Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has interviewed many people who’ve lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn’t see it coming. “They’re all surprised,” she said. “Even when, to somebody who studies it, it’s obvious years beforehand.”
Two books out this month warn that this country is closer to civil war than most Americans understand. In “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” Walter writes, “I’ve seen how civil wars start, and I know the signs that people miss. And I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate.” The Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Marche is more stark in his book, “The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future.” “The United States is coming to an end,” Marche writes. “The question is how.”
In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar who studies violent conflict, recently urged the Canadian government to prepare for an American implosion. “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” he wrote. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” As John Harris writes in Politico, “Serious people now invoke ‘Civil War’ not as metaphor but as literal precedent.”
Of course, not all serious people. The Harvard political scientist Josh Kertzer wrote on Twitter that he knows many civil war scholars, and “very few of them think the United States is on the precipice of a civil war.” Yet even some who push back on civil war talk tend to acknowledge what a perilous place America is in. In The Atlantic, Fintan O’Toole, writing about Marche’s book, warns that prophecies of civil war can be self-fulfilling; during the long conflict in Ireland, he says, each side was driven by fear that the other was mobilizing. It’s one thing, he writes, “to acknowledge the real possibility that the U.S. could break apart and could do so violently. It is quite another to frame that possibility as an inevitability.”
I agree with O’Toole that it’s absurd to treat civil war as a foregone conclusion, but that it now seems distinctly possible is still pretty bad.
As usual, there are different opinions on the situation we are in. Calling a new American civil war inevitable is not credible yet. But we are in a perilous place and our political and social situations appear to be worsening, not stabilizing or getting better. Yes, prophecies of civil war maybe can be self-fulfilling, if that is what happened to Northern Ireland. But warnings short of prophesy can also help waken people to the grave danger that democracy, the rule of law and civil society now face.
Question: Which is the greater danger, warning of the possibility of a civil war or denying it is significantly or distinctly possible?
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