Drama and Spectacle
Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future
Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781982123215
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
The United States was born in a bloody civil war, which over the course of eight years not only dismembered the British empire in North America, but also wrought transformative destruction on indigenous communities and created displaced populations from Canada to Florida, New Orleans to the west African coast. Uprisings, insurrections, filibusters, and secessionists have plagued the republic ever since — just as they have other settler-colonial empires. The Civil War of 1861–65, which ended with the violent crushing of the system of plantation slavery, is sometimes understood as a decisive rupture in the country’s history, a second revolution from which something new emerged. But continuities abound, not least in the relationship between armed white supremacy and fierce resentment of the federal government.
In The Next Civil War, Canadian novelist and journalist Stephen Marche shows a particular fascination for the far-right paramilitary movements, from doomsday preppers to neo-Nazis, that are in some sense the descendants of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1870s and 1920s. He describes Reconstruction — the federally-organised effort to entrench African-American citizenship in the south between 1865 and 1876 — as ‘the first failed American occupation’, a predecessor to defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book’s argument is simple. Helped along by the corrosive effects of increasing economic inequality and the disruptive impact of environmental catastrophe, the federal government’s internal enemies are going to become too much to handle. Federal authority in some states will collapse, the union persisting in name only — and the rights that it had once protected will be stripped away.
What Marche does not envision is an actual military conflict. The US Civil War of the 19th century, like the Syrian Civil War today, began with the defection of military units to rival centres of power. The closest Marche gets to considering the breakup of the US Army is when he notes, in a one-sentence section titled ‘The Hard-Right Infiltration of the US Military’, that white supremacism among American soldiers appears to be on the rise. He gives no space to the command structure of the military, and ignores scenarios, such as a contested presidential election, where it might plausibly come under strain. As Marche has it, the point is that no such decisive break is even necessary for his version of a civil war.
Instead, what constitutes Marche’s ‘next civil war’ is just a ratcheting up of some existing conditions: political polarisation, political violence, and the paralysis of federal authority. Consider Kyle Rittenhouse — the 17-year-old who killed two people with his AR-15 rifle at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, was acquitted of homicide charges by a Wisconsin jury, and became a right-wing cause celebre — and its not too hard to imagine a spiralling increase of such incidents. Combine that with the recent rolling back of women’s reproductive rights across a swathe of Republican-controlled states, and the basic contours of Marche’s scenario are on display. It may not be analytically helpful to call that a civil war, but it is nonetheless a sign of a crumbling political and institutional order.
The violence of the original US Civil War, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has pointed out, was determined not only by polarised ideologies but by conflicting material interests. The southern elite that created the Confederacy did so to protect the institution of slavery, which was the basis of their status and power. Bouie finds no similar conflicting interests in today’s United States, and it’s certainly notable that Marche doesn’t bother to identify any either. In The Next Civil War, economic inequality is part of a general background of discontent that helps stoke violent ideological attachments, but it’s not a subject of analysis itself. What if it was? Are phenomena like Rittenhouse and the assault on reproductive rights unmoored from underlying economic forces? If not, then whose interests are at stake, and how?
One approach to the problem is to look for the economic locus of far-right organising among a specific class of Americans: the owners of small and medium-size businesses. Polling suggests that this class overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. When it comes to their economic interests, moreover, what matters is that these are the people most concerned by rising wages and increasing worker power. If racial segregation and gendered domination are forces that suppress the income and entitlements of the lowest-paid American workers — including advantages such as health and safety rights, and protection from harassment and discrimination — then it is their employers who most stand to benefit from perpetuating those regimes. Small-business-owners can also exercise a good deal of control over local political establishments, especially in states without large concentrations of capital.
In other words, the same people who complain that ‘nobody wants to work any more’, and who fear that President Biden’s recent foray into student debt forgiveness will strengthen low-paid workers’ hands in the market, are also the ones funding far-right campaigns and attending Trump rallies — including the one on 6 January, 2021. These business-owners don’t represent capital as such, but rather a particular fraction of it, and one that has often been marginalised in the halls of federal power. It’s here, if anywhere, that we might find the same kind of reactionary, seditious white elite that sponsored the violent campaign against Reconstruction and black equality in the postbellum south. They don’t need to fight a civil war to start enacting their agenda. In a lot of places, they’re already effectively in charge.
Both the strength and the weakness of Marche’s book derives from the way it translates unfolding developments into drama and spectacle — a confrontation on a bridge, an assassination in a Jamba Juice, the destruction of New York City. The Next Civil War is a disaster movie, a Tom Clancy thriller, with the reader as protagonist. ‘Your city will burn,’ Marche writes towards the end. ‘Your hospitals will fill. Your police will take sides.’ The far right has entertained itself with exactly these fantasies for decades. But it’s too easy to allow spectacle to stand in for real analysis, just as it’s too easy to take people’s word for it when they say they feel like they’re living on the brink of civil war.
Few people in the UK would claim anything similar, even in Northern Ireland where the memory of violent conflict is still raw and the existing political compromise extremely fragile. Yet cities burning, hospitals filling, and police taking sides don’t exactly feel like alien concepts. The slide into worsening living conditions for large numbers of people, and the concerted beating back of any genuine political alternative, has been if anything more sharply felt here than across the Atlantic. Workers’ rights and reproductive rights are both set for erosion in the coming years, while the period of mourning for the Queen has offered a timely rehearsal for the repression of civil dissent. When all the power is lined up on one side of the aisle, it’s not civil war you need to worry about.
The biggest threat to flourishing life, both here and in the United States, is that our political institutions continue to become less and less capable of anything but the protection of private property. Like Marche, we can only hope that the United States may ‘recover its revolutionary spirit’ — and remember that in England we once had a revolution too.
In The Next Civil War, Canadian novelist and journalist Stephen Marche shows a particular fascination for the far-right paramilitary movements, from doomsday preppers to neo-Nazis, that are in some sense the descendants of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1870s and 1920s. He describes Reconstruction — the federally-organised effort to entrench African-American citizenship in the south between 1865 and 1876 — as ‘the first failed American occupation’, a predecessor to defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book’s argument is simple. Helped along by the corrosive effects of increasing economic inequality and the disruptive impact of environmental catastrophe, the federal government’s internal enemies are going to become too much to handle. Federal authority in some states will collapse, the union persisting in name only — and the rights that it had once protected will be stripped away.
What Marche does not envision is an actual military conflict. The US Civil War of the 19th century, like the Syrian Civil War today, began with the defection of military units to rival centres of power. The closest Marche gets to considering the breakup of the US Army is when he notes, in a one-sentence section titled ‘The Hard-Right Infiltration of the US Military’, that white supremacism among American soldiers appears to be on the rise. He gives no space to the command structure of the military, and ignores scenarios, such as a contested presidential election, where it might plausibly come under strain. As Marche has it, the point is that no such decisive break is even necessary for his version of a civil war.
Instead, what constitutes Marche’s ‘next civil war’ is just a ratcheting up of some existing conditions: political polarisation, political violence, and the paralysis of federal authority. Consider Kyle Rittenhouse — the 17-year-old who killed two people with his AR-15 rifle at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, was acquitted of homicide charges by a Wisconsin jury, and became a right-wing cause celebre — and its not too hard to imagine a spiralling increase of such incidents. Combine that with the recent rolling back of women’s reproductive rights across a swathe of Republican-controlled states, and the basic contours of Marche’s scenario are on display. It may not be analytically helpful to call that a civil war, but it is nonetheless a sign of a crumbling political and institutional order.
The violence of the original US Civil War, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has pointed out, was determined not only by polarised ideologies but by conflicting material interests. The southern elite that created the Confederacy did so to protect the institution of slavery, which was the basis of their status and power. Bouie finds no similar conflicting interests in today’s United States, and it’s certainly notable that Marche doesn’t bother to identify any either. In The Next Civil War, economic inequality is part of a general background of discontent that helps stoke violent ideological attachments, but it’s not a subject of analysis itself. What if it was? Are phenomena like Rittenhouse and the assault on reproductive rights unmoored from underlying economic forces? If not, then whose interests are at stake, and how?
One approach to the problem is to look for the economic locus of far-right organising among a specific class of Americans: the owners of small and medium-size businesses. Polling suggests that this class overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. When it comes to their economic interests, moreover, what matters is that these are the people most concerned by rising wages and increasing worker power. If racial segregation and gendered domination are forces that suppress the income and entitlements of the lowest-paid American workers — including advantages such as health and safety rights, and protection from harassment and discrimination — then it is their employers who most stand to benefit from perpetuating those regimes. Small-business-owners can also exercise a good deal of control over local political establishments, especially in states without large concentrations of capital.
In other words, the same people who complain that ‘nobody wants to work any more’, and who fear that President Biden’s recent foray into student debt forgiveness will strengthen low-paid workers’ hands in the market, are also the ones funding far-right campaigns and attending Trump rallies — including the one on 6 January, 2021. These business-owners don’t represent capital as such, but rather a particular fraction of it, and one that has often been marginalised in the halls of federal power. It’s here, if anywhere, that we might find the same kind of reactionary, seditious white elite that sponsored the violent campaign against Reconstruction and black equality in the postbellum south. They don’t need to fight a civil war to start enacting their agenda. In a lot of places, they’re already effectively in charge.
Both the strength and the weakness of Marche’s book derives from the way it translates unfolding developments into drama and spectacle — a confrontation on a bridge, an assassination in a Jamba Juice, the destruction of New York City. The Next Civil War is a disaster movie, a Tom Clancy thriller, with the reader as protagonist. ‘Your city will burn,’ Marche writes towards the end. ‘Your hospitals will fill. Your police will take sides.’ The far right has entertained itself with exactly these fantasies for decades. But it’s too easy to allow spectacle to stand in for real analysis, just as it’s too easy to take people’s word for it when they say they feel like they’re living on the brink of civil war.
Few people in the UK would claim anything similar, even in Northern Ireland where the memory of violent conflict is still raw and the existing political compromise extremely fragile. Yet cities burning, hospitals filling, and police taking sides don’t exactly feel like alien concepts. The slide into worsening living conditions for large numbers of people, and the concerted beating back of any genuine political alternative, has been if anything more sharply felt here than across the Atlantic. Workers’ rights and reproductive rights are both set for erosion in the coming years, while the period of mourning for the Queen has offered a timely rehearsal for the repression of civil dissent. When all the power is lined up on one side of the aisle, it’s not civil war you need to worry about.
The biggest threat to flourishing life, both here and in the United States, is that our political institutions continue to become less and less capable of anything but the protection of private property. Like Marche, we can only hope that the United States may ‘recover its revolutionary spirit’ — and remember that in England we once had a revolution too.