I predicted the next US civil war would be in 2040 – but l was wrong. It feels closer than that…
As the fallout of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump continues, Stephen Marche, author of ‘The Next Civil War’, says that all the signs are there that American society has just entered its most dangerous political state yet, and points to more violence to come
Back in 2018, when I was working on my book The Next Civil War, I remember speaking to an FBI agent who had been undercover for many years with the far right. By then I had done my own time with extremists from both sides, and I had a question: The right was responsible for over half of all political murders in the United States, and the left for somewhere around 4 per cent. How could he explain the difference? Why was one side so much more violently effective than the other?
He knew right away. The left blows itself up before it can blow anyone else up, he told me. The right, even on its insane fringes, can muster basic solidarity and order. As the 2024 election heats up, that undercover agent’s truth seems freshly valid to me. It feels like the right has already organised a path to autocracy. The left, which loudly claims to be defending US democracy, is in shambles.
The causes of the potential collapse of the American republic have been well established since 2008 at least. Countries collapse, not because of single events, but because of deep systemic failures, and the United States exhibits many of the most toxic systemic failures: negative partisanship drives its political system and, increasingly, its legal system; income inequality is at levels the country has not seen since its founding; faith in institutions of all kinds – Congress, the media, religious institutions, the courts – is in steep decline.
Meanwhile its archaic election system, the electoral college, simply does not reflect, in a meaningful way, the popular will. Fewer and fewer people in the United States believe in their political system – and those who do believe in it less and less.
All of these realities were true enough when I published The Next Civil War two years ago, but they were in the background. You had to look to find them. When I was creating the scenarios that frame the chapters, the date I used as a shorthand was 2040, not anywhere close to 2024. But countries in collapse are what experts call “complex cascading systems”, with different factors feeding off each other. The models I used have held up to a degree I find astonishing. But the process they describe seems to be accelerating so much faster than I ever imagined.
The difference between the two sides in the current American election is that the right seem to be aware of the rapid entropy, and the left seems unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge it. The American Democratic elite, a group in which I would include not only political operatives and elected officials but analysts and media figures, still function as if they are living in the United States of the Obama years. They are still in the West Wing mindset. They believe that politics, in a democracy, involves consulting policy experts, negotiating consensus through compromise, and finding figures who can embody that consensus in elections.
The right knows and understands that many feel as if the system is already rotten, and those on the right are using the rotting of the American dream for the everyday man and woman, to empower themselves.
I believe the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was, by no means, the most important political event that took place last week. When the history of the fall of the American republic is written, the dismissal of the classified documents case which many thought would send him to prison will matter so much more. The Republicans have now put their ducks in a row. They have prepared the legal system to give unprecedented power to the executive branch. They have polluted the electoral system by casting any result they may disagree with in doubt preemptively. And, of course, they now have their victimisation narrative prepared.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” JD Vance tweeted moments after the shot hit Trump’s ear. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that president Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to president Trump’s attempted assassination.” The assassination attempt will provide them with all the moral cover they need to persecute their enemies to the full. The crowds are shouting “fight, fight, fight” already. This is not the language of peace and harmony. It speaks of power by “any means necessary”.
Meanwhile, the Democrats cannot even organise behind their candidate. They cannot organise behind another candidate either. Democrats do not have a story to tell. They can’t even work up a convincing hatred of their opponents.
The problem runs deeper than horse-race politics. Democrats want to keep their institutions alive. And to keep those institutions alive, they have to believe that the institutions are still functional. In other words, they have to look away from the collapse. Many of them are still, in some corner of their hearts, holding onto Barack Obama, and Obama said that there was no red America and no blue America, that there was no Black America and no white America. Obama also said that if you work hard and you play by the rules, you can rise in America. These are much more attractive lies than the ones that Trump is telling to his followers, but their beautiful decency has only rendered their seductive deceptions more entrenched.
The trend of American decline has been underway for a decade at least. Nonetheless, the classified documents decision, and the assassination attempt against Trump, represent a small, but important, inflection point. The United States has entered a period of anocracy, a shadowy realm between autocracy and democracy. Any expert on civil war will tell you that anocracy is the most dangerous political state to inhabit, with the greatest tendency to violence.
The reason for that is obvious. If the electoral system doesn’t represent a popular mandate, if the courts appear to be simply the tools of powerful interests, and if no institutions transcend the hack work of a vicious political system, then the state’s monopoly on violence is inherently illegitimate. The American people are the most armed society in the developed world. There are more guns than people in the United States. The time of American unity is over. It has been over for a while. Only one side seems to be aware of it. Unfortunately, the other side will be brought around, one way or the other, later rather than sooner. If a civil war does come to America, it will be fully weaponised.
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