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.
... in speculating about various possible catalysts for chaos in the U.S., [Marche] writes more in sorrow than in anger, more as a lament than a provocation. Marche’s thought experiment begins, however, with two conceptual problems that he never manages to resolve ... All of these scenarios are well researched and eloquently presented. But how they relate to one another, or whether the conflicts they involve can really be regarded as a civil war, is never clear. Civil wars need mass participation, and how that could be mobilized across a subcontinent is not at all obvious ... Marche’s other conceptual problem is that, in order to dramatize all of this as a sudden and terrible collapse, he creates a ridiculously high baseline of American democratic normalcy ... This failure of historical perspective means that Marche can ignore the evidence that political violence, much of it driven by racism, is not a new threat ... Marche is so intent on the coming catastrophe that he seems unable to focus on what is in front of his nose ... In this context, feverish talk of civil war has the paradoxical effect of making the current reality seem, by way of contrast, not so bad. The comforting fiction that the U.S. used to be a glorious and settled democracy prevents any reckoning with the fact that its current crisis is not a terrible departure from the past but rather a product of the unresolved contradictions of its history. The dark fantasy of Armageddon distracts from the more prosaic and obvious necessity to uphold the law and establish political and legal accountability for those who encourage others to defy it. Scary stories about the future are redundant when the task of dealing with the present is so urgent.
While Marche is adept at uncovering the fault lines that exist in the U.S. polity and extrapolating their significance for the stability of American democracy, his imagined narratives of possible inciting incidents for a widespread civil conflict are less convincing, especially after two years of an ongoing global pandemic ... The decision to structure his book around imagined events such as a presidential assassination or a catastrophic flood loses some of its force in the context of COVID-19, actual wildfires in California and lethal tornadoes in Kentucky, and a geopolitical reality that has effectively rendered dystopian fiction indistinguishable from kitchen sink realism. He frames the possibility of an assault on the U.S. Capitol in conditional terms — the country 'would not respond rationally' — ignoring what we know about the actual fallout from Jan. 6, 2021. (Marche does mention the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, but briefly and without much elaboration) ... To a certain extent, Marche falls victim to the forces that anyone trying to write a book-length study of our current moment must confront: the plain fact that history is galloping too quickly to even attempt a long view. By the time a book is printed, the situation on the ground will have changed beyond all recognition. If a futurist is someone who makes guesses for a living, it is not necessary to engage in supposition about where America may be headed. We’ve already seen it in action, and it ain’t pretty.
... cogent if alarmist ... Though Marche includes some astute commentary from experts, his thought experiments are more sketched than fully realized. Readers will find plenty to worry about, but little to hold on to.
