THE NEXT CIVIL WAR

It’s not a matter of if but when: A civil war is on the way, as “the United States is coming to an end.”

As Toronto-based novelist and culture writer Marche observes, the U.S. is riven by sectarian conflict that cannot help but end, at some point, in violence. By his projections, the inevitable civil war will be uncommonly vicious, pitting neighbor against neighbor. It’s not just Donald Trump’s fault, though he certainly did his best to sow hatred and division. As Marche notes, Trump was right when he said, “This country was seriously divided before I got here.” The author posits a number of scenarios around which a civil war could emerge: the assassination of a president; the seizure by local authorities of a bridge condemned as unsafe by federal authorities, drawing militias from afar into armed conflict with the Army; a campaign of terror on the part of “anti-government patriots,” with dirty bombs that are less lethal than they are panic-inducing, countered by a government that will suspend First and Second Amendment rights to contain the violence. In all these scenarios, the fuel is the deep chasm between two visions of America, the one multiethnic, the other White supremacist. This chasm is full of antipathy and even outright venom. “Hatred drives politics in the United States more than any other consideration,” Marche writes, and in the America of today, the middle ground has disappeared. What is to be done? Marche proposes a radical solution: Allow the South to break away into a largely impoverished theocracy, grant prosperous California and Texas their own nationhood, and let the rest of the country form a flourishing, wealthy blue-state democracy. “Disunion would be the death of one country,” he writes, “but it would be the birth of four others.” For other possible remedies, follow this book with Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start.

Lincoln wouldn’t have liked Marche’s proposed remedies, but in a time of torment, this is a book well worth reading.