2020 was a crazy year. Political violence has never been foreign to the American system, but even against the general background of maniacal killing you sometimes get a crazy year. A crazy year isn’t even necessarily deadlier than other years, just more deranged. In 2020, large swathes of the population were so outraged by the cold-blooded police murder of unarmed black people that, despite having believed only a few days previously that your lungs would cave in like a Coke can in the Mariana Trench if you left your home for any reason whatsoever, they took to the streets. In some places they managed to chase the cops out entirely. These liberated zones were protected by new anti-racist community self-defence groups that almost immediately set about cold-bloodedly murdering unarmed black people. There was just over a month between the killing of George Floyd and the killing of Antonio Mays Jr. It seemed to make sense at the time.
Somehow, in the middle of all this plague and protest, the country had to hold an election, and in a year of youth revolt the choice ended up being between a fat, senile, rambling old man and a thin, senile, rambling old man. (A third old man was briefly a contender, but he was too cogent to really express the spirit of the age.) When the fat old man lost he refused to accept defeat, and some of his supporters took an unplanned and unguided tour of the Capitol building with the idea that doing so would somehow change the result. One of them was shot dead by police. Two more found it all a bit too exciting; their hearts, clogged with fifty years of trademarked greases, suddenly gave out. One moment they were gibbering through the halls of power, the next they’d died spontaneously on the spot.
The upshot of this crazy year is that large numbers of people are now convinced that the United States is on its way towards some kind of breakup. Maybe a more or less amicable national divorce, in which Red America and Blue America decide that their differences are irreconcilable and resolve to go their separate ways. The red people can go back to drinking corn juice without having to worry if it’s secretly trying to turn them trans. The blue people will agree to only secretly administer the chemicals that turn you trans to their own children. Or maybe it’ll be a full-on civil war. States against the federal government, cities against the countryside, a guerrilla campaign that widens and widens until the entire country is gurgling on its own blood.
This is the earnest fantasy of plenty of people on the very online right, but it’s also the opinion of Dr Barbara F Walter (Chicago, UCSD, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, etc), a scholar of civil conflicts abroad who now thinks something similar is coming to her own country. Resentful rural whites, frothing like a yeast infection to the demagoguery of ‘ethnic entrepreneurs,’ will soon take up a campaign of terror against democratic society, until the whole thing is so riddled with shrapnel holes it simply collapses. Reviewing her book in the LRB, James Meek disagrees. Not that civil war is imminent—he just thinks it’s more likely that the liberal side will be the insurrectionaries. He imagines Donald Trump illegally seizing power in a sham election that’s then rubberstamped by his captive Congress, and the defenders of democracy rising up in an armed revolt against the new regime. The real danger, he writes, isn’t civil war, but the prospect that the right seizes power and ‘most liberals just put up with it, judging it not worth the blood and damage to fight for democracy.’ This scenario has some problems. (Given the last two elections, isn’t it the case now that the losing side always claims the result was illegitimate? How do you tell the difference between an actual sham election and a sham of a sham? Is it really democracy you’d be fighting for, or is it something else?) If that one doesn’t catch your interest, though, there are other models. Just this month we had Civil War, the biggest and flashiest A24 feature to date: Alex Garland’s vision of a future conflict between an implicitly dictatorial federal government and a secessionist alliance of Texas and California. Meanwhile Stephen Marche has five different accounts of how the United States could spiral into civil war. He also thinks the next civil war has already begun.
The next civil war has not already begun. America is a violent country, armed to the teeth and blistering with hatred, but it’s also old, lazy, stupid, fat, medicated, and cowardly. 2020 marked a recent high point in American political violence, but all that violence was politically meaningless and merely dumb. A clown show, a farce, but this time when the performer falls off the ladder with his head in a bucket of custard, you can really hear his neck snap as he hits the ground. The past decade of polarisation and turmoil has not yet produced a single exchange of fire. There are armed factions, clammy political losers of every stripe, walking around in the streets with their assault rifles, their incomprehensible slogans, and their bellies peeking over their waistbands, but all of them, from the cops to the anarchists to the Nazis, are abject pussies. The most prominent of them call themselves the Boogaloo Boys, because there’s a 1984 film called Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and it became an internet meme to append Electric Boogaloo to any sequel, and they’re trying to spark a sequel to the nineteenth-century American Civil War. Also, they wear Hawaiian shirts, because big luau sounds a bit like boogaloo, and wave flags of a blue igloo, because that sounds a bit like boogaloo as well. This is what’s meant to overturn the most powerful empire in human history: some sub-Rickroll meme dogshit. It’s all playing pretend, and they know it. The American way of doing deadly violence involves one man with a gun spraying a bunch of other people without guns, basically at random. If he isn’t a cop he’ll end by turning the gun on himself. One last spastic fit: the only way to really express the frenzy churning away inside you. If you tried to put it in words it wouldn’t make much sense. In other countries, ideological violence is the ultimate means of securing your political objectives; in America it all comes down to the voices in your head.
There will not be a second American Civil War in our lifetimes. But you want it. Absolutely everyone in America, from the liberals on down, agrees that the ordinary agonistic mode of democratic politics has failed. Your opinions about gender are too different; you can’t agree on whether to say unhoused or homeless: now is the time for force. It’s not going to happen, but you still dream tender dreams about it every night. You imagine your friends and neighbours all being lined up against a wall and shot. You imagine your city in ruins. And as you do, your lips curl up into a beatific smile. This is what we need to understand.