To many it seems like an age ago when the United States of America was seen as the beacon of the free world, a country whose democracy the rest of the world aspired to.
Indeed, if anything its divisions are growing bigger than ever with the shadow of violence looming large after the January 6th US Capitol riot that saw supporters of former president Donald Trump attempt to overthrow the election of Joe Biden with violence.
This polarisation is more than likely to be highlighted once again at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which kicks off on Thursday, February 24th, in Orlando, Florida, with Mr Trump scheduled to make an address on Saturday.
In a new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Canadian novelist and cultural commentator Stephen Marche looks at the increasing polarisation in American life and politics, and outlines five scenarios that could spark a new civil war in the States.
Mr Marche interviewed military officials, law enforcement, people involved in right wing militias, food supply experts, historians and political scientists to research the book, and the five scenarios 'or dispatches' are all striking in how easily they could materialise.
'Normalisation of political violence'
Speaking to BreakingNews.ie about his book, Mr Marche explained: "I don’t think anything is inevitable, I try to be very specific in this book about the odds of things happening, how strong the models are, because I don’t think you need to exaggerate anything here to be scared out of your wits.
"The expert opinions, meta analysis, of experts in civil war and foreign policy experts, put the chance of a civil war at 67 per cent, that’s about where I’d put it too. I would say definitely the trends are heading towards massive increases in violence and the normalisation of political violence."
One scenario described in the book involves a local sheriff who refuses an order from the federal government to close an unsafe bridge, leading to him becoming a hero to fringe movements and conspiracy theorists. Another concerns a major climate catastrophe which plunges New York into chaos.
In another, a lone gunman assassinates a US president.
"You don’t even have to go back as far as the John F Kennedy assassination, after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan Democrats were genuinely horrified. It wasn’t play-acting for politics, they did not want their president to be assassinated. Four American presidents have been assassinated, as one Secret Service agent put it to me, it’s a dimension of the political process in America.
"The question is how would they respond to it? God forbid, if Joe Biden or Donald Trump were assassinated, half the country would regard it as a disaster and the other half would regard it as at least partly legitimate.
"The Secret Service is excellent, and I think the chance of a group of terrorists successfully planning and executing an assassination of a president is virtually nil. But there are 400 million guns in America, the chances of some lone guy self radicalising and being angry and in possession of a gun, that’s much higher."
While many outsiders view the current division in the States as a hangover from four years with Donald Trump at the helm, Mr Marche argues that Mr Trump is at most a "symptom" of the problems in America.
"The argument that people have the hardest time accepting in my book is that if Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, instead of Trump, everything in the book would still be true. I think he is at most a symptom, he represents something very ugly in American politics.
"However, ultimately the real crisis here is in the systems, the structures of government and the increasing lack of legitimacy in the institutions."
Mr Marche feels the institutions of American politics are the real issue, and that the polarisation has already become out of control.
While Republicans and Democrats have never seen eye to eye on the majority of issues, they now cannot even agree on fundamental facts.
This is evidenced in the recent claim from the Republican National Committee that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse”.
"The fact that only two Republicans showed up to a minute of silence for the guard who died during the January 6th riot, let’s think about what that conveys, that’s a whole party unwilling to give basic respect to a law enforcement official who died protecting their personal physical security, that to me is much more troubling than anything Trump says.
"For mature democracies, the Build Back Better bill would be a budget, it’s not something extraordinary at all. They can’t even get that over the line. Biden, even though he controls the House, Senate and the presidency could not get a diplomatic corps until December, almost a year after his election.
"Basic government functions are increasingly difficult to perform. On some level America is becoming ungovernable. Tensions between Democrats and Republicans are stronger than racial tensions in the United States, that was shown in a recent study, Democrats don’t want their children to marry Republicans, and vice versa, they don’t hire each other.
"It’s the institutions themselves, the Supreme Court, five out of the nine judges on the Supreme Court were selected by presidents who did not win a popular vote, they’re going to make a decision about abortion soon and a huge number of Americans will not regard that as a legitimate legal decision.
"That’s where you get into all the danger, when people don’t feel they’re living in a democracy any more. They don’t feel like political will is enacted by convincing other people with arguments or increasing the popularity of opinion, that’s when the only way to achieve political objectives is by violence and that’s when everything spirals out of control."
Mr Marche points to how closely the institutions that govern the States are tied to the US Constitution as a core problem.
"While the Constitution is a great document of genius, it is a document of 18th century genius, it is no longer capable of even orchestrating peaceful transition of power.
"There’s lots of blame to go around, don’t get me wrong, but if you want to look for solutions... it's deep structural problems."
One of the things he found striking about the various people he interviewed for the book was the only common theme tying them together; a deep reverence for the Constitution.
"One of the things I found really fascinating about writing this book is I would go and talk to Texas nationalists, really violent Nazis, people on the left, people in Chaz [Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone], various figures in the Black Lives Matter movement, and they all worship the Constitution.
"Even these Texas separatists, who want to destroy the union, they still worship the Constitution, which I find genuinely bizarre."
He added: "I think part of the problem is that the system in decline makes it very hard to reform from within. Obviously the Constitution is not working but the mechanisms to reform the Constitution require a huge amount of goodwill and a huge amount of fellow feeling which is exactly what’s lacking in the first place.
"It’s so old in effect, its meanings are 18th century meanings. The Second Amendment says you can own any weapon you want, they didn’t know about the existence of machine guns."
Mr Marche said "collective facts" no longer exist in America, such is the level of division on almost any significant issue.
"One of the real tipping points was the Newton massacre [the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting], where all those children were killed, and that caused no reconsideration of gun policy in the United States.
"Kyle Rittenhouse was at CPAC, he was a terrorist to half the country, but he’s at political rallies.
"There were different narratives that emerged from January 6th, within 12 hours. It was not a wake-up call at all. Conservatives turned it into what they wanted to turn it into basically right away.
"When I say this is a struggle over meaning, that’s what I mean, there are these two narrative systems that are in contrast and don’t connect. Any event gets divided, there is no collective event in the United States, that's what the chapter on assassination is about."
The widespread division over the events of January 6th is still just as evident over one year later, and it was again highlighted when Mr Trump, speaking at a rally in Texas, said he would pardon all those prosecuted over the event if he wins the presidency in 2024.
"That is much worse than polarisation, that’s like classic pre-civil war behaviour, that’s exactly what you see from dictators in South America and when Europe had that sort of movement. It’s totally endangering of people's lives because it is a signal, if you commit violence, we will forgive you."
While many people think of civil war as two fighting factions, Mr Marche's models are based on different eventualities that are more reflective of modern conflicts.
"America is so huge, both in political and ethnic terms, but the models do apply, the model of a civil war is that it starts at 1,000 combatant deaths a year, a civil strife starts at 50 combatant deaths a year, so America is past that by far, and I would argue that it’s in a state of civil strife, it’s in a low grade normalisation of political violence that’s increasing.
"That’s a semantic definition, it’s more helpful to think through the normalisation of political violence in the sense that the peaceful transition of power is no longer meaningful, that is very close, right on the cusp of happening, that’s enough I think.
"In these insurgent campaigns, they tend to fragment very quickly, into irrepressible groups, I also think they’re dealing with a level of ideological incoherence that’s unique."
Mr Marche added that some far right militia groups have extremely different notions of freedom, and what their goals are.
"They have this notion of freedom that is so messianic and unachievable that it seems almost farcical. I’ve been around some who consider paying property taxes to be the same as enslavement, they literally call it enslavement.
"The nature of this is the question of meaning that would be the subject of the war, it’s not like the first civil war where it’s a struggle over slavery, state rights and there are two sides. It’s a struggle between order and chaos itself, rather than any political programme.
"The way I thought through the hard right in America was like a buffet; Second Amendment absolutists, people who don’t believe we should pay taxes, sovereign citizens, sagebrush rebels [who don’t believe in the federal use of land in the west], different forms of white power movement.
"People move back and forth between them, take what they like from one and then move to another, it’s totally ideologically incoherent. It’s a very diffused, vague, hard to grasp thing, but when it materialises you get January 6th."
While some critics have labelled Mr Marche's predictions irresponsible, he disagrees with this and describes the goal of his book as being a "wake-up call" to the dangers ahead for the United States.
"To me, it’s a wake-up call. Fintan O’Toole wrote a piece in The Atlantic saying my book was irresponsible because if you imagine these civil war scenarios happen you can cause them to happen, which I don’t really believe.
"The situation now needs to be phased, it needs to be encountered, I think it’s very easy to pretend everything is going to work out, when the one thing I am quite certain of is it’s not all just going to work out. It’s going to require work at the basic foundations of the institutions to right this ship. I just want to make that clear, the point of the book is to clarify that as much as possible."
He added: "The point of these scenarios that I imagine is to show how little is required, there are many failing bridges in America... check. There are many sheriffs who believe in interposition and that resistance to federal government is their job... check. There are many militia people who are looking for a movement to back and will join it once they can.
"All of those things are true, so these events can easily happen, they don’t require any imagination to envisage, so in that sense America is very dry wood, and all it is going to take is a spark to set something on fire. What that spark could be, I imagine a few scenarios in the book, but really the point of the book is that it could be anything, it could be something very small."
With the peaceful transition of power now not even seen as a formality, many have pointed to the 2024 US presidential election as a potential flashpoint.
Mr Marche feels a January 6th-type event is in danger of materialising much sooner.
"I think that could happen this year. A recent poll said only 20 per cent of Americans have faith in their electoral systems, another poll said 33 per cent believe using violence against your own government could be justified in some circumstances.
"You’re in a situation where neither side believes the other side can be in power legitimately ever, that’s breakdown.
"I would say another January 6th, I would be completely unsurprised by that, let me put it that way. I don’t think anyone I’ve talked to, anyone either on the right in the militias or in law enforcement, on either side, thinks that January 6th will be the end of it."
Mr Marche cited the US military as the only core institution of the country that is still serving its purpose effectively.
Military leaders managed to resist Mr Trump's efforts to deploy soldiers to the streets during the riots in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, but Mr Marche predicts they will come under similar pressure in the not-too-distant future.
"The military is the one institution in the United States that still has widespread trust and is not in decline. Their oath is sacred, if that falls apart the country is gone.
"Congress and the Senate are ruins of themselves but the US military has preserved its integrity and its honour. Nobody understands that better than the US military itself, the last thing they want to do is be in a position where they have to respond to civilian chaos.
"That said, I think a moment is going to come where they’re not going to have much of a choice and certainly in the first dispatch where they’re ordered by the president to occupy a US county, it happened in LA, and in Arkansas in the 50s, that’s a very uncomfortable position for them to be in."
While Mr Marche stressed that he doesn't feel anything is inevitable, his view is that the core institutions in America are so fundamentally broken that change will have to come in some form.
When marriages get to the state the US is in, people get a divorce because the other option is just too ugly.
"America is hugely diverse. That’s the beauty of the United States... there are all kinds of people, who get into all kinds of weirdness, produce their own cultures, little scenes, new religions and new political movements are blossoming all the time.
"I think having been an observer of America for 20 years really, what did surprise me was that they were losing their sense of unity.
"On the right, they have been convinced for quite a while, perhaps even since the first civil war, that the federal government is illegitimate and that they’re being imposed upon, occupied in some sense.
"Now I think the left is starting to get that sense too, of ‘you know what, this is not working, this is not capable of providing us with popular government'.
"They feel it in a lot of ways with the declining healthcare system which is just a nightmare, the educational system which is out of control.
"I think they’re all feeling the decline in very real terms. It’s not something where when I ask them they reply ‘how dare you say that?’ like it was before. They know what I’m talking about, it’s no surprise to them... and that surprised me.
"The US government can’t enact policy. In many countries governments can enact their policies, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, when they work out it’s great, when they don’t, we punish them at the polls.
"This is what being ungovernable means, you can’t fix your bridges, even when you have the money, everyone wants it done, you still can’t, and they’re all starting to figure out that’s the country they are living in."
He feels change to the United States will eventually come, adding that conditions of violence, and political violence, eventually make way for solutions to deep structural problems, as "nobody can stand" the alternative of prolonged conflict.
"Violence is horrible, political violence is horrific, nobody can stand it for very long, nobody can prosper under civil war conditions or conditions of endemic political violence, so there will be some impetus to real negotiations around these structural problems. Perhaps secession, which is totally unconstitutional, perhaps a constitutional convention, but I think America has actually reached the point where the most profound political questions are being asked.
"Who’s going to be leader of the House, matters less, increasingly it’s just irrelevant.
"When marriages get to the state the US is in, people get a divorce because the other option is just too ugly.
"The Department of Justice just announced they’re forming a specific domestic terrorism unit, I take a lot of encouragement from that step. Breaking up these organisations, destroying their networks of violence, the thing about violence is once it starts it’s very hard to stop, so nipping it in the bud now, that’s a positive sign."
The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future will be released in Ireland on March 3rd, 2022.
