Stephen Marche is an imaginative storyteller who believes the United States will collapse in the “immediate future.” A Canadian offering an outside perspective of our country in crisis, his The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future can best be described as 24 meets The Day After Tomorrow aimed at people who own several pieces of Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorabilia.
The Next Civil War consists of five “What Ifs” that Marche does not consider “to be worst-case scenarios” but rather “the best available models with established predictive capacities.” These “dispatches from the future” can be summarized as follows: What if, supported by Fox News and National Review, every far-right group from the Proud Boys to state militias united under a David Clarke figure who is a mixture of Thomas Jefferson, Rush Limbaugh, and Ho Chi Minh, resulting in a Cliven Bundy-style media frenzy? What if our first female president is assassinated by an unemployed incel living with his mother who’s been radicalized by internet message boards after his father abandons the family to marry a Vietnamese woman in California? What if, following a dust bowl, hyperinflation, and economic depression, a massive hurricane hits New York City? What if a far-right group uses a drone to hit the Capitol with a dirty bomb? What if we have a peaceful “national divorce” based on the political theory of secession and allow lawyers to carve up the nation into smaller countries?
Absent from these scenarios are any common sense consequences. What would happen? In scenario one, surely most would refuse a choice between Super David Clarke and the federal government. In scenario two, the vice president would become president, and most of us would be somber despite internet trolls praising the shooter. In three, there would likely be a national fundraising effort similar to those after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina. In four, the public would be outraged, and Congress would meet elsewhere after holding special elections. Scenario five doesn’t require a “dispatch from the future” to predict, since we have tried this in the past. The Hartford Convention and Confederacy were both failures. Yet, as you may have guessed, Marche contends the U.S. would collapse into civil war in each of these cases.
The beauty of reading consists, in part, of the bond created between the author and the reader as they share the experience generated by a book. There were times in The Next Civil War when I wondered who between the two of us was having a fever dream. This feeling lingered as I read the dispatch about the dirty bomb. Marche argues that, like Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declaring martial law during the October Crisis in 1970, “the American government, in order to survive, will have to suspend the sacred icon of American government, the Bill of Rights. So, right from the beginning, as an inevitable element of this kind of war, a massive portion of the US populace, nearly half, would consider the actions” un-American. Who is this near half who’d protest such measures? Not the ACLU, liberals, or civil libertarians, but rather gun owners who oppose a national gun registry.
Marche explains how this counterinsurgency would operate: “A military force would move from, say, Portland, where the belief in government legitimacy is strong, county by county, into rural Oregon, which is rife with anti-government patriotism.” He concludes that we would still have jobs and families, but:
This technically fits Marche’s contention that his dispatches are “not worst-case scenarios.” I suppose a Trump supporter could somehow extinguish the sun, leaving the few remaining microorganisms to spend their final moments facing the dark, empty cold of outer space, but the fourth chapter is still pretty dour.
The Next Civil War relies on stark dichotomies to make its claims, depicting urbanites as sophisticated, wealthy, educated, and liberal. His rural Americans are paranoid, racist conservatives. The suburbs are caught somewhere in between. This is especially displayed in the story about the hurricane. The protagonist is a podcast producer living in Brooklyn who can afford to consider buying a $28 cabbage caused by hyperinflation while much of the country is on food assistance. Her sister stayed in Iowa, lost her job, has little food, and “didn’t believe Covid was real.” Her son, the protagonist’s nephew, joins a separatist commune in the Dakotas, and his bedroom is filled with World War II propaganda and models of bombers. After the storm, the protagonist joins refugees fleeing the East Coast to the strange, foreign land filled with heartless losers called the Midwest. “On the bus to Iowa,” he writes, “the Producer finds she can tell who’s a New Yorker and who’s an Iowan. … The New Yorkers look scared. The Iowans look bored.”
Marche is confident that he’s written a contemporary version of The Day After, the 1983 classic about life after nuclear war. His book reminded me more of the pro-slavery fire-eater Edmund Ruffin’s 1860 Anticipations of the Future to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. Both frantically predict widespread violence, lament America’s democratic institutions as illegitimate, and paint their mainstream ideological adversaries as cartoonish villains. For Ruffin, it was William Seward and abolitionists. For Marche, it is anyone living more than 10 miles from a Starbucks. Both Anticipations of the Future and The Next Civil War were written to galvanize support for secession, a solution Marche promotes in his final chapter.
Ruffin ended up being sort of right — the country did have a civil war, after all, due to people like him abandoning his nation in support of slavery’s expansion. Marche will almost certainly not be, at least not anytime soon. The reasoning undergirding The Next Civil War relies too much on bad history, a sophist’s confusion of numerical data with empirical evidence, and incoherent logic. For example, the book’s introduction discusses the suddenness of the Civil War, pointing to the famous promise by James Chesnut Jr. to drink all the blood spilled in conflict. Marche writes, “The North was so unprepared for the war that they had no weapons.” He later states that the presidency is the most dangerous job in America, just ahead of industrial fishing, and is convinced U.S. military leadership finds Republican-leaning states to be as mysterious as Afghanistan when it comes to tactical planning and understanding the population.
The Next Civil War too often falls into overgeneralization, viewing partisanship as entirely defining American life. In describing the sides of the next civil war, he says the Right has the “ferocity and militarization of its base. … The left, for its part, makes up the majority of the country and they have the money.” Where does he get this idea? “Biden-voting counties in 2020 accounted for 70 percent of the national GDP.” There were no Biden voters in Texarkana and no Trump voters in New York. Later, Marche states that DeRay Mckesson, an early Black Lives Matter activist, and Richard Spencer, the formerly frequent CNN guest and a white nationalist, symbolize the cleaving of the nation. He seems persuaded that Twitter is real life.
Unwittingly parroting Confederate arguments, Marche takes on the legitimacy of America’s democratic institutions, as well. The Constitution that created the oldest, wealthiest, and strongest representative government in history is a sham because of the Senate, Electoral College, and Supreme Court. “America’s current political insanity goes back to its beginnings. The three-fifths compromise,” he randomly indicates, “was right at the heart of the country. It was a compromise that should not have been made in a country defined by compromises that should not have been made.” The Next Civil War argues we will have a civil war because we cannot find unity and also argues that grand compromises are bad.
Marche believes America’s institutions are failing, citing the usual suspects of growing economic inequality, failure to fight climate change, and, most significantly, former President Donald Trump’s denial of President Joe Biden’s victory and the mobbing of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I do agree that our institutions have weakened for reasons recently examined by Yuval Levin in A Time to Build. But Marche’s read on Trump and Jan. 6 takes completely the wrong lesson. The outgoing president attempting to deny election results and the mob’s attack on counting electoral votes served as prime examples of the institutional resiliency of our democracy. The Electoral College allowed states to conduct a high-turnout election successfully during a pandemic and made implausible the claims that the election was rigged. The Capitol insurrection, recently compared to Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 by Vice President Kamala Harris, delayed Senate certification by a mere 12 hours. Biden sits in the White House. Contentions that the current president is illegitimate, something not uncommon over the past couple of centuries, are immaterial because the Electoral College confers national legitimacy to its winner by holding 51 independent elections. Under stress, the institutions worked as designed.
I don’t think we’re going to have a civil war over our current politics. There is nothing today remotely akin to slavery in the 1860s, and geographical isolation does not really exist. In fact, it’s the opposite: People are interacting more than ever and arguing. A similar thing happened with the printing press, telegraph, radio, and television. I also believe the public like being Americans much more than they like being Republicans or Democrats. I could just be a rosy optimist who’ll be the last one turning the lights off after the U.S. dies. But if the believability and clarity of thought on display in Marche’s vivid imagination are any indication, we’re not going to have another civil war anytime soon.
Carl Paulus is a historian from Michigan and author of The Slaveholding Crisis: The Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War.
