Americans interested in politics and governance have been reading many often thoughtful but somewhat terrifying essays recently on the possibility of a second civil war in our country. Not a metaphoric civil war, but a real war with guerilla skirmishes, a divided military and even paramilitary terror squads.
There’s talk, as well, of a Trumpian form of fascism turning the United States into as authoritarian capitalist state, similar perhaps to a scofflaw version of Singapore. The New Yorker and the Brookings Institute have published troubling speculations about the state of our national psyche and the presence in our midst of elected legislators, like Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn from North Carolina, who’ve made not-so veiled threats of having to “pick up arms against fellow Americans… if false election claims cause a civil war.”
Was the January 6th storming of the Capitol complex in Washington D.C. a foretaste of savagery to come? Was it a dress-up game played by brainless thugs on the lunatic fringe pretending to be patriots? Was it an assembly of whiners and opportunists who’d never given a decent thought to politics until a tawdry grifter with a genius for drawing out legal confrontations like so much stale taffy took over the White House and started playing games with the Constitution as he had always played games with business law and lending systems, working sting after sting until he became a self-proclaimed billionaire with more debt than bucks? Was it a symptom of a characteristic kind of American self-indulgence, a “me-ism” that leaves people stripped of civic decency and any sense of social responsibility?
Guns and violence and the madness of the mob notwithstanding, I think many of January 6th rioters saw politics as just a big game and costume party with no deep, long-range consequences. Raiding the Capitol, beating security guards, destroying public property, occupying congressional offices, even the chanting of “hang Pence,” came across like a bestial lark, a humorless sick joke in a play about a madhouse on the part of people who’d never voted in their lives. As New Mexico political scientist Richard Fox has observed, the Republican Party has managed to organize the lunatic fringe, and has, itself, been consumed by it.
What would happen, though, if Democrats got infected by the same political violence? What if Democrats started to consider Republicans so dangerous to democracy that it was their duty was to take up the cudgel of politics-by-other means themselves and go to any lengths to stop the GOP from holding office? What would happen if the Democrats increased their majority in the House and Senate in this year’s mid-term election cycle, and then refused to validate a Trump victory, should he run and win in 2024, on the grounds that he is a fascist demagogue working to overthrow the government of the United States and turning America into a kind of an upscale North Korea? In other words, what if the Democrats got sick and tired of trying to be reasonable and rational and decided to play tit for tat?
It’s a hair-raising thought and not one, of course, I’d hope for or endorse. It would lead to a constitutional crisis and much, much worse. I still don’t see the majority of Americans, on either side of the partisan divide, willing to disrupt commerce and the “good life,” fueled by credit cards and therapeutic shopping, and operating in at least the semblance of a law-abiding culture, to actually kill each other over politics. No matter how riled up we get, Americans are too distracted, numbed, lazy, spoiled and exhausted by work and COVID to muster the zeal to risk their own lives for a mere politician, or in the service of a mob. Ours is not a pre-revolutionary environment. We’re up for spasms of violence, as long as it’s not to close to us. But despite the endless fulminations, horror shows and pomposities spawned by contemporary media, I think most of us still consider bloodshed over politics to be preposterous and criminal, without a shred of righteousness, a malignancy that only infects other countries. Such is the abysmal state of American exceptionalism. We still value our democracy, even if we’re not sure of what it means, even if we’re aware of its many faults. And the peaceful transition of power after elections is still sacrosanct to most of us, I believe.
As historian Will Durant wrote in 1929, the flaws of American democracy are legion — “its dependence upon a public opinion misinformed, misled, and thoughtlessly passionate; its nominations controlled by political machines favoring obedient mediocrities; its legislatures and Congress subservient to lobbies and wealth; its leaders too busy with electioneering to have time to think.”
But despite it all, most of us don’t want to do away with democracy in the same way that the Soviet populace acquiesced to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. We haven’t had an American Stalin or Hitler, though we’ve supported many of them abroad, mostly on the right. But the tantrums and lunacies of the GOP, the consternating blabber-mouthing of Donald Trump and the violent rhetoric and racism of many of the GOP’s philosophical fellow travelers are objects of demonic entertainment, perhaps, and even the occasional wish fulfillment on the part of devilish devotees, not a massive movement with the power to conscript an army, motivate it with citing the tradition of other insurrections and with the discipline to mount a successful coup. Or so I hope.
This is not to say that we couldn’t turn our national bellicosity and obsession with foreign wars against ourselves. What if Trump had managed to stay in office despite Biden’s electoral victory? With an eight million popular majority for Biden, I believe we might have seen a counter coup, after all legal avenues had been exhausted. The military two years ago wouldn’t have allowed it. And the consequences would have been catastrophic.
The conditions are still not ripe for a second civil war in America. But if pandemics surge through the world on a regular basis, if inflation and supply lines cripple consumerism, if fear is stoked, racism pursued, hatred enflamed and class and gender inequalities magnified, we could become a nation of battlegrounds and riots and insurrections, of political unrest as capricious, unpredictable and lethal as COVID or any other virus with a head of steam.
Politics is not a game. And it’s still not a war, yet, either, let’s hope, in 21st century America.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Photo by Tyler Merbler)
Excellent piece, V. B. Price! I agree entirely with your sentiments. You mentioned the military. I agree that they have resisted this attempted take-over of democracy. And they have the power. Woe is us if they ever decide that a coup is in order.
Gee . . . I think I used to like the country I thought I grew up in. I wonder if it ever existed.
i thank you for your rationality in a time of great irrationality.