Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Is a Second Civil War Inevitable?
Stewart Rhodes, head of The Oakthkeepers, has been charged with seditious conspiracy. (Joe Hoover)
January 20, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
Is a second U.S. Civil War inevitable? If so, what form will it take?
A national survey by pollster John Zogby, published in early February 2021, found a plurality of Americans (46%) believed a future civil war was likely, 43% felt it was unlikely, and 11% were not sure. “Is it really possible that America could face the possibility of civil war in the near future? It may seem unthinkable, and yet there’s much to worry about,” William G. Gale, a Brookings Institution senior fellow in economic studies, and Darrell M. West, director of governance studies at Brookings, wrote in a September 16, 2021 article titled “Is the US headed for another Civil War?”
Canadian novelist and journalist Stephen Marche’s new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (Avid Reader Press. 238 pp.), poses several scenarios -- each extrapolated from current movements and trends -- that could lead to civil war in America. Marche describes his book as highly researched, speculative non-fiction. However, the political, social and environmental preconditions for profound disruption and civil war are not at all speculative; they are knowable and well documented. The organizing and staging of a right-wing insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which was aimed at overthrowing a duly elected president, and could be a preview of things to come.
As Marche writes in the book’s Introduction titled “An Introduction to the Immediate Future of the United States,” “The United States is coming to an end. The question is how. Every government, every business, every person alive will be affected by the answer.” Marche’s book is an urgent call for us to recognize rather than deny and look away from the forces that are tearing apart the world’s longest-lived democracy.
Over the past few years there has been an uptick in paramilitary organizing and the growth of right-wing anti-government organizations. This intensified political polarization has been spurred on by former President Trump’s Big Lie, increasingly frequent environmental disasters, growing income inequality, distrust in established institutions, religious extremism, the proliferation of guns, and racial animus, all combustible pre-conditions for an American Civil War.
Earlier this month, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, a former paratrooper and the founder of the anti-government para-military Oath Keepers, and 10 co-conspirators were charged with seditious conspiracy for allegedly plotting “to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” via an armed, well-coordinated takeover of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Rhodes’ arrest was the first time the Justice Department brought a sedition charge against any of the Capitol invaders.
“Rhodes and certain co-conspirators ... planned to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by January 20, 2021, which included multiple ways to deploy force,” the indictment reads. “They coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington, D.C., equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical gear, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’ call to take up arms at Rhodes’ direction.”
On Nov. 5, 2020, Rhodes told an invitation-only message group of Oath Keepers leaders: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.”
Marche, a gifted writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and The New Yorker, poses five potentially catastrophic scenarios, scenarios constructed from reviewing sophisticated predictive models, and from nearly two hundred interviews with military leaders, law enforcement officials, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists.
“Scholars of civil war, “Marche writes, “used to analyzing conflicts abroad, now see their established patterns replicating themselves identically in the world’s richest country, home to the most powerful military in human history.”
As Carlos Lozada pointed out in his Washington Post review of Marche’s book , “To glimpse the coming dismemberment of the United States of America, just stop by your local bookstore.” Lozada writes:
“How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” by Barbara F. Walter, one of the most-discussed titles of the moment, warns that the signs typically heralding such conflicts are now evident at home. Divided We Fall by David French, published weeks before the 2020 election, pictures the cleaving of the United States into two culturally distinct states, united only in their mutual detestation. On the magazine racks, the Atlantic argues that the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol was merely ‘practice’ for the more effective democratic subversion that’s now underway. And on the fiction shelves, you can pick up a paperback of Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel, American War, a grim vision of environmental destruction, youth radicalization, internally displaced populations and biological warfare in the United States, a vision rendered less fashionable only by its timing (here, the second American civil war is not waged until the latter half of the 21st century).
Spoiler Alert: Marche’s book does not end in total despair: “None of the crises described in this book are beyond the capacity of Americans to solve. It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces. …There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times…”
While a full-fledged civil war seems unlikely at this point, there is no doubt that an emboldened and militant right wing will stage more vigilante actions similar to the plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. And a Republican Party totally consumed by seizing political power can move the country closer to a right-wing autocracy.
Interestingly, in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar who studies violent conflict, recently urged the Canadian government to prepare for an American implosion. “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” he wrote. “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.”
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