abolitionists won the last Civil War–and although it won’t be easy, We the People significantly outnumber the Trumpers who want to turn America into a White Christian Nationalist autocracy. We can win this one too.
When you see troops armed to the teeth repelling from Blackhawk helicopters on the west side neighborhoods, you kind of the beginnings of complete trashing and discarding The constitutional rule of law, and the freedoms held within.
Groups of militarily armed agents walsing around the magnificent mile, millennium Park, daily plaza, the theater district, you pick it! Hanging around the Riverwalk, invading housing projects sewing fear and disrupting lives.
If this isn’t the man of lawlessness, I don’t know who would be.
2 Thessalonians 2: 3-6 reads; “Let no one lead you astray in any way, because it will not come unless the apostasy comes first and the man of lawlessness gets revealed, the son of destruction. 4 He stands in opposition and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he sits down in the temple of God, publicly showing himself to be a god. 5 Do you not remember that when I was still with you, I used to tell you these things?”
You haven’t seen the gist of it yet! There is no answer for what is happening. At least not from men’s mouths and by men I mean humanity. There are no solutions that any politician can give or prescribe That’s going to prevent the inevitable. There will not be one inch of human civilization that will not be touched by what is happening. It just goes to show, how weak this current iteration of political Kabuki really is. This is so juvenile, it looks like a bunch of kids in a schoolyard, playing tag! And the bully is running around with a baseball bat.
I don’t think our current situation has gotten to the stage of a Civil War because there aren’t two well-defined “sides.” It’s more related to chaos theory at this point, as there are numerous variables involved.
Protests by Gen Z are erupting in countries worldwide, primarily due to a sense of hopelessness about their futures and government corruption in various forms. I believe this will only get worse because what the young people are sensitive to is the significant changes within our global community. The primary change is the end of the unipolar world established after World War II.
The dollar is on the verge of losing its position as the global reserve currency, which would have significant effects both globally and within the US. China is playing four-dimensional AI chess while the US is playing two-dimensional checkers. Trump has no idea what the Chinese just did with the export controls on their rare earth minerals, but I am sure the AI Tech giants know precisely what could happen.
There are also reports that the US Treasury wants to transfer its $37 trillion in debt to stablecoins and then devalue them. Regardless of how they do it, it’s referred to as a default on our debt obligations in foreign circles. Thus, the flight to gold and silver.
I’ve read several articles this week from independent journalists claiming that we are experiencing the “end stages of capitalism and democracy since they go hand in hand.” I agree wholeheartedly with their analysis, but I’d say that the process started decades ago, and we are only now reaching the stage of acceptance, despite all the propaganda thrown at us by the entertainment media.
For those who want a recap of daily events from this past week, I strongly recommend Mehdi Hassan’s Zeteo weekly analysis. It really puts things in perspective…
https://zeteo.com/p/this-week-in-democracy-week-38-trump/comments
Masked, unidentified ICE goons may well represent the final – or one of the final – nails in the trump coffin, perhaps even the maga version. The illiberal, illegal, unconstitutional, sickening activity by the current administration is unacceptable, and although I am fearful that it can’t be stopped in time, I do believe it will end, but just how much of the damage already inflicted is irretrievable can’t be known as yet. Can we wait another whole year of continuing destruction before we can at least potentially control the constitutional division of governing by Congress? And then two more years of daily insanity in the form of pronouncements and executive orders and SCOTUS affirmations? These surely are the times that try men’s souls.
Many words have been employed to describe what is happening here. I think that most explanatory ones describe the fact that part of the country exists in one world, shaped by their choice of media, while the selection of other channels depicts an entirely different world.
Most of us live in a world where nothing special is happening except for the rising costs of everyday items. All we know of “troubles” comes from our screens. Some choose the storyline from what’s billed as news that says the troubles in other places come from an invasion of people, unlike us, who stormed across our southern border during the last administration, which followed our immigration laws despite chaos in Central and South America that displaced millions of people. Some of us opt for a different news version that highlights the growing threat here, stemming from corruption and incompetence that have been empowered in DC.
Two different worlds, realities, depictions of what is happening that will affect all of us over time. One is focused on DC, the other, on blue cities. One has a backstory of the electorate’s failure in choosing our government. The other has a backstory of an invasion of criminals.
Both are based on actual events in the past, but differ in how they depict current reality. How is it possible to merge partial truths into the whole truth and nothing but the truth that can unite a fractured nation?
I see two possibilities driven by the spread of troubles into more and more lives. One is a temporary displacement of civilian government by military government. The other is an economy that is so painful for so many of us that our present government gets replaced by enough of us ignoring their laws and actions and demanding our rights be returned to all of us. The outcome that will become our history will be determined by the timing of the country’s collapse.
The assumed “Civil” war is happening, and it seems to be happening in relation to those who know “civics” and those who do not. My Trumpets cousin, for example, told me that she does not bother to read anything I email her that deals with politics, such as a quote from Sheila’s blog , or HCR’s. She automatically “knows” that any such thing will be “fake.” Sorry Sheila.
There is an irony in this: both of her, and her husband’s favorite POTUS posturers were/are traitors: Reagan and Trump. And, the husband is a lawyer. Yes, I’m guilty…of expecting real intelligence from him just because of that.
Both of their would-be POTUS people took an oath to protect the Constitution…fat chance.
The right-wingers like their bubble, and we like what they would/do call our bubble. The problem is that their bubble is held aloft by hot air and falsehoods, while ours, and I guess, by definition it is a bubble, is full of “woke” awareness.
Wow! How glum a picture is painted by the foregoing comments. It feeds into, and possibly from, Trump’s playbook. Evil is afoot in our cities and the federal government will rescue the fair maiden Liberty. The evil is actually afoot in our small minded, disoriented civilians who do not find comfort from their beer and chips. Yes, this is an uncivil war between those who resent those who think they know what would constitute a glorious future.
It seems to me that the civil war began in Los Angeles in June of this year when the Guard and. Marines were sent there. We won’t wrap this one up in 5 years. The simple fact that the battlefield is a duality composed of urban warfare and social media, which presents a perfect conveyer of propaganda. The first rule of the revolution is take over the media. It’s too late for that thanks to the likes of Roger Ailes, the radical right has already taken care of that task.
” The revolution will not be televised!” In fact while it’s happening, more people will be fed a constant line of disinformation. We need a way to penetrate the silo of news from FAUX NEWS, OAN, NEWSMAX, AND R2, not to mention Sinclair and Nextstar..
I take reassurance from HCR’s observation that these times remind her what happened in 1850’s. The opposing forces and how the grassroots abolitionist movement picked up momentum and created the leader, Abraham Lincoln.
It’s disturbing when the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, calls the upcoming peaceful demonstrators for the October 18, nationwide No Kings Day, un-American and terrorists. The trump regime would love to incite enough violence to call for martial law. I’m telling my daughter to leave the kids at home that day.
I’ve wondered why many people are avoiding accurate descriptions of the current state of the USA, avoiding words like “fascism,” for example. Perhaps one reason is the fear that accurate analysis will spread despair and lead to inaction and compliance. I like to think people are better than that–and I certainly may be wrong–and an accurate assessment will lead to resolve and determination, instead.
We are already in a soft civil war. The only question is how long it takes for people on the left to realize it and respond with something more than posturing. There is no radical left (I’ve looked for it), and the irony is that that’s the only thing that could help. I’m glad to see that articles like this one are popping up, because they at least address the elephant in the room. Even if the author doesn’t think we’re there, yet, it’s still a serious address of the problem. Up until a few weeks ago, search results showed virtually nothing about a new civil war. Now, as long as you set search filters for no more than a month ago, you can find a lot. Gee, I wonder what changed in the last few months.
The one thing that the regime forgot is that you have to pay the military. Paying ICE is not going to be enough.