Troops of the National Guard in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, January 14, 2021, days after the storming of the building by Donald Trump supporters © New York Times / Redux / eyevine
In the summer of 2015, America saw how its future could develop. The U.S. military conducted routine exercises in the south that sparked a cascade of conspiracy theories, especially in Texas. Some believed that the maneuver was a precursor to the Chinese invasion; others thought it would coincide with a massive asteroid impact. The exercise, called Jade Helm 15, means “eradicating local extremists,” according to one of the right-wing dark fantasy sites. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, took these jealousies seriously. He ensured that the 1,200 federal troops were closely monitored by the Texas National Guard. In this strange episode, which happened a year before Donald Trump became the Republican presidential candidate, we see the germs of American disintegration.
As with any warning of impending civil war, the very mention of another American sounds incredibly alarming – like persistent warnings from the head of Vitalstatistix in the comic series about Asterix that the sky is about to fall on Gallic heads. The disintegration of America has often been misdiagnosed.
Yet a number of recent books make an alarmingly convincing argument that warning lights are flashing red more than ever since 1861. The French philosopher Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe that absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” As Barbara Walter of the University of California points out in her Guide to Strengthening, check boxes in all wrong boxes.
Even before Trump triumphed in the 2016 presidential election, political analysts warned of the erosion of democracy and the pursuit of autocracy. The paralyzing divisions caused by Trump’s failed coup on January 6, 2021, sent him into dangerous new territory. Polls show that most Republicans believe, without evidence, that the election was stolen by Democrats backed by the so-called “deep state,” the Chinese government, fake Venezuelan voting machines or a feverish combination of them.
New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Joe Biden was quoted as saying to a senior Democrat: “I certainly hope so. [my presidency] works. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure we’ll have a state. ” The fact that the President of the United States can say something so apocalyptic without raising too many eyebrows shows how routine such fear has become.
In 1990, the CIA correctly predicted that Yugoslavia would disintegrate within two years as its policies solidified into ethnic factions. In 2022, the two American parties are increasingly sorted by racial and identical lines. Republicans are white, small towns and rural areas – the party now owns only one true urban convention area on Staten Island, New York. Democrats are now almost entirely urban and multiethnic. The habits of a normal democracy, in which the losing party forms a loyal opposition, are disappearing.
More than a third of Republicans and Democrats today believe violence is justified in pursuing their political goals, compared to less than a tenth in 2017, the year Trump took office. His rhetoric opened the door to separatist sentiment. When a party loses, its constituents feel as if their America is occupied by a foreign power. America, Walter points out, has become a “factional anocracy” – a state in the middle between autocracy and democracy – which is “rapidly approaching the stage of open rebellion.” Violence lurks in the political language of America. As Stephen Marche, a Canadian writer, writes in The Next Civil War, a richly imagined jeremiah over America’s impending disintegration, the country “is a grand act of violence far from a national crisis.”
How did America get to this passage? Take your choice from the dark stages – Newt Gingrich’s approach to scorched earth to his tenure as a polarizing spokesman for the House of Representatives in the 1990s, the Supreme Court ruling 5-4, which handed over the 2000 election to George W. Bush, the unexpected America’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI’s fateful investigation into Hillary Clinton’s almost comically trivial emails, Democrats attributing Trump’s victory to Vladimir Putin, Trump’s attempt to uproot every railing within reach or the failure of Congress to united on the need to punish a violent attack on himself. America’s democratic retreat is like Ernest Hemingway’s famous observation of bankruptcy: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Burns and Martin provide a thoroughly researched and often enlightening chronicle of America’s recent political degeneration. Much of this boils down to a lack of character. When the dust settles on last year’s Capitol Hill attack – made up of an almost entirely white mob of retired police officers, nurses, developers, doctors, lawyers and small business owners carrying Confederate flags, stunning Smith & Wesson pistols, stunning devices, firecrackers, handcuffs, chemicals and knives – Republican leaders sighed with relief. The Capitol may have been strewn with glass; its corridors are littered with feces. But Trump’s spell was broken. This “despicable man” is “finally being discredited,” said Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republican Senate. Kevin McCarthy, his colleague in the House, said Trump’s actions were “brutal and completely wrong”.
Three weeks later, McConnell voted to justify Trump for what he called a “failed uprising.” McCarthy stepped back even further, heading to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s refuge in Florida, to regain his allegiance. In the weeks that followed, he had come to the conclusion that his only way to become president was with the blessing of the disgraced former president. “Trump was in favor of life,” said Adam Kinsinger, one of only 10 Republicans to vote for his impeachment. “He [McCarthy] The authors label McCarthy as “perhaps the most attractive figure” in the Republican Party. There is fierce competition for this honor; Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, among others, is firm on McCarthy’s footsteps.
It was not absurd to hope that Biden’s folk touch would reduce America’s fever. However, it was abandoned. America is even more bitterly divided into imaginary rival nations than under Trump. Biden did not help, promising to restore bipartisan normalcy – a pious hope shattered under Barack Obama – while promising to be a transforming president in the style of Franklin Roosevelt. At 50:50 Senate, this was never realistic. Joe Manchin, a staunch West Virginia Democrat who is blocking Biden’s major reform bills, has not maintained the balance of power in Washington in the FDR.
In this way, the Democrats withdrew to their hitherto routine ethnic division of the spoils. Biden treats his choice of cabinet as a “Rubik’s cube in identity politics,” Burns and Martin write. Far from hoping for a new generation, his vice president, Kamala Harris, is “fixed on real and alleged neglect in ways that the West Wing finds annoying,” they wrote. Their party faces the likely annihilation of this year’s midterm elections in November, which will spark a devastating 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump. A popular Trump T-shirt reads, “I’d rather be Russian than Democrat.”
More seriously, the number of right-wing militias in the United States has exploded in recent years. White sentiment has also infiltrated U.S. law enforcement, Walter said. The number of armed potential rebels is a multiple of left-wing rebel groups, such as the Black Panthers and the Symbian Liberation Army, which sparked such panic in the early 1970s.
How would the US Civil War actually happen in the 21st century? Nothing like the first time. Unlike the 1860s, when America was neatly divided between slave-owning Confederates and the North, today’s separatist geography is marble. Unlike then, today the US military cannot be surpassed. Even in a country that, uniquely, has more private weapons than people (more than 400 million), many of whom are military, this would not be a competition. Yet America, on all sides, knows that asymmetric warfare is invincible. Think Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Think also about how America was born – its revolutionary army lost almost every encounter with Britain’s much better-equipped red coats. And yet, with the help of the French, American guerrilla forces prevailed. Now replace today’s federal army with red coats. The armies have had a terrible attempt to pacify the troubled population. Each victim gives rise to 10 more rebels.
“They will come and go from the shadows, communicating on message boards and encrypted networks,” Walter wrote. “They will meet in small groups in the vacuum cleaner studios along the shopping malls. In desert meadows on the Arizona border, in public parks in Southern California or in the snowy forests of Michigan, where they will train to fight.
Democrats face possible annihilation in this year’s midterm elections in November, which will provoke a crushing rematch in 2024 between Biden and Trump
Walter’s book outlines America’s possible paths to anti-utopia with impressive conciseness. Its synthesis of the various barometers of a country heading for civil war is difficult to refute when applied to the United States. But she tainted her case with a number of major mistakes. Nowhere near 60% of the world’s countries are “full” democracies, she said. Nor is India a “strictly secular democracy.” Its constitution celebrates rather than avoids all religions. However, her book is indispensable.
None of the writers offers a simple antidote …
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