America is edging closer to civil war
That people on both sides of the political divide are using intemperate language is undeniable, even if the left will always insist the other side is worse. That there is a potential for an increase in US political violence seems clear. By European standards there are terrifying numbers of lethal weapons in private hands. But civil war?
Some of the people who make this argument can be dismissed as scaremongers. When a Canadian novelist fantasises about Trump being assassinated, the United States tearing itself apart and all the nice Americans moving to Canada, it’s better to avert your gaze. Same drill when a marine turned chat show host calls for red states to secede if a future Democratic administration comes for their guns.
But when a colleague at the Hoover Institution, the historian Victor Davis Hanson, warns that we are “at the brink of a veritable civil war”, we all need to pay attention. The same goes for the National Review’s Reihan Salam, whose new book argues that without root-and-branch immigration reform, the US will come apart at the seams. I also take seriously the work of Peter Turchin, who has been arguing for some time that several leading indicators of political instability (notably inequality) are set to peak around 2020, making the US “particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval”.
Hanson’s argument is that the tensions arising from globalisation, the internet, campus leftism and illegal immigration have led to an ideological split that is also geographical. The toxic atmosphere puts him in mind not only of the 1850s but also of the 5th century BC, when “stasis” (meaning internal strife) tore apart the ancient Greek city states.
Like our colleague Morris Fiorina, I am inclined towards the optimistic view that most normal Americans find the culture war exhausting. As I argued here last week, the evidence suggests that the extreme right and extreme left are two noisy minorities. They would be lost without one another, but they turn everyone else off.
Hanson, who still sees further polarisation as avoidable, makes a crucial point, though. History repeatedly shows that “zealous and sometimes warring tiny minorities can escalate tensions, nullify opposition and bully the silenced majority to sanction — or at least not object to — violence”.
