Excerpts from, "Next Civil War - Stephen Marche"

One way or another, the United States is coming to an end. The divisions have become intractable. The political parties are irreconcilable. The capacity for government to make policy is diminishing. The icons of national unity are losing their power to represent. The threat multipliers from economic and environmental sources are driving an underlying tribalism that is shredding the ability of the political order to respond to threats against its own stability. The Constitution is becoming incoherent.

One possible conclusion is violence. The other is civilized separation. At this point, disunion is among the best-case scenarios for the United States.

Secession as a Possibility Secession would not be a failure, given the tensions tearing the United States apart. Separatism is a worldwide political trend. The number of states in the world has tripled since 1945. And there will soon be more. “Right now, there are about sixty secessionist movements worldwide. Sixty independence movements is a pretty large number by historical standards,” says Ryan Griffiths, a professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty. “In the long run, there will be another secessionist movement in the United States. It will just happen. No country is permanent. It will change. It will break apart in some way.” One way of breaking apart requires mass death. The other requires political courage and the ability to face hard truths.

The first hard truth that needs facing is the most basic: that the United States no longer functions as a nation. The ideas that motivated its system no longer convince. The symbols that once unified its people no longer hold up. The country no longer makes sense.

The Appetite for Disunion American tolerance for the idea of secession has been rapidly growing. In 2014, Reuters asked Americans, “Do you support or oppose the idea of your state peacefully withdrawing from the United States of America and the federal government?” One in four supported leaving. That’s not one in four from states with active secessionist movements. That’s one in four from the Union as a whole. America’s taste for secessionism has never faded. Even in the country’s most unified periods, it has always remained a sometimes violent force in the United States’ history of overlapping and competing identities.
Since Trump’s election, intellectuals on both sides have started arguing, tentatively, for an American separation. The Federalist, from the right, has argued that “we both now agree that living under the other side’s value system is wholly unacceptable.” The New Republic, from the left, shared the sentiment: “Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.” American divorce, for the partisans, is a thought experiment, mostly just a chance to explain, in detail, how monstrous the other side is. “The GOP has many problems, but the Democratic Party has turned into something completely un-American. The United States was founded on two things: Judeo-Christian values and a limited federal government,” the Federalist can say. The New Republic has a chance to indulge its contempt to the fullest: “Go ahead, keep on voting against your own economic interests to satisfy your need to control other people’s bodies, sex lives, and recreational habits.” More recent books, from both sides, have taken the issue much more seriously, such as Break It Up by Richard Kreitner and Divided We Fall by David French. Every year secession becomes more popular and every year its arguments become more legitimate.

The dream of disunion is far from a mere thought experiment at this point. Serious people, more of them all the time, are imagining realistic scenarios, planning, and organizing. As the identity of the United States dies, new identities and new loyalties—loyalties to countries that don’t yet exist—are emerging.

Imagining Secession
The United States might well be better off as separate countries. How would it happen? For all the rhetoric of secession, for all the talk, almost no one, either in the media or in the political establishment, bothers with the specifics. They simply assume that if enough people support secession, it will happen. That assumption is naive. Secession is not easy. Ask any independence movement.

A national separation is a bureaucratic nightmare. Uncertainty over small questions of daily life like pensions and passports is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. How would the national debt be divided? Would dual citizenship be permitted? What amendments to the Constitution would be necessary to make secession possible? How would a state decide which country to belong to? What would the terms of new confederations look like? What would happen to the military?

If the pressure to split the United States grew, either through democratic means or through mass violence, how would the government of the United States respond? How would a new Philadelphia Convention, a de–Constitutional Convention, carve up the country? How would a broken America, with a half-legitimate president and fifty governors, work toward becoming future countries?

Where Would the Break Be?
The United States would have to agree to break up. It would have to know that the time had come. But then there is the question of how it would break. Along which lines? Who would break from whom? The first question facing the negotiators won’t be “How should America be divided?” It will be “How is America divided?”

Simple political disagreement is not enough to make separation realistic. Regions don’t tend to secede over political differences. “The main factor that drives the desire for independence, that makes it possible, is having a separate or ethnic identity,” says Jason Sorens, a political scientist at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, and a leading scholar of secessionist movements. “We don’t have a state that has that identity.” Puerto Rico isn’t a state. Hawaii, the only non-white majority state, has an Indigenous population vastly outnumbered by Asian Americans.

That’s not to say that political differences never lead to secessionist movements, but they are usually at least underpinned by regional identities. The Northern League of Italy is motivated by political differences between the northern states and the central government, but those states had also survived as independent states for centuries before Italian unification. Even in America’s first civil war, the issue of slavery was, beyond question, the primary cause of the war, but secession was possible because the Southern partisans believed they were citizens of their states before they were citizens of their country. It is identity that matters, the sense of belonging to a nation. In Canada, Quebec shares, to a surprising degree, the same political vision as the rest of the country—on education, on health care, on the role of government—but Quebecois are a distinct people, defined by a language and a history. Therefore, they have a large and active separatist movement.

This is essential to understanding the possibility of American secession: mere political differences won’t be enough. It is a question of identity and of whether the divisions of American politics are becoming identity differences. The anger overwhelming American politics, the hyper-partisanship, does not tend to separatism in itself. “You would need to see a gradual unmixing of these populations, and the cultivation of some idea of nation or consciousness. There are maybe glimmerings of that,” Griffiths says. The dark glimmerings of the new separation are that, slowly but consistently, Americans are hiving themselves off into concentrated ethnic identities.

Difference as the Defining Feature of the United States
The beauty of the United States as a country is its mixtures. As a country, on all levels, it possesses an extraordinary ability to be many things at once. America is difference. Difference defines it. Differences of opinion. Differences of race. Differences of religion. Differences between the rich and the poor. America has always been overwhelmed with its multiplicity, a country that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense by standards other than its own; it has always been a huge mass of contradictions. And any countries that could emerge out of the United States would themselves be masses of contradiction.

In 1981, Washington Post editor Joel Garreau had a bestseller with The Nine Nations of North America, in which he divided the continent into categories that included Ecotopia on the West Coast, New England on the East, and Dixie to the South. An updated 2011 version of Garreau’s argument, American Nations by Colin Woodard, expanded the number to eleven. Regional identity is more complex than North and South. The South, for Woodard, contains six different nations. The East and the West Coasts contain multiple nations. And neither Garreau nor Woodard deal with Native Americans except as a lump. There are over five hundred federally registered tribes in the United States. And African Americans, as a distinct category, don’t figure in either description.

The country is divided, not only by every available economic and social metric, but also by personality. In 2013, a group of British and American psychologists carved the United States into three “psychological regions” by large-scale psychometric analyses. “Psychological factors are likely to be the driving forces behind the individual-level behaviors that eventually get expressed in terms of macrolevel social and economic indicators,” they hypothesized. They divided America into a “relaxed and creative region” on the West Coast “marked by low Extraversion and Agreeableness, very low Neuroticism, and very high Openness”; a “temperamental and uninhibited” region of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast “defined by low Extraversion, very low Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, very high Neuroticism, and moderately high Openness”; and the “friendly and conventional” region of the South and Middle, “defined by moderately high levels of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, moderately low Neuroticism, and very low Openness.” Their research shows the emotional depth of the divide in the United States. “The most common explanations for the American political divide point to religion, racial diversity, education or wealth,” they write. “The present findings suggest another explanation for the differences, stemming from the psychological characteristics of residents.”
The psychological characteristics play out in a variety of social and cultural differences, and those social and cultural differences can easily be defined geographically. Gun ownership is much more likely in the South and the Midwest than in the Northeast or the Pacific Coast. Proximity to abortion access is much more limited there. Corporal punishment in schools is still legal in much of the South and the Midwest. Church attendance is much higher. The percentages of marriages that are same-sex is much lower. And those important social differences—differences fundamentally in the way of life—correspond to which states voted Democratic and which states voted Republican in the 2016 election. And that political divide further corresponds to which states were free states and which states were slave states before the Civil War. These profound distinctions are geographical and they are entrenched. Blue America. Red America. They’re real.

The Political Consequences of Division

The reason that Republicans and Democrats feel occupied is that both are. Blue America and Red America represent two identities, two styles of life, the mostly white and rural against the mostly multicultural and urban. In the 2018 election, density was the single strongest determinant of who voted Democratic and who voted Republican, with eight hundred people per square mile being the cutoff. Below that number, 66 percent vote Republican. Above it, 66 percent vote Democratic. The year 2018 saw the urban-rural divide in the United States become total: there are no urban Republican congressional districts left. The last one to fall was Staten Island. The pockets of political differences within states—Austin in Texas or the rural parts of southern Illinois—have come to resemble ethnic enclaves.

Each of these Americas promises a Utopia. Red America promises a country where government defers to individual rights, where the traditional family is the bedrock of society, where ordinary people live by the power of faith. Blue America promises a country of open ideas in which people can live by whatever values they choose and where distinct communities work together toward a more rational future. It’s easy to flip these Utopias over. Red America is a bunch of macho hypocrite rednecks. Blue America is a bunch of latte-sipping wimps. Each side accuses the other of hating America, which is only another way of saying that both hate what the other means by America. The pleasure of contempt for the other side has launched media empires: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for the red, Jon Stewart and MSNBC for the blue. Loathing is the principal emotion that America’s political entertainment industry sells.

On both sides, the sense of being under occupation dominates. It doesn’t matter where you go or who you talk to. The Black teenagers in Baltimore and St. Louis feel under occupation by the police. The ranchers in Texas and Oregon feel under occupation by the federal government. Every political faction operates under a siege mentality—the Democrats from the Republican political machine; the Republicans from demographics, from immigration, from popular culture. Everyone wants to build a wall of one kind or another.

The geographical divide between the competing American Utopias means that, in every election, whoever loses comes to feel like they’ve been dominated by a foreign power. The response is always the same: Begin by delegitimizing the president—“Obama is a Kenyan” or “Trump is not my president”—then proceed by arguing for a shift in power away from the federal government. Red America has argued for states’ rights from well before the Civil War. Blue America is finally starting to come around. “If I live in a blue city, I have my way of life. If you live in a red state or a red city, you have your way of life,” the urbanist Richard Florida argued in a recent interview. “The way to lower the stakes is to make the Imperial presidency and the nation-state less important.” The way across the political divide, in other words, is to accept it. Federalism is tolerable only when my side is in power. The appetite for secession is always highest in presidential out-party states.
And if you imagine a miraculous political figure emerging from the American middle to fulfill the by now cliché political imperative to “unite, not divide,” the bad news is your dreams have already come true. There was a president who preached unity and hope. The other side insisted he was a Kenyan and brought a man who denied his citizenship to power. Significant portions of the United States believed that their government was controlled by a foreign power, as a significant number of Americans came to believe that Russian interference was the primary explanation for the election of Donald Trump. Biden in power has changed nothing. He is most effective insofar as he has abandoned bipartisanship rather than restored it.

The Big Sort Reconsidered
America is already countries within the same country. In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop coined the term the “big sort” to describe how Americans of different political beliefs are self-selecting away from each other. The choices people make aren’t necessarily political: few people move from, say, Los Angeles to rural Texas explicitly because they want to be around Republicans rather than Democrats. But as partisan politics comes to define Americans’ sense of themselves, the decisions they make about who they are and what kind of lives they want to lead inevitably place them in one tribe or another. They want to be in Texas rather than California, and that means the people they want to be around tend to be Republicans rather than Democrats. People who move to Texas go there for its spirit of freedom and individualism as well as its opportunities; they just happen to move into Republican territory.
Since 2004, the big sort has increased in intensity, both nationally and within states. And the trend is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. It’s bicoastal, with more Democrats moving to New England and to the mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions and more Republicans moving to the Midwest and the South. This is the key to the future of the United States as a political entity. The polarization is geographical. Americans with different politics are moving farther away from each other physically as well as ideologically. The separation feeds back into the political system. More states become single-party states, like California and Texas. Ideological unity replaces open debates. The geography of the national government, and the way it apportions power, become distorted. Huge geographical inequalities are baked into the system of government—which is, after all, nearly 250 years old. Sixty-two senators represent one quarter of the American population. Six senators represent another quarter. The same discrepancy, though to a much lesser extent, causes presidential victories without the popular vote, which further skews the power imbalance.

Within that big sort, there’s also been a small sort. American politicians have spent decades breaking their country up into ever more bizarrely contorted districts in order to engineer victories. The technological sophistication of gerrymandering, the quantity and quality of information available for carving up regions into noncompetitive strongholds, keeps advancing. The name of the game is “incumbent protection,” and it works. Whoever is in power, on either side, forges the structures to keep themselves in power. Everybody wants democracy but nobody wants democracy. Gerrymandering leads, quite naturally, to voter suppression, which is increasingly an overt tactic. Once you’ve started making your opponents’ votes matter less by fixing the district, why not make it harder for your opponents to vote in the first place by moving the polling places to less convenient locations? Once you’ve done that, why not simply suppress their vote by any means available?
Each small decision, undertaken for tactical reasons, erodes, slowly but surely, the political system as a whole. The American people don’t want to be around the other side and whenever possible choose not to be. Their leaders don’t want to engage in meaningful competition of political ideas and don’t need to. America is being shaken like a sieve, separating Democrat from Republican into political, social, intellectual, geographical fortresses. The sorting makes life easier for everybody. The only thing that suffers is American democracy.

The Status of Secessionist Movements in the United States
The men who are planning the destruction of the United States are cheerful men, open, frank, and ambitious. They are very American in their plots against America.

Daniel Miller, head of the Texas Nationalist Movement, lives in Nederland, a town of 17,000 on the Gulf Coast. The TNM is the latest iteration of a decades-old movement. Like the Scottish National Party or many other separatist movements, it began in lunatic fringes and fractured sects divided by method and ideology and then coalesced. The Republic of Texas movement in the 1970s, by Miller’s description, “splintered into a thousand pieces” after two years. In the 1990s, five Texas separatists were involved in a standoff with federal authorities. Some were shot. The others were sentenced to extensive prison sentences. “When we were founded in 2005, any of the polling data we could find put us in single digits. And it hovered that way for a long time,” Miller says. Fast-forward to 2014, around the time of the Scottish Independence referendum, when Reuters/Ipsos polled Texans and found that 36 percent believed that Texas should secede. And that was during a period of relative political unity in hindsight.

The California separatist movement is much newer and so less established. But in January 2017, Reuters revealed that 32 percent of Californians supported California becoming its own independent state, a number roughly in line with several other polls at the time. Another 13 percent weren’t sure. The leader of the Calexit movement, Marcus Ruiz Evans, lives in Fresno, a city of half a million in the San Joaquin Valley. The election of Trump spiked interest in the movement, but, for Evans at least, the desire to escape American politics dated to the Iraq War, widely supported in the United States as a whole but not by California. Diverging politics has led to profound contempt for the federal government, which Evans calls “a horrible abusive relationship that’s gone on for thirty years.”

Unlike separatist movements in the rest of the world, neither the Texas Nationalist Movement nor the Calexit movement have formed their own parties. They don’t need to. California and Texas are single-party states. Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. The Republicans have taken Texas in every presidential election since 1976. They have controlled the state legislature since 2003. In California, only 25 percent of registered voters are Republicans. San Francisco has not had a Republican mayor since 1964. Democrats in California hold every statewide office. Because of their unusual ballot system, where the top two candidates face each other in Senate races, Democrats run against Democrats. America may be Democratic and Republican, but Texas and California are not. Both states have, in a sense, already separated from half the country.

Because both states are single-party states, Calexit and Texit advocates press their cases through the dominant party, whose partisan identity is already built on the rejection of the other side. At the Texas GOP convention in 2016, the Texas secessionists came two votes shy of having the matter reach the convention floor for a full vote. The number of GOP county conventions that passed independence resolutions remains in dispute, but it’s somewhere between 10 and 22 out of 270, which is more than the single county that passed such a resolution in 2012.
“We have got support of rank-and-file Republican voters,” Miller explains. “The challenge that we have run into is that when it comes to leadership in Texas, particularly the Republican leadership, they all have their eyes set on a federal office, and the paycheck and benefits that comes with it.” Republican leaders in Texas play a dangerous game. They flirt with separatism but won’t go all the way. They know the majority of their base loves the rhetoric of Texas independence but they also know it’s Utopian. Miller blames careerism more than cynicism. “The leadership talks out of both sides of their mouth. They love to tease supporters of independence to get their votes. They one hundred percent every time fail to deliver.” Former governor Rick Perry often mused about the possibilities of secession, but it never amounted to anything.
Miller recalls meeting with Rick Perry’s legislative director, a former state senator, who promised that Perry would never run for federal office, and within two weeks he had announced his candidacy. “You’ll hear them read these applause lines. The current governor, Greg Abbott, is the absolute worst at this,” Miller says. “He loves, when he gives his stump speeches, to the throw the line out there, ‘If Texas were its own nation,’ then he rattles off some wonderful economic statistic about how we measure up against all the nations of the world. Invariably it’s his largest applause line. It gives people this mistaken impression that Abbott is really a fan, maybe secretly, of Texas independence. But Abbott is one of the guys who works overtime behind the scenes to torpedo a lot of things we have done.” The politicians like Abbott who indulge in separatist rhetoric know they won’t be tested, so they can play games. When Scots or Catalans or Quebecois say they want to split, they mean it. Abbott is indulging in dreams. The rhetoric is allowed to expand, to float free of consequence, at least for him, at least for the moment.

Californian politicians indulge in separatist rhetoric less often than Texans do, although it is sometimes blurted out. Jerry Brown, on a visit to China, spoke of his state like it was its own country. “It is a little bold to talk about California-China partnership as if we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” he said. “We’re a state of mind.” Even if he was joking, California under his leadership has resisted the federal government with far more than just talk. They have veered toward nullification. Sometimes they have more than veered. Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to California to speak against their policy of sanctuary cities because it was in violation of federal authority. “There is no secession,” the attorney general felt required to insist. “Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg, or to the tombstones of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln. This matter has been settled.” Well, has it? That’s the question. Maybe the matter was once settled. It is becoming unsettled again.

The Constitutionality of Secession
Secession is unconstitutional—that part is settled. You will not find a single serious constitutional scholar who believes that secession, under any condition, is legal. Both the Texas and California separatists have their arguments about why separation is constitutional, drawn from esoteric readings of Texas v. White, an 1869 decision about the legality of state bonds, but generally the consensus is bipartisan on the point. “I cannot imagine that such a question could ever reach the Supreme Court,” Antonin Scalia wrote in 2006. “To begin with, the answer is clear. If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.” The separatists respond with the obvious fact Scalia admits: technically, the constitutionality of secession has never been tested in the Supreme Court.

It is true that the court system has never had to deal with the constitutionality of secession, but that’s mainly because the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” You’re an American first. Then you’re a citizen of a state. The state cannot make laws that deny citizens their rights as Americans. If Texas were to secede, they could not deny any Texan their American citizenship. Their laws would be subject to American laws. Therefore, Texas cannot constitutionally secede.

The text of the law doesn’t really matter, though. Some questions are bigger than law. David A. Strauss, a leading scholar of the Constitution, wrote in 1998: “Before the Civil War, there was a lively and inconclusive debate over whether the Constitution permitted states to secede. There is no longer any such debate; the issue was settled by the Civil War. No one today would seriously advance the position that the Constitution permits secession, at least the kind that the Confederacy attempted. Where is the text that settled this question? The answer, of course, is that this question, like other important constitutional questions, is decided by something other than the text.” That’s what Scalia was saying, too. The text of the law was determined by historical events, not the other way around. There once was one hell of an argument about whether secession was legal. It happened in the 1860s. About 600,000 Americans died in that argument.

Only a few countries possess legal machinery for secession anyway. Canada has made arrangements for what the acceptable conditions would be for Quebec to separate. Britain has done the same in the case of Scotland. But in most countries in the world, secession is illegal, just as it is in the United States. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. The laws adapt to the reality of history.
Meanwhile, secessionism grows. “It’s not grandpa that places the Lone Star over the Stars and Stripes, but his grandchildren,” Miller reports. In Texas, the movement is growing fastest among Democrats and African Americans.

What the Negotiations Would Look Like
The negotiations would be like a divorce. The lawyers would pick over the bones. In offices on neutral territory, the heat of passionate loathing would worm its way into the coldness of bureaucratic reasoning.
We know a great deal about what such a divorce between regions would look like, because they’re happening all the time. “If you want to become a recognized independent state, that means you become a recognized member of the United Nations,” Griffiths says. “There’s a club of states. To get into the club, you would put in an application. If an application comes to them, they put it in a little group from the office of legal affairs.” If the working group thinks the application is too trivial, they reject it. If they think it’s serious enough, which they do by asking other states, then it goes to the Security Council. “The Security Council decides on whether or not to support the application. It has to win by a three-fifths vote without any vetoes. That’s key. If that works, it goes to the General Council, which generally rubber-stamps the Security Council’s decision.” So what that means is that the Security Council is the arbiter, but the Security Council almost always agrees when the application has proceeded that far. The Kurds have never applied for independence to the Security Council because they know they’ll lose. “A tremendous amount of weight is given to the home state from which you want to secede,” Griffiths says. It’s “the home state veto.” So the United States, if it wanted to, could easily hold up any state asking for sovereignty. It would have the Security Council seat, and it would have the home state veto.

“Let’s imagine that the Texas Nationalist Movement really made some headway,” Griffiths proposes. They call a referendum, and there’s a groundswell, and it looks like they have a majority of Texans on board. “The United States will work hard to defeat it on the grounds that it’s illegal.” But it wouldn’t matter. “Most countries in the world, at some level, to varying degrees of strength, declare that secession is illegal. That doesn’t mean those things become obstacles down the line.” Politics comes before the law when borders are in question. “Secession is more of a political conflict than a legal one.” If huge majorities declare they want Texas to separate, the legalities will become irrelevant. If it gets to 70 percent, “then the United States is going to have a real problem.”

The negotiators would be faced with a pair of dilemmas. The first would be from the point of view of the US government. “A big difference between Scotland and Quebec and Texas is the way that Texas is defined administratively,” Griffiths says. A Texas separation would be a precedent-setting problem. “If the government doesn’t show its commitment to stopping the Texas Independence movement, it gives pathways to other states to independence.” Scotland and Quebec are already distinct political entities. Not US states. “Jurisdictionally, they’re all the same,” Griffiths says. If one state leaves, where does it end?
There would be a dilemma on Texas’s side, too. They would have a moral right to secede, and they would sense massive pressure from their supporters to declare independence. But such romantic ideas of statehood, derived from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would have little purchase in the twenty-first century. It’s all very well to imagine a bunch of independence-minded Texans raising their rifles in the air and shouting, “Don’t mess with Texas!” and defying the world in the name of their freedom. That’s all well and good until nobody will land an airplane in a Texas airport. And a separate Texas wouldn’t have the power of the current United States in global negotiations. They would just be another midsize country with no history and no connections.
“There’s only one sovereignty game,” as Griffiths says. Everybody needs to get into the same club, and that club is the UN, which would require US approval. Some states separate without UN recognition. It does happen. Kosovo is not a recognized state. “To get plugged into the global economy, you need to be a UN member,” Griffiths points out. “You have states out there that are quasi-states: Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus; they sort of endure as states. But it’s difficult. They’re sort of handicapped. They can’t do international exchange with foreign banks. They can’t have an international post address. So they’re forced to use the black market. All of these things are denied them because they’re not a sovereign state.” If you want to go to Northern Cyprus, you have to fly to Turkey, because it’s the only country that recognizes Northern Cyprus. So the planes touch down for a minute in Istanbul and then reroute to Ercan.

Both sides would have a lot to lose and little to gain by separation. As in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international community’s first priority would be to denuclearize Texas or any new state formed out of American collapse. The second priority would be to prevent bloodshed. And, needless to say, Texas or any other remnants of the United States would no longer qualify as a superpower.
The fact that there is no established legal mechanism for separation in the United States—that there is in fact a massive counter-mechanism in the Constitution—is paradoxically what makes the idea of separation so dangerous. If the right to secession was determined by facts outside the text, then facts outside the text can determine it again. “If the Civil War did settle this issue, then no one would even be discussing it,” Miller says, which is his most convincing argument. If Texas or California declared themselves independent, would the federal government bring them back by force? Could they bring them back by force when 48 percent of American soldiers believe it’s a state’s right to leave? Secession may be unconstitutional, but it sure is American. What could be more American than the idea that “in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”? America is founded on the right to break up political unities.

That’s what makes America separatism so fascinating, so distinct. The separatists love America even in their hatred. Both Texas and California separatists are obsessed with proving that their desire to separate is constitutional. It’s genuinely weird. Everywhere else in the world, unconstitutionality is a moot point. Quebec separatists do not worry about whether their departure would violate the spirit or letter of the British North America Act. The Catalans have no interest in proving they are maintaining the foundational Spanish political order. But Texan and Californian separatists do. “We’re not withdrawing from America,” Miller says. “We’re withdrawing from an economic and political union called the United States of America. And the two are not the same.” They are living their original national contradiction to the full—patriotic treason and treasonous patriotism.

These are movements grounded in a sense of loss. Separatists in America love America, and their love has emerged in the most twisted possible form: They have devoted themselves to the basic proposition that America is no longer possible in the United States of America.

Do the Separatists Mean It?
These weird American separatists and their tortured adoration and contempt for their country are not new. The United States has always provoked a unique mixture of love and hatred among its most passionate patriots. “The Man Without a Country,” a short story by Edward Everett Hale, was a classic in its time, taught in high schools all over America; it produced that semi-religious devotion that high school literature sometimes elicits. During the bicentennial, there was even a gravestone set up in front of the Covington County Courthouse in Andalusia, Alabama, dedicated to the memory of Philip Nolan, the fictional character at the heart of the story.

The Atlantic published the story in December 1863, right in the teeth of the Civil War. “The Man Without a Country” was written at a time when America was unsure if it was a country and about another time when America was unsure if it was a country. Aaron Burr, vice president under Thomas Jefferson and the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was charged with treason in 1807. It was alleged that he planned to establish a separate country in the Southwest. Burr was eventually acquitted. But Philip Nolan, the fictional coconspirator with Burr in “The Man Without a Country,” was not. At his trial, in a fit of rage, he shouts out “D—n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” His punishment is the fulfillment of his wish: “Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the United States again.” They even take away his naval buttons, which bear the inscription “US.”
Not only are Nolan’s fellow sailors forbidden from mentioning their home country; they have to cut any reference to it out of his books. “Right in the midst of one of Napoleon’s battles, or one of Canning’s speeches, poor Nolan would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the President’s message.”

He craves facts about American politics above all. Sex is as nothing to his desire to know about his homeland. At one point in the story, because the other sailors need his stateroom, he’s invited to a ball on the ship. Nolan meets a woman he knew from home and tries to squeeze some information out of her:
“And what do you hear from home, Mrs. Graff?”
And that splendid creature looked through him. Jove! how she must have looked through him!
“Home!! Mr. Nolan!!! I thought you were the man who never wanted to hear of home again!”—and she walked directly up the deck to her husband, and left poor Nolan alone, as he always was.—He did not dance again.
Meanwhile, the country keeps changing and Nolan has no idea. He belongs to what he doesn’t understand. And he loves what he no longer belongs to. His ship, on its endless sea journey, encounters a slave ship. The captain of Nolan’s vessel thinks only of returning the slaves back to their homelands. Nolan finds their longing for home unbearably moving, and he gives a speech to one of the youngsters on board:
“… Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with, behind officers, and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to Her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by Her, boy, as you would stand by your mother, if those devils there had got hold of her to-day!”
“The Man Without a Country” is in one sense a very simple story, one that you could happily read to boys that you’re about to send off to war, a strange but palatable fable of patriotism. But there is also a paradox knotted in its center: Every patriot hates his or her country. When you love your country, that’s when it drives you crazy. You can only love your country when you imagine it rather than live in it. You can only love home from the boat.
At the end of “The Man Without a Country,” Philip Nolan is lying in bed; his room has become a shrine to the country he cursed.
The stars and stripes were triced up above and around a picture of Washington, and he had painted a majestic eagle, with lightnings blazing from his beak and his foot just clasping the whole globe, which his wings overshadowed. The dear old boy saw my glance, and said, with a sad smile, ‘Here, you see, I have a country!’ And then he pointed to the foot of his bed, where I had not seen before a great map of the United States, as he had drawn it from memory, and which he had there to look upon as he lay. Quaint, queer old names were on it, in large letters: ‘Indiana Territory,’ ‘Mississippi Territory,’ and ‘Louisiana Territory,’ as I suppose our fathers learned such things…

As Nolan lies dying, a friend named Danforth finally tells him all that has happened to America—of the states that have joined the Union, the triumphs of the young country. But he can’t bring himself to talk about the Civil War, which was underway during the story’s composition. Even in the end, even by a compassionate friend, Nolan has to be deceived about the nature of his country.

“The Man Without a Country” is a profound, dark little story about what it means to belong. Is a country a collection of vaguely like-minded individuals participating, by choice or by the accident of birth, in a collective project? Or is it closer to a family with arrangements, with stories and symbols and rituals, that keep it splitting into factions? For Philip Nolan, dying aboard his ship, the country he loved was a half-remembered dream. And that’s the point: the more distant the memory, the more vague the dream, the more possible it is to love your country.
Dan Miller and Marcus Ruiz Evans are motivated by love of countries that are half-imagined dreams, half-remembered fantasies. Countries without the embarrassment of existence are the easiest to love. For Evans, California is the only place in the United States where he belongs, where there is “an acceptance of a range of different diversities, culturally and ideologically. This is the place where you can come and be accepted.” Miller’s love of Texas is more forthright, though more ethereal. “It’s this intangible quality. It’s hard to put words on it. I love Texas because I’m a Texan. My first ancestor fought with Sam Houston at the battle of San Jacinto. There is this mindset, this allure. There is just something about the people, about the land, about the climate, about the history. There is something about all of it. At the end of the day, it’s just my home. It’s home.” It is no surprise that it is so easy to convince people of the value of secession. Our homes are easy to love. The government, which becomes visible most commonly in failure, is easy to hate.

And when your country is a dream, how can any reality be more than a disappointment?

Overcoming America

The Texas and California separatist movements are only the two largest. There are dozens of others. But separatist movements are marginal forces for disunion. The rising number of Americans who are disillusioned with their country is a more central threat: they don’t want America’s differences. They can no longer tolerate America’s contradictions.
Richard Spencer is the most prominent figure in the alt-right movement, and there has been a push, in the progressive press, against describing him in any other terms but monstrosity. There is certainly enough monstrosity in Richard Spencer. He has described his opponents as “fucking kikes” and “fucking octoroons.” “Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me,” he said in an audiotape taken clandestinely at the Charlottesville rally. But if you only acknowledge Spencer’s monstrosity, you will never understand the significance of his threat. He is not some prison house Nazi with “Born to Lose” tattooed on his neck. The man is charming. The charm is the threat.
He is educated and he has plans to build a national white identity and out of that identity a state. When you ask Spencer how he would envision his ethnonationalist state, he blithely mentions the Japanese constitution and Israel’s “Law of Return.” The new racism is not atavistic. It is not reactionary or stupid. Spencer believes, for instance, in reparations to African Americans: “White people have committed historical crimes against Africans, and those crimes have been detrimental to both peoples.” He just wants to pay reparations to people who live in another country, not his.

Spencer is a white nationalist, not an American nationalist—a key distinction. “I am profoundly ambivalent about the American project,” he tells me. The identity in his identity politics is not American. The United States, after all, is African in part. American culture, in almost all of its distinctive forms, is a mixture of European and African diasporas. Demographic change is the source of the turmoil. But demographic change is not something that is happening in America or happening to America. Demographic change is America, and Spencer knows it. “White people have assumed that they are America, and it’s dawning on them that they aren’t.” He has another, more ominous way of putting it: “I think we need to overcome America.”

Spencer’s whiteness is fragile; it senses itself under threat. That sense of white fragility is not new but it is quickly coalescing. To any sensible person, looking at America’s history on voting rights and real estate and incarceration, white supremacy looks like the prime motivation of the history of the country: an elaborate scheme to deny African Americans the status of free property-holding voters. But white supremacy is always experienced as supremacy about to be lost. It has possessed an imminent sense of erasure from its beginning. The original feature film The Birth of a Nation (1915) was an epic of white people under threat from a multicultural political elite. Obama quoted Faulkner in his great 2008 speech on race—“The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past”—but Faulkner was lamenting his own family’s losses, not the crimes of his people against African Americans. Whiteness is inherently nostalgic. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway encounters a vision as he crosses Blackwell’s Island into Manhattan, a vision of hypermodernity: “A limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.” That’s the future Carraway sees, crossing into the city. White Americans have always suspected that America is not essentially a white country and that their whiteness is incompatible with its future.

At one point as we chat, I ask Spencer how he feels at Trump rallies, whose spectators share none of his calm, reasoned articulateness. He must have more in common with any African American graduate student, I suggest. He attended the University of Chicago.
Even the idea that he would share more with a Black person than with a white person makes him squirm.

“They’re still my people,” he says about Trump’s crowds. “They’re still people that I have much, much more in common with than any African American.”

Underneath the impeccable manners, under the charm, lies a profound contempt for Blackness itself, which all the manners do nothing to alleviate.

“Most people do want to be around their own kind. It’s hard to explain because it’s so deeply ingrained. You care about your own family more than you care about other people’s.”

And so there it comes down to the real question: Who is the American family? The old, old question.

“The only thing that is different now is that these conversations are happening in public,” DeRay Mckesson tells me. Mckesson is the most prominent leader of Black Lives Matter, arrested in Baton Rouge for protesting, a major force behind Campaign Zero, a plan for the comprehensive police reform that would provide a real policy solution to the crisis between African Americans and the police.
“Trump isn’t the first person to say ‘build a wall,’ ” Mckesson says. “Trump made popular birtherism, but he wasn’t the first person to say it.”

The process that Black Lives Matter confronts runs deeper.
“The Civil Rights Act still emerged in a context of people pushing back. People got teargassed and water hosed. That was the status quo pushing back. And people still overcame.”

There was that word again: “overcoming.” Richard Spencer and DeRay Mckesson are not comparable human beings. One belongs to a movement based on the fundamental stupidity of racial pride and celebrates genocide. The other is looking for social justice and equality under the law. But, between them, you can see the cleaving, the unsettling, of the United States. They both want to overcome America in all its glorious, ludicrous contradiction.

The hyper-partisanship that is dominating American politics is, at least in part, the emergence of ethnic identity. The Republican Party has become a white rump party. The difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party over the past thirty years is that Republicanism became the party of white resentment of growing diversity, while the Democratic Party became the party of imposed multiculturalism. The racial resentment levels have nothing to do with age, so do not expect hope from that quarter. The reason young Americans poll as less racist is only because they are more diverse. In 2019, two researchers who study racial affect undertook a “cross-generational analysis of the nature and role of racial attitudes in the 21st century.” They found “younger Whites are not bringing about any meaningful change in the aggregate levels of racial resentment.” And as we saw in Dispatch Two, as diversity increases, it only increases the sense of white threat.
For 240 years, America was a white settler country that could pretend it contained transcendent post-ethnic values. That pretense survives, at the moment, in a kind of inertia. For how long? “We could imagine that changing over a couple of generations. We could imagine political divisions growing deep enough in the United States that some states rely on those political divisions to see themselves as a distinct nation,” Jason Sorens says. “There is something that could lead to the formation of a separate nation.”

Separate ethnic identities are emerging: America as a white settler republic, America as a multicultural democracy. You can have one or the other. Both cannot survive except as distinct countries.

The Iconoclasm

Remember: countries don’t tend to separate because of political division. Countries separate because of the emergence of national consciousness with territorial divisions, “concentrated ethno-nationalist groups,” according to Ryan Griffiths. Have the divisions within the United States grown to the point at which they constitute divided identities? The mechanism of identity is symbolism. And the symbols that once unified the States are crumbling everywhere. America is in the middle of a grand iconoclasm. In other countries and at other times, the breaking up of images has frequently been a prelude to civil war.

An Example of American Iconoclasm: Silent Sam
On August 20, 2018, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the youth of America hacked the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam from his foundation, tossed him over in a gleeful moan of collective ecstasy, stomped him from his safety and permanence and solidity. A few in the crowd began, as if in some ancient ritual they were just inventing, to cover his face with crumbly mud they had scraped with their bare hands from the soggy earth.

“It was honestly the best moment I’ve ever had,” Maya Little says, remembering the downfall. She’s a graduate student in history, an organizer, the woman who threw her own blood mixed with red paint on the statue at an event a few months before Silent Sam fell. “It made a great creaking sound, and everyone got quiet. A second later, everyone started hugging and cheering. Then it started raining. It was just a really beautiful moment.” Jake Sullivan, a UNC alumnus, witnessed the fall, too. “I was just deeply sad,” he remembers. “Sure we get angry before or after, but when I see the face of that brave young man buried in the mud and dirt he figuratively fought and died for and privileged white kids awkwardly kick and spit on him, there’s nothing else for someone like me to be but deeply, deeply sad. How did we get here? How is this okay? Who are these people?” Maya Little is African American and Jake Sullivan is the North Carolina division chief for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The United States is a country of Maya Littles and Jake Sullivans. They possess different meanings. They have different histories, belong to different peoples. They already belong, in a sense, to different countries, except that they happen to live in the same country. All they share is a spirit of fury.

Even ten years ago, the UNC administration would have known just what to do after the desecration of a statue: repair the damage and move on. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, a hammer and sickle in bright red, yellow, and green paint covered the statue; the next morning it was scrubbed clean. Even in 2015, the administration removed a “Black Lives Matter” tag when it was sprayed there during a protest. But cleaning is different from restoring. It’s one thing to want a Confederate monument on your campus to be clean. It’s quite another to raise one back up.

Maya Little remembers her first glimpse of Silent Sam as she crossed the UNC campus in the summer of 2016. “You see it immediately when you go to McCorkle Place, which is the forefront of campus. It’s this beautiful quad with all these beautiful buildings that frame it. All these buildings were built by slaves.” Sam’s original location is very much an element of his symbolic power. “He stands at the front of campus, facing north, and not just the North that the South fought against but also against the north part of Chapel Hill, which is a historically Black part of town,” Little explains. “So, imagine anyone from that neighborhood walking towards UNC: What is the first thing they see when they walk onto campus? It’s an armed Confederate soldier.” To put Silent Sam back where he was would be to put his meanings back in their original place.
That’s just what Jake Sullivan wants. He is fighting for restoration in many senses. In November of 2018, he began organizing a protest flyover, and within days the state membership of the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised the money. Originally, they planned to fly on November 3, the date of the UNC homecoming game, but a malfunction in the twin-engine plane prevented takeoff. Their next opportunity was Veterans Day, which suited their purposes fine. “Confederate veterans are American veterans in every sense of the word,” Sullivan says. This time the weather was clear and calm, and the plane worked. A banner with the Confederate flag and the message RESTORE SILENT SAM NOW flew over Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh.

The law is entirely on the side of Sullivan and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. So are most North Carolinians, 53.7 percent of whom support the restoration, a number that rises to 66.8 percent of white voters. In 2015, in direct response to protests over Silent Sam, the North Carolina Senate unanimously passed a ban on the removal of Confederate monuments. “An object of remembrance may not be relocated to a museum, cemetery, or mausoleum unless it was originally placed at such a location.” There is a solution to the problem of Silent Sam. It’s not that hard to figure out. Other jurisdictions have moved Confederate monuments to museums or cemeteries, positions of respect that are not offensively prominent. That way, the Sons of Confederate Veterans can honor their ancestors, and African Americans don’t have to confront monuments to white supremacy as they walk the streets. North Carolina’s state legislature has made that obvious and easy solution impossible. “An object of remembrance located on public property may not be permanently removed and may only be relocated,” the law decreed.

The administrators are trapped. If they put Silent Sam back, they’re asking for riots. And you can debate what “jurisdiction” means, and you can debate what “similar prominence” means, and you can debate whether the state law is in violation of Title VI and Title IX, but “may not be relocated to a museum” is surely clear enough. They cannot ship the thing elsewhere. The activists on both sides, highly organized and entirely capable of violence, would refuse compromise anyway. “If UNC officials have already said countless times that the memorial is at the ‘gateway’ of the University, how can there be any other place of similar prominence on campus?” Sullivan points out, and he’s not wrong. Maya Little has a simpler proposal for what to do with the statue: “They should leave the monument in the ground, in the dirt where it fell, and put a plaque up commemorating the people who have fought against it.” That will be tough on the alumni tour.

As the old myths fall, the myths of the first Civil War are falling first. The war’s memory weighs so much more heavily in the South than the North because the devastation was so much more extreme there. South Carolina lost 60 percent of its landed value, and 20,000 of its 60,000 white men of military age over the course of the war. All that suffering, all that death, must have had some noble purpose, right? The South’s myth of the “lost cause” relied on “states’ rights” for justification. The North, for its part, developed the myth that they had fought the war to end slavery. Both are only dubiously reflected in the historical record. On Lincoln’s memorial, a quote from his second inaugural loads the mass death of the war he prosecuted with the significance of a redemptive divine retribution for the crime of slavery: “He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” But even after the war’s outbreak, Lincoln was clear enough about his motivations. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he wrote in a letter. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.” The value of Black lives was always incidental.

Christy Coleman, the former CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, is wrestling with America’s competing mythologies at the exact moment when the old symbols and the old stories have stopped working. She began her career in museum work by attending Civil War reenactments and playing a slave—a gutsy business, inserting the story of human property into historical memory that wanted to forget that part of the story. She knows why the lost cause remains such a powerful force in Southern life. “When you’re talking about that level of trauma, particularly to the white South, there is this need to reconcile their grief,” she says. “And the way they did that was to take slavery out of the picture.” The essence of the lost-cause ideology is a forgetting within remembering, an amnesia necessary to have a morally coherent history.

Northern triumph required its own form of forgetting within memory. “When the North and the South do reconcile, one thing they reconcile over pretty easily is white supremacy. That’s the first thing,” Coleman says. Union and Confederate soldiers gathered together to cement their brotherhood in arms in ceremonies that raised the monuments to the Confederate dead—monuments like Silent Sam. Southern fiction imagined an antebellum South of “happy darkies” retelling romances between Union soldiers and Southern belles—wildly popular in the North as well as the South. Black veterans—there were more than 200,000—were disinvited to the celebrations. You might say that the North won the war and the South won the peace. But that’s not entirely accurate. The North won progress. The South won heritage. The North won the future. The South won the past. And it is not clear at all which is more powerful. The reconciliation is “how we chose to lie to each other for a hundred and fifty years,” as Coleman puts it.

The irony of figures like Silent Sam is that, far from representing the overcoming of America’s internal hostilities, they represent their resumption by other means. Union brigadier general James S. Brisbin was sent to pacify the white South during Reconstruction. “These people are not loyal; they are only conquered,” he wrote back. “I tell you there is not as much loyalty in the South today as there was the day Lee surrendered to Grant. The moment they lost their cause in the field they set about to gain by politics what they had failed to obtain by force of arms.” In the disputes over the election of Rutherford Hayes in 1876, the election with the highest turnout in American history (over 80 percent), both sides claimed victories in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. An informal deal was struck to give Hayes the presidency in exchange for pulling federal troops from the South, essentially ceding the whole region to white supremacy. The Redeemers came back to power and immediately disenfranchised Black voters. They called it the Compromise of 1877. Compromise was the cost of the union.
Silent Sam itself was another such compromise. At 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of June 2, 1913, Julian Carr, an industrialist and supporter of the Ku Klux Klan who received an honorary degree from UNC, inaugurated the statue with a speech in which he bragged about his courage in flogging an African American woman: “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of a hundred Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.” The record does not relate whether the audience chuckled at this anecdote, but after the Carr speech, they marched to the monument itself for the unveiling, and sang “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground,” an old, mournful tune of soldiers who just want to be home. Even at the inauguration of the statue, it told a double story: the story of white supremacy and the story of the sufferings of ordinary men.

The great-great-grandson of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, has devoted a fair portion of his life to trying to fathom the crossroads where those stories meet. “If we forget the evil that has created our history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” Bertram Hayes-Davis says. “Those folks that want to tear that monument down have no earthly idea what it stands for or who those people are. On the other hand, the guys who are standing there saying this is where it absolutely needs to be no matter what are on the other side of the ballpark.” You can only remember so much when it comes to the Civil War. You have to choose the memory of slaves or beloved sons. You have to forget someone.
Both Christy Coleman and Bertram Hayes-Davis know what should be done with Silent Sam. He should be moved to a museum or to a Confederate Cemetery, a place of contemplation where the work of history, uncovering the mystery of why people did what they did so that we may understand why people do what they do, may be undertaken. The legislature has rendered the obvious solution impossible. But also, to put these monuments aside would be to fail to reckon with the reality on the ground: For Maya Little and Jake Sullivan, Silent Sam is not some abstruse historical question. The rise and fall of the statue in their midst is lived experience to them. They want to relive history. They don’t want the compromises of the past. Why would they cherish the disinterested contemplation of history? How much nuance can you tolerate when they try to take away your humanity? How much discussion can you have when they want to degrade your ancestors? How can you be reasonable when they want to take away your future? How can you be civil when they want to strip away your past?

On December 3, 2018, Chancellor Carol Folt and the UNC board of trustees continued the grand American tradition of impossible compromise when they recommended the construction of a new building on campus to house Silent Sam. The construction was going to cost $5.3 million plus an additional $800,000 in annual operating costs. It was an ingenious answer in a way. If they couldn’t put Silent Sam in a museum off campus, they would bring a museum to campus.

The solution satisfied nobody. “Why would our ancestors want their contributions and sacrifices moved from the public square to a place where we will be the only ones to appreciate them?” Jake Sullivan wonders. “Certainly, where the proposal suggests it should go is far out of the way and down by the hospital, where it would see very little related foot traffic. It’s essentially just a basement for the university to store what it now considers its trash.” For Maya Little, the new building is a direct threat to the student body, since there can be little doubt that there will be violent protests by both sides wherever it is. “Where are they going to build this mausoleum, this shrine for Silent Sam?” she asks. “That’s five minutes away from a synagogue. And it’s in South Campus, where most Black students continue to live, because UNC still is a very segregated campus.” For Sullivan the new building for Silent Sam is a garbage disposal and for Maya Little it’s a shrine.

On December 14, the board of governors rejected the proposal anyway. At the time of writing, the question of Silent Sam remains up in the air. The truth is that no compromise was ever possible because of all the compromises America has already made, the compromises by which America built itself, by which it has lived. The forces ripping Americans apart have seams already prepared for the tear. “We’re fighting for our lives,” Little says. “We’re fighting for our dignity. We’re going to keep fighting no matter what.” Monumental symbols are supposed to bind the past to the future. Silent Sam serves that role faithfully. He watches over the cracks that are opening just as he was supposed to watch over the covering up of the old cracks. The tensions of the American origin remain. It is a double country. Black woman. White man.
Silent Sam was a vicious, fraudulent lie that kept America together. When the lies you tell yourself no longer make sense, how do you live?

The Ongoing Constitutional Crisis
Like any psychotic break, America’s current political insanity goes back to its beginnings. The three-fifths clause, debated at the Philadelphia Convention, was right at the heart of the Constitution, right at the heart of the new country. It was the first compromise that should not have been made in a country defined by compromises that should not have been made.

The struggle was over Northern against Southern representation but it was also over the nature of taxation and representation and also over what constituted a human being. Slave states received three-fifths of a vote for every slave in their possession, which increased their taxes but also their power. In the debates on July 12, 1787, founding father Edmund Randolph “lamented that such a species of property exists, but as it did exist the holders of it would require this security.” That national lament, a squirming acceptance of recognized evil, began shaping the course of American history right away. Without the three-fifths clause, Jefferson would not have beaten Adams in the election of 1800. Without the three-fifths clause, Virginia would not have controlled the presidency for thirty-two of America’s first thirty-six years. The Electoral College, then as now, gave precedence to Southern and reactionary elements that shaped the country.

Slavery and racism are not uniquely American. The British Empire helped to create the transatlantic slave trade, and powerful interests relied on slavery for their wealth and privilege. But the British Empire was not ripped apart by abolition. Brazil was a slave-based economy, importing nearly half of all slaves during the nineteenth century, and it abolished the practice only in 1888. Slavery has left a terrible legacy of cruel degradation in Brazil, but the end of slavery did not require the near destruction of the country. The unique American contradiction is slavery embedded among people celebrating freedom—both impossible and actual. The crisis comes as a question—a question that America refuses to answer: Do Black people count? Because America refuses to answer the question, the question refuses to go away. It is the American question. It is the question that American history has been trying to work out. Do Black people count? The answer America has always given is “sort of.” Three-fifths.

The founders, and those who followed them, hoped the whole ugly business of slavery would just go away. Thomas Jefferson embodied his national contradiction to such an extent he amounts practically to an allegory. He was a double man. He hated slavery and lived by it. During the period when he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he described the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people…” He believed that slavery destroyed master as well as slave. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. Nonetheless, Jefferson was, as a matter of course, deeply racist, a slaveholder, believing African Americans to be foul-smelling and subject only to “transient” grief. Jefferson preached ideals and impregnated his slaves. His hypocrisy was American to the core. He ate the fruits of slavery but knew the tree was rotten. He wanted life to go on as before and knew that it couldn’t. Jefferson believed that the young men who had “sucked in the principles of liberty as if it were their mother’s milk” would end slavery in a generation or so.

Inconsistency, not racism, is the American bugbear. For the sake of the Union, in order to remain whole, it compromised on a reality not subject to compromise. The same insoluble mess that faced the framers of the Constitution faces the UNC board of governors. Maya Little’s blood and paint, “Black Lives Matter” on one side, and on the other the pride of Jake Sullivan in his ancestors, the tenderness of an established way of life.

At this point in history, 240 years after its composition, much of the US Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government. I’ve seen Trump supporters at rallies with whole chunks written out on the backs of their shirts. During the 2016 election, Gold Star father Khizr Khan waved around a pocket Constitution at a Clinton rally like a talisman to deflect Trump’s insults; the New York Times reprinted the whole thing, with commentary, like the Talmud. It’s absurd. The practice of constitutional law in the United States gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history. The geniuses who wrote it, and who signed it less than 100 miles from unclaimed wilderness, never imagined for a moment that their plans for a new republic would survive for 250 years. They were much too sensible. The founders never desired their permanence. It is only their great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren who conjure the founders into gods among men. Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions. Jefferson himself believed it was the “solemn opportunity” of every generation to update the constitution “every nineteen or twenty years.” Before Trump and anything he may or may not have done, there was already a constitutional crisis. There is no way to govern rationally when your foundational document is effectively dead and you worship it anyway.
The legitimacy crisis that has infected the American political system can’t be resolved with an election. It’s not a question of political choices, this president or that president, this party or that party. People are losing faith in the basis of the government of the country. They’ve already lost faith in their political class. They’ve nearly lost faith that government can be an instrument of policy. They’re starting to lose faith in their history. Faith may sound like a vague and arbitrary foundation. But ultimately faith in its own reality is the substance of any nation.

The United States, if it is to survive, requires a new Constitutional Convention. The loathing overtaking the country makes that possibility more remote every day.

Have the Conditions for Secession Been Met?

In America, more than in any other country in the world, treason is just a matter of dates. “In the long run, all countries are dead,” Ryan Griffiths says. “The same will happen to the United States.” The History of the Fall of the American Republic, author still unborn, will no doubt recognize who and what to blame: the nihilistic hyper-partisanship of Newt Gingrich; Bill Clinton allowing China into the WTO on the mistaken assumption that capitalism and democracy were inevitably linked and that the American middle class would rise on the world’s swelling tides; Bush v. Gore; the suspension of civil liberties in the aftermath of September 11; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the explicit rejection of the “reality-based community”; the Tea Party; Citizens United; Obama’s failure to unify on immigration and health care; Mitch McConnell’s decision not to consider the appointment of Merrick Garland; the presidency of Donald Trump. And there are thousands upon thousands of politicians who put private and party interests ahead of the interests of the institutions, who developed contempt for government in and of itself and rode contempt to power. Apportioning blame makes for a satisfying game. It’s a kind of retrospective partisan politics. Blame misses the point. Blame hides the underlying structural weaknesses.
The conditions necessary for separatism to become real are (1) that there’s a will to disunion and (2) that the political differences inside the country amount to distinct identities with geographical boundaries. The will to disunion is not yet a majority position, but it’s growing, and it’s growing consistently across the country. Partisan identity is now a deeper division than race or religion: See Dispatch Two. The distinct geographical boundaries are not set, but they’re simple enough to imagine, given the maps of America’s political and cultural divisions.

These regions already possess distinct identities, distinct politics, distinct ways of life, and increasingly distinct realities. Obviously, this is nothing more than a rough projection. Border states like Virginia, Georgia, Nevada, and Oklahoma would have to decide by plebiscite where they belong.
But the final requirement for secession would be the most difficult to achieve: goodwill among the negotiating parties. The structure of the United Nations means that the US government would have to let the states that wanted to separate go. The stewards of the United States would have to recognize that their great experiment had ended.

What Would a New North America Look Like?

Disunion would be the death of one country but it would be the birth of four others. These countries would all be sizable and powerful.
The main difference between the American separatist movements and those in the rest of the world is that the countries that emerge from the separation could join the world quite comfortably as independent nations. If Texas were a country, it would have a GDP of $1.59 trillion, tenth in the world, slightly below Brazil and slightly ahead of Canada. It would certainly look like a country, forty-seventh in population, fortieth in size. California is even larger. With a GDP of $2.88 trillion, it recently passed the UK to become the fifth-largest economy in the world. It would rank thirty-sixth in population, with the world’s largest technology and entertainment sectors. It would have the largest national median income in the world. Unlike many other regions searching for independence, California and Texas could work as independent countries. Scotland, if it ever left the United Kingdom, would need to belong to NATO and the European Union to ensure its security and its economic viability. The Scottish National Party, in effect, wants to transfer itself to a different superstate from the one it was forced to join in 1707. Quebec separatists believe national sovereignty is required to preserve their survival as a people, but whether or not they belong to Canada, they will still be a tiny French minority in an Anglo continent, with trade and all other matters of importance happening in English. Texas and California share none of those vulnerabilities. California and Texas are the new economy. Both states are donor states: they give more in federal taxes than they receive. Military infrastructure wouldn’t be a problem, either. California hosts the most active-duty personnel, followed closely by Texas.

The North would not be a superpower anymore but it would continue to be a major power. The economy of the states between Pennsylvania and Maine is the size of Japan’s. The South would find itself much poorer and unhealthier and less developed than its neighbors. The federal government currently subsidizes the Southern states considerably. South Carolina alone receives $7.87 back for every dollar in taxes it pays. Life expectancy in the South is considerably shorter than in the rest of the country. Infant mortality rates are much higher. But Florida and Alabama have a combined economy as large as Mexico’s, and the twelve Midwestern states produce more than Germany. The citizens of a new Confederacy would find themselves in a much Blacker country than the United States: 55 percent of the African American population lives in the South.
What could these countries become? It’s a fascinating proposition. Currently, both sides are hobbled by their affiliation. Outside of the United States, a new Confederacy would be liberated to fulfill its political destiny. It would have to define itself on its own terms, rather than against federal authority. It could re-create itself as a Christian nation, banning abortion and gay marriage outright. It could permit no restrictions on any weaponry. It could end any progressive taxation. It could make government small enough to drown in a bathtub, as the saying goes. The North, for its part, would no longer be hobbled by a political system weighted heavily to rump parties who increasingly don’t want government in any form. It could enact meaningful policies on health care, police reform, gun control, and the environment. The Union, as it stands, is preventing both sides from becoming the people they want to be.

And wasn’t that always the point of the United States of America? Wasn’t it set up to allow people to become who they want to be?
The Loss and the Gain of Separation
Disunion could be liberation. Even without the possibility of a violent civil war, the current state of permanent conflict in the United States makes basic policy more difficult to enact and life harder for its citizens. These four new countries would not be anywhere near as powerful as the current iteration of the United States of America, but they would probably be saner, more normal. It’s also worth acknowledging that a grand thing would be lost if the United States disunited.
The American experiment was, at its core, a statement of radical faith in the power of openness to difference. It offers a fantastic piece of dialectic, the permission for contradiction. And the founders went all the way, without exception almost: in religion, in speech, in the structure of power, there would be disagreements. They believed that those disagreements would ultimately lead to deeper truths; that was their faith. “This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public” was the view of the Federalist Papers. Argument, not conclusion, was the hope of the future. Everyone was entitled to their opinion, and those opinions would not be fixed. It is the essence of equality: to be a human among other humans, entitled to an opinion. Jews and Hindus and Christians and Muslims would coexist. Nobody could have a monopoly on truth. The simple grandeur of this basic proposition is its faith in human nature, expressed politically. It has never been rivaled.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Everything distinctly American has been a fusion of what should be opposites: North and South, white and Black. Self-determination is a moral state and not simply an economic one. How else would so many new religions, new art forms, be born out of a single country? America is its freedom and its openness, its vast production of stories, seemingly without limit, its generation of new technologies, new religions, constant new ideas, its willingness to embrace the new.

Even if breaking up is the sensible option, even if it’s better for ordinary Americans, let’s be clear about the stakes here. If the American experiment fails, and it is failing, the world will be poorer, more brutal, lesser. The world needs America. It needs the idea of America, the American faith, even if that idea was only ever a half-truth. The rest of the world needs to imagine a place where you can become yourself, where you can shed your past, where contradictions that lead to genocide elsewhere flourish into prosperity. Now that America is ceding its place of authority, the source of its power is becoming clear. The American empire was built on the story it told itself. It was an empire built, in perhaps its ultimate contradiction, on the belief in self-determination. And now that its story is crumbling under the weight of its contradictions, the world will miss it.

At the heart of tragedy is the tragic flaw: What makes the hero great destroys him. America’s tragic flaw is its openness. Perhaps it was a failure right from the start: slave owners preaching freedom and equality. But it would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction. That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.

Conclusion:

A Note on American Hope

I don’t consider the dispatches in this book to be worst-case scenarios. Neither are they best-case scenarios. I have tried, with the best available evidence, to describe, as simply as I can, what is happening. So I hope I will be taken seriously when I say that, even in the current period of darkness, the American hope is real. The power of hope in America should not be discounted by anyone who wants a sensible analysis of its current predicament.
The American experiment has always been an experiment in hope. Hope shines from its face. Hope lives in its guts. The pilgrims on Plymouth Rock were bewildered by hope, a hope not just for prosperity and freedom but for a type of divine reflection on earth, “a shining city on a hill.” America has filled itself with new hope all along the way: the eyes turned to the Statue of Liberty, the mothers clutching their babies in the Arizona desert. The world pumps a steady supply of dreamers into the United States even when the United States despises and abuses them. It is the Golden Door.

America’s place in the world has always been distinguished by its hope. When its foreign policy descended into cynicism and brutality, it worked like other empires and other nations. But a cynical history of the United States would be an incomplete history. For huge swaths of the world, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, America was synonymous with hope. The radical generosity of the Marshall Plan in Europe was unprecedented: for any other people, at any other time, the idea that you would rebuild the economy of an enemy who had attempted to annihilate you would be taken as outright insanity. The Americans tried hope. The hope worked. It’s also true that hope has sometimes misled America. After the disaster of the Iraq war, John Bolton upped his naivete with sickening arrogance: “What we should have done is said to the Iraqis: ‘You’re on your own. Here’s a copy of the Federalist Papers. Good luck.’ ” Obama has been selling hope his whole career; his hope always manages to sell even when it’s rotted on the shelf.

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, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. 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. It won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary nation. If history has shown us anything, it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations.

The hope for the survival of the United States resides in what I can only describe as its spirit. I understand that American spirit is a rarefied and indistinct phenomenon for such a hardheaded book. It is real even if vague. I have always believed that the most beautiful quality of American life is the way Americans talk to each other. You notice it the moment you arrive from a foreign country. The agents behind the airline counters gossip more freely. The cabbie and his fare argue directions more openly. They don’t whisper, the way people do in Cuba. They don’t talk placidly and exchange endless nothings like Canadians, either. The frankness of American speech is felt more often than recognized, as much a part of the background as the smell of stale tobacco or running engines in the airport. Americans themselves don’t notice the way that they talk because they have this habit of assuming everyone is like they are. It’s why so many foreigners, myself included, feel jumbled, both liberated and lost in space, on arrival. Frankness is obvious in the most everyday interactions, but it is political, too, the essence of being a citizen rather than a subject.

The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit, and I don’t mean that as some kind of inspirational quote. I mean that, if it is to survive, the United States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit. The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over. The founders understood that government is supposed to work for living people rather than for a bunch of old ghosts. And now their ghostly Constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirit that animated their enterprise, the idea that you mold politics to suit people, not the other way around. Does the country have the humility to acknowledge that its old orders no longer work? Does it have the courage to begin again? As it managed so spectacularly at the birth of its nationhood, the United States requires the boldness to invent a new politics for a new era. It is entirely possible that it might do so. America is, after all, a country devoted to reinvention.

The situation is clear: the system is broken, all along the line. Once again, as before, the hope for America is Americans.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9lg1EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Q&A: Does Stephen Marche Know How America Will End?

Q&A: Does Stephen Marche Know How America Will End?
His novel about a new Civil War explores three scary scenarios.
Written by Andrew Beaujon
| Published on December 30, 2021
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Photograph courtesy of Stephen Marche.

Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future is a work of “speculative nonfiction” that imagines what the breakup of the United States might look like. It isn’t pretty—and it’s not all that far-fetched, either, given that Marche did 200 interviews with experts in the military, agriculture, science, and other fields to craft the three grimly plausible scenarios he games out.

Marche, a critic and novelist who lives in Canada, has previously written books tackling subjects such as Shakespeare’s influence on modern culture. But like many people north of the border, he’s a close observer of American politics, and he finds our current situation somewhat horrifying. “As lousy and vicious and stupid as American politics might look on the surface,” he writes, “underneath the reality is even worse.” In his view, polarization currently runs so deep in the US that “now there is no nation as a whole.”

He talked to us from his home in Toronto, where he spends his days safely insulated from the terrifying potential futures he’s been imagining.
What swung you to the view that the US may be a doomed project?

I covered the Trump inauguration for a Canadian magazine, and, you know, that had a very fall-of-Rome feel. It was violent. The information systems were all breaking down.
And yet that day seems quaint in retrospect. Nobody attacked the Capitol!

Well, it just keeps getting worse, right? You would never think, “Oh, there are going to be tanks on the streets of Washington on the Fourth of July.” But then that happens. The book really became an attempt to understand why the unimaginable keeps happening.
That idea slots in neatly with your contention that there’s little holding us together as a nation.

The breaks keep happening, right? The crackup is not really an event—it’s a series of events, which is exactly how the first Civil War happened. There was violence on the floor of the Senate. There was the legal breakdown, where judges in the South just simply stopped recognizing the North. Right up until [the first battle of the Civil War at] Fort Sumter, people didn’t want to believe it was happening. But certain kinds of trends, when they get started, become incredibly difficult to stop.
In countries like the UK or Spain, the thing that’s put the brakes on separatist movements has been the reluctance of other established nations to recognize new countries, because they don’t want it to happen at home.

Secession at this point is kind of a best-case scenario for the United States—when marriages reach the point that America has reached now, the time has come to sit the kids down.

The United States has very specifically created a legal framework where secession is basically impossible because of the 14th Amendment. [And in order to] have a postal system or financial exchange on international markets, you also have to get a secessionist movement through the UN. To do that is very complicated and requires the home state to approve the separation.
You don’t always have to go the legal route. West Virginia was arguably admitted to the Union in an illegal fashion, and now we’re all just cool with it.

Right. One way of thinking about the failure of Reconstruction is that the North basically gave up and gave the South home rule for quite a long time. There were a whole set of different laws for people in the South than there were for people in the North. Something like that, some really quite elaborate de-federalization, could be one solution. But again, it’s very hard to see how that would happen when the national politics is just so toxic, right? When you have sitting governors calling for violence against people and you have militias attempting to kidnap other sitting governors and school-board members fearing for their lives, it’s hard to know how to get to the exit door.
If I understand the critique you make in the book correctly, our hollowed-out institutions wouldn’t be able to withstand natural disasters, much less manmade ones.

Well, I think America has actually effectively entered a post-policy period. I mean, the Build Back Better bill was considered this huge achievement. In most mature democracies, that’s a Wednesday. That’s called a budget. A really good case in point is that no one is under the impression that legislators will ever come to a political decision about abortion. It’s totally beyond them. So it’s been left to the courts for 15 years to decide it. That’s really not normal.

There’s also the other thing, I think, which is really important to acknowledge: America is about to undergo an incipient legitimacy crisis no matter what happens. A Republican President will be elected while losing the majority of votes by many millions—if it’s not 2024, it’ll be 2028 or 2032. And the Senate now is really not representative of the will of the American people. By 2040, 68 percent of the Senate will be controlled by 30 percent of the population. You already have this problem where five of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were selected by Presidents who did not win the popular vote. And it’s very unclear on just a basic level whether they represent in a legitimate way the will of the American people.

I think the real question is when the left decides that it’s had enough. I think that moment is also coming.
And the left in the US is considerably more conservative than the left else-where. Despite holding the presidency, the House, and the Senate, they’ve failed to enact a bunch of policies that would be very popular.

Yeah. The Constitution was a document of great genius. It was the greatest political document of the century. But Jefferson said you need to rewrite a constitution every 19 years. The amazing thing is that every single person I talked to [for] this entire book—Texas separatists, California separatists, far-right Oathkeepers, neo-Nazis, Black Lives Matter activists—they all worship the Constitution. They all explicitly called to the Constitution as the justification for their politics. And, you know, when you worship a dead document, you can’t have a living government.
This seems like an opportune time to ask you why you chose “speculative nonfiction” as the way to write this book.

I used speculative nonfiction to be like, okay, you need to see where this is going, because otherwise it’ll just slowly overtake you. I didn’t have to imagine much. I just pushed things slightly forward.

Things that were unimaginable ten years ago are now perfectly normal. Things that were considered impossible five years ago? Perfectly normal. New York is incredibly vulnerable to hurricanes, but the lack of seriousness with which this is treated is shocking to me.
Which of the scenarios in the book would be most likely to mark the beginning of the end of our country?

I think they’re all likely. As we speak, there are far-right militiamen in prison in your city who sing the national anthem and consider themselves political prisoners. The thing that I don’t worry about much is a Trump presidency in 2024. I think he’s really a symptom more than a cause of this crisis. I definitely worry about the effect of the far right. When you lose the sense of legitimacy of the court system, things go very badly from there.
You’re worried about incremental decay rather than spectacular events like January 6.

It’s like what Hemingway said [about] how do you go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. It’s structural decay and legal decay and political decay. My hope would be that before the violence gets too out of hand, there’s actually some kind of negotiation toward either separation or a new constitutional convention.
One thing that seems worth noting is that you are not yourself American. How do you think a broken-up United States might affect Canada?

Oh, it’d be a disaster for us. I’m not [like] a European who somehow feels superior to Americans. I love the United States.
Do you see any echoes of our divisions in Canada?

No. I mean, we get some of the same stuff. My country has nearly broken up twice in my lifetime. It’s actually very strange as a Canadian, because we’ve always felt that our own country’s incredibly fragile and America was this total rock of stability. It’s kind of switched.

We have much less vertical and horizontal inequality. We have a legal system that is truly transnational. I don’t know the political leanings of any Supreme Court justice in my country. The problems in America are problems of structure—like the Senate does not represent the American people. And it destroys the capacity of the government to produce policy. Canada doesn’t have that problem. Only America does.

This article appears in the January 2022 issue of Washingtonian.

https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/12/30/qa-does-stephen-marche-know-how-america-will-end/

How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter review – sounding the alarm

This compelling history delineates the path from democracy to autocracy – and warns that the US is heading the wrong way

Barbara Walter does not expect to see a civil war in the US of the order of the conflict that tore the nation apart in the 1860s, but that’s chiefly because civil wars are fought differently these days. And it’s about the only comfort a concerned reader can take from this sobering account of how civil wars start and are conducted in our time. Walter is a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego, and a consultant to various government and international agencies. She has studied civil wars and insurgencies for three decades, and iIn this book she draws on her own work and that of other researchers to produce a typology of the descent into organised domestic violence.
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The key concept is that of “anocracy”, a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.

A crucial development in the road to civil war is the emergence of factions. Walter observes that in the early 20th century, civil wars were fought along lines of class and ideology. Hence the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution that began a decade later. But after the second world war, as the old colonial empires broke down, civil wars increasingly reflected ethnic and religious factionalisation. By the late 20th century, such fault lines lay at the heart of most civil wars.

A case study to which Walter returns repeatedly is the breakup of Yugoslavia. Held together by the iron fist of Tito, who ruthlessly suppressed displays of religion and ethnicity, the country fractured spectacularly on ethnic and religious lines after his death. In that conflict, the Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševic proved an archetype of another concept that Walter employs, the “ethnic entrepreneur”. Miloševic turned Tito’s policy on its head, deliberately fanning ethnic and religious flames.

Walter punctuates her account with recollections by individuals she has interviewed. One informant told of living in Sarajevo before the breakup began and hardly noticing the religious and ethnic differences among her neighbours. But after Miloševic and his imitators engaged the propaganda machinery, the social fabric was torn asunder. Walter’s source was at home with her young son in March 1992 when the lights went out. “And then suddenly you started to hear machine guns,” she said.

The most important driver – the ‘accelerant’ – of recent civil wars has been social media

The factions most disposed to violence are those Walter and others call “sons of the soil”. People with deep histories in a country, traditionally rural, they resent displacement by immigrants and urban elites. When their resentments are stoked by ethnic entrepreneurs, they are much more prone to violence than other groups.

And the most important driver – the “accelerant” – of recent civil wars has been social media. “Social media is every ethnic entrepreneur’s dream,” writes Walter. She finds it not at all a coincidence that the world achieved peak democracy just before social media began to proliferate, and that democracy has been in retreat ever since.

She notes that on the scale researchers in her field employ, the US in the last few years has slipped into the range of anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. And then: “Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.”

Walter’s recounting of Trump’s assaults on decency and democracy is familiar yet still chilling. The good news is that the bad news wasn’t worse. But we haven’t seen the end of it. “America was lucky that its first modern autocratic president was neither smart nor politically experienced. Other ambitious, more effective Republicans – Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley – have taken note and will seek to do better.”

So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. The research of Walter and her colleagues shows that politics is more important than economics in starting or preventing civil wars. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing partisan gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college. More vaguely, she recommends that government “renew its commitment to providing for its most vulnerable citizens”.

And social media must be regulated. “The US government regulates all kinds of industries – from utilities and drug companies to food processing plants – to promote the common good,” Walter writes. “For the sake of democracy and social cohesion, social media platforms should be added to the list.”

Will this be enough? Walter hopes so. But she expects the domestic terrorism that has been on the rise since the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 will continue to get worse, that insurgents and militias – the civil warriors of the 21st century – will continue to proliferate, and that demagogues like Trump will continue to encourage them.

Walter relates that amid the 2020 election campaign, she and her husband, who between them possess Swiss, Canadian, Hungarian and German passports, considered their exit strategy from the US should things get really bad. They even weighed up applying for Hungarian citizenship for their daughter. It didn’t come to that. But they renewed their passports just in case.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/13/how-civil-wars-start-by-barbara-f-walter-review-sounding-the-alarm