The Next Civil War (A Fiction)

I spent almost the entire of this book trying to figure out if it’s any good or not. My issue is not actually political. A lot of the reviews seem to take offense with the idea that the most likely perpetrators of the “next civil war” will be right-wing terrorists. Well, get over it. When that happens, you’ll be so happy you won. They also mention that he’s glowing about BLM, which is simply not true. He simply states that their grievances are founded in actual oppression, not the perception of oppression. There is absolutely economic oppression in this country, and obviously racial oppression. Sometimes those two line up and affect groups of people doubly, but they both exist in their separate spheres as well. The entire history of the United States has been built on racial oppression and then when there are attempts to even mitigate that any meaningful way, there’s been a white backlash against it. My issue with this book is not that those things aren’t true or that Stephen Marche has hurt my feelings politically, but that he doesn’t actually know American history particularly well. The Civil War was baked into the founding of the country, but it’s more or less an aberration in terms of mass violence. The rest of American history tends to reinforce the economic and racial disparities in this country with the system almost always trying to allow for both. Individuals are completely sacrificed to this system. The weird thing about the recent rise in right-wing violence is that there isn’t more of it, and that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that began in the 1950s and has been growing in visibility in the last twenty years. But the end goal is and always has been political power, and that’s been happening and still is happening since Johnson’s presidency. The country has move right-ward politically as it’s been moving left-ward culturally, and while that breed violence, I don’t think it breeds war. Instead, it breeds what we already have and will continue to have: oligarchy.

I do agree that some kind of break could happen, but I don’t think that spark will involve war, but rather climate, famine, a much more significant pandemic, or something like a meteor strike. That chaos will upend things, and who knows how it will break, but while we are barreling toward authoritarianism, it’s not actually that hard to argue that we’ve already had it since (if not forever), WWII.

The thing about predictions is that they don’t have to come true for someone to get credit for them. Marche is pretty good at narrating and identifying the flashpoints of white violence, but he extrapolates from there, not using predictive modelling, but guesswork. He constantly warns about what we’re not seeing, but he doesn’t look at the actual history of the US to see that almost everything we have now, has always been here. It’s really bad, but it’s always been really bad.