"What about a second Trump administration as the spark, given the way the last Trump administration ended? What about Jan. 6? What about, to be more bipartisan, the waves of protest and violence in the summer of 2020, the cities on fire, the tear gas outside the White House? Didn’t Americans show an appetite for internecine conflict then?
The answer is that they did, albeit up to a well-short-of-the-1860s point. But the breakdown happened only in the pandemic year, under extremely unusual conditions and pressures most people had never experienced before. A once-in-a-century global plague and an unprecedented shutdown of society converging with a fraught election did, indeed, break through the torpor I’m describing, turn virtual playacting into actual statue-topping and make right-wing dreampolitik temporarily real. In that sense, 2020 showed that any general pattern or trend can be disrupted, given insane-seeming circumstances and a mentality of existential crisis.
But once the circumstances normalized, the appeal of protest politics dissipated. There was no follow-up to Jan. 6 on the right, no wave of insurrectionary violence carried out by true believers in President Biden’s illegitimacy, no rush to join the Proud Boys by ordinary right-wingers. Likewise on the left, the racial reckoning was subsumed back into bureaucratic politics, the “CHAZ” commune in Seattle was dismantled rather than imitated, antifa receded back into the shadows. It’s not that protest politics disappeared (witness the various disruptive protests on behalf of Palestine) or extremism vanished, but both returned to the realm of the exceptional remarkably swiftly.
So if you were really interested in what it would take for the United States to actually plunge into armed conflict, to be divided into warring camps and not just polarized blocs of voters, the lesson of 2020 is that you should be looking for some kind of rupture, some world-shaking external or internal force, as the necessary precondition.
Maybe a pandemic substantially worse than Covid, which prompts states to close their borders and splits the country much more completely and viciously than did the difference between, say, New York and Florida’s pandemic policies.
Maybe a great defeat in war and an economic crisis — China taking Taiwan, North Korea overrunning South Korea, the stock market melting down as the Pax Americana topples, a discredited establishment facing new forms of demagogy and revolt.
Maybe some radical technological development, out on the frontiers of A.I., that reshapes the contours of normal life and creates new moods of utopianism or desperation.
Maybe a true climate crisis, not just slowly rising temperatures but one of the “tail risk” scenarios for global disaster." [1]
1. What It Would Really Take to Have an American Civil War: Ross Douthat. Douthat, Ross. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 17, 2024.
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