A journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds.
Marche’s Canadian citizenship is helpful in his analysis, for he is 'outside that particular confusion,' a sympathetic witness who can conclude certain things that those closer to everything might not see. Despite some failings in presentation, The Next Civil War is a welcome addition to left-center analyses of the divisions in American society, divisions which the right is poised to exploit ... If The Next Civil War has any role, it’s this – to convince liberals that they’re already in the midst of such a conflagration, even if it’s not of their choosing.
Such scenario-spinning is a staple of the Civil War redux and secessionist lit ... There is a horrifying yet normalizing quality to such discussions. The more often cable news chyrons, think tank analyses, political rhetoric and nonfiction works elevate the discussion of a new civil war, the more inevitable such an outcome may seem, and the more fatalistic the public may feel. It’s not clear that fanciful scenarios are all that necessary; one year ago, we witnessed a real-life spectacular act of political violence against the U.S. Capitol, carried live on television, while a recent Washington Post-UMD poll finds that one-third of Americans say violence against the government can be justified ... Oddly, given his book’s title, Marche oscillates between certitude about a coming civil war and the belief that we can avoid it ... When you’re betting on the end of the American experiment, a little hedge doesn’t hurt ... Marche’s brisk writing sometimes falls into spirals of political and cultural buzzwords ... Yet Marche does hit on a more fundamental tension, one that underlies so many of our divides.
The book alternates between fictional dispatches from a coming social breakdown and digressions that support its predictions with evidence from the present. The effect is twofold: The narrative delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary ... If there’s a frustration in reading Marche, it’s that his book is negative to the last and therefore fails to capture the full complexity of our moment ... This makes even the use of the term 'civil war' a misleading one: first because it can turn the authors into Cassandras; second because...fears of civil war can precipitate one if both sides are encouraged to arm up and pre-empt an attack by the other ... a sobering vision of where we may be headed, and for that reason they should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.
