A new book imagines what the next American civil war will look like, starting with the 2021 Capitol riots.
Insurrection by Trump supporters, false flag operation by anti-Trump forces, or a protest with some tough times? The American debate over how to characterize, and deal with, the violent invasion of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, only intensified as its one-year anniversary approached. In most mainstream comments, including those of journalists Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague in their just published book, Theft: the attempt to reverse the 2020 election and the people who stopped it, and in the next American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation By political scientist David Rothkopf, Trump emerges as an aberration and the country’s political institutions as reassuringly resilient.
One foreign observer who disagrees is Canadian Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (Simon & Schuster, January 4). In his grim and compelling combination of reports and well-founded predictions, call it plausible projection, Marche argues that Trump and the insurrection itself are essentially symbolic, much more of an effect than it causes in the winter of American discontent. The United States, he believes, is spiraling into disaster, with its political and legal systems polarized, paralyzed and rejected as illegitimate by millions of citizens. The time and location of the next Fort Sumter – site of the initial salvo in America’s (first) Civil War – is impossible to predict, writes Marche, but such an event is almost certain to occur. Unless, of course, you add in an interview, you’ve already done so: “I think January 6 could have condition the new Fort Sumter “.
Stephen Marche’s ‘The Next Civil War’ imagine what the fall of the United States would be like.
Not, The next civil war offers other likely scenarios. Perhaps the ignition moment is a bloody confrontation between the right-wing militia and the US military near a rural bridge closed by the feds and forcibly reopened by a local sheriff who denies Washington’s authority. Or a presidential assassination, after which both the murderer and the victim are turned into martyrs by the media ecosystems on their side. Or a massive climate change-induced storm on the east coast that creates a destabilizing wave of refugees. Or a “dirty” bomb exploding in the United States Capitol, dispersing radioactive material and causing panic.
The first result, says Marche, would be generalized violence; the second, government repression. The United States, founded on revolution and historically prone to harsh reprisals against domestic and foreign enemies, is unlikely to respond with measures designed to reduce tensions, but with an “oversized” reaction. “It would be violent. It would be controlling. It would be vindictive, ”writes Marche. More violence would continue until the cycle ended not with the victory of either side, but with exhaustion, and the de facto end of the United States as it stands.
It is a future seen more clearly by those outside the country, says Marche. “Some American reporters on the ground who know what I have been writing have told me: ‘You are not worried enough, everything is accelerating faster than you say.’ But millions of Americans, including leading political commentators, truly believe in their institutions, despite what they see in front of them. “
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Among outside observers, no one is better placed or more (rightly) obsessed with America’s future than Canadians, says Marche. English Canada was founded largely by refugees from the American Revolution, while the Confederacy itself emerged in alarmed response to the Civil War. The current inward focus of the United States and the corresponding withdrawal from the world will affect every country in the world, but none more than ours. “We are a small, vulnerable country, more or less a client state of the US right now,” says Marche. “It involves our entire economy, our entire security structure and an international order that we believe in.”
Then there is our peculiar relationship, both as nations and as border crossers. “We are Horacio for his village,” says Marche, “a close, understanding and mostly irrelevant witness.” He doesn’t think a European could have written his book, “because it would be too stuffy.” But, he says, “Canadians get the good stuff about America, because we’re close enough to get to know them. We basically have a kinship relationship with them. “
Marche’s latest and most striking dispatch, Peaceful Dissolution, begins with the words: “One way or another, America is coming to an end.” Its divisions are too intractable, its constitutional structure too archaic, its propensity for violence too deep-rooted for any other result. That makes the prospect of a peaceful dissolution one of America’s “best scenarios.”
It would not be an easy task, says Marche. Peaceful separation requires goodwill, which dissipates like fog in the face of mass violence. There really is no time to waste. “I think Americans should sit down and seriously consider how they can renew or abandon their political union, because those are the options right now,” says Marche. You may be wrong that the renewal option is almost hopeless, but if it isn’t, you’re surely right that the sooner the United States begins to divide, the better for its citizens. And for us.
This article appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the title “Goodbye, neighbor.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
Reference-www.macleans.ca