Following a wave of destructive riots that tore through many cities in the United States last year, this turn toward open celebration of equally useless violence when it is visited on the enemy team speaks to a dangerous sort of polarization.įrom this sort of bloodlust flows another very common assertion: that a civil war, if waged on American soil, would be over quickly, and lead to a fairly effortless massacre of any insurrectionists in flyover America. Sometimes, that bloodlust is not even thinly-veiled after the unarmed USAF veteran Ashley Babbit was fatally shot through a locked door in the Capitol building, many anonymous and some less anonymous commentators intimated that perhaps the problem with police violence in America was not that officers were shooting and killing too many unarmed people - but rather that maybe they just were not killing enough of them. One of the most worrisome aspects of contemporary American political discussion is the sense one often gets that many participants are possessed by a thinly-veiled bloodlust. Still, the question to be answered at the end of the day is quite simple: how likely is civil war, or national divorce, or a troubles scenario really? To answer this question accurately, a few misconceptions about it being impossible have to be dealt with. Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.Īny one of these crises would be bad enough on their own taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order. has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another. The year 2021 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the U.S. None of this morbid interest in civil conflict is irrational, given the times. Others claim they would actually prefer to declare war on their recalcitrant countrymen rather than let them go their own way unmolested. Some support this national divorce others are opposed to it. It is entering the fringes of polite society. Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill. Why? How? It takes a unique confluence of mistakes and crises for civil war to appear possible, and an even longer list of mistakes, crises and elite screw-ups for them to happen.īut 2021 is a different world to 2015. Yet when, towards the end of Trump’s presidency, a radical friend of mine told me that he thought America was headed for civil war, I dismissed the argument out of hand.
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