The Next Civil War
Happy Chinese New Year! I hope you celebrate the same way Evelyn and I did – a delicious night out with family and friends at a local restaurant.
This week on the podcast I interviewed Stephen Marche, the author of the fascinating and painstakingly well-researched “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.” Stephen started his book after attending the Trump inauguration. As you likely know, the subject matter is near and dear to my heart.
I’ve been concerned about political unrest and societal disintegration wrought in part by the polarization of America for years. Stephen puts a firmer stance behind it – “It’s a matter of how it happens, not whether it happens.”
First the numbers. Stephen uses a definition from the Peace Research Institute Oslo that a Civil War has broken out when there are 1,000 political combatant deaths per year. Have their been deaths born of political violence in the U.S, these past years? It turns out domestic anti-government extremists in the US killed between 37 and 72 people per year from 2015 – 2019, before the January 6th insurrection. So we are about 3-7% of the way to Civil War right now. Incidentally, 25+ deaths per year from political violence is categorized as ‘civil strife.’
Stephen categorizes the United States as being particularly prone to political unrest as an ‘anocracy,’ which is defined as a semi-democracy or a regime that mixes democratic and autocratic features. “True democracies don’t have revolutions. Neither do autocracies, which suppress them. But America right now is in a middle ground, neither truly democratic or autocratic.”
This definition may seem extreme to you – is the U.S. not the world’s most storied democracy? Unfortunately our democracy is rife with problems that more and more Americans are waking up to: a two-party system that locks out different points of view with both parties awash in special interest money. 85% of Congressional districts are safely blue or red and are effectively decided by 10% of voters, further stifling the will of the vast majority. Polarized media organizations trumpet different versions of reality separating people into tribal camps. One reason so many people are now concerned about a possible shift to authoritarianism is that our two-party system is uniquely vulnerable to it in a way that other nations’ more representative systems are not. The Forward Party is geared to help change that.
How does Stephen imagine Civil War being catalyzed? He paints a detailed set of scenarios, all of which are plausible because they are based on things that have either happened already in some form or experts expect to happen soon. U.S. armed forces taking up arms against anti-government militias on American soil. Lone wolves radicalized into teenage assassins. Social order swamped by the ravages of climate change. Secessionist movements moving from the margins into the mainstream. Indeed, Stephen wrote a chapter on a January 6th-type insurrection before it happened, thus requiring significant edits to the book.
Some of you read my book ‘The War on Normal People’ which painted a picture of a decaying society torn apart by technological automation and economic marginalization. “The Next Civil War” is in many ways a portrait of how this process could play out politically. I think that we will experience some version of the near future that Stephen presents – the question is how will our institutions respond, and is the American political system itself capable of evolving? We will certainly become either much more autocratic or democratic in the coming months – millions of us would vastly prefer the latter. We need to make the case to our fellow Americans that a genuinely multi-party system and more real representation is the necessary antidote to polarization and Civil War.
- Andrew
