OPINION: Is a civil war really possible? One of America’s most pre-eminent scholars on civil wars and how they begin offers this blunt answer: Yes. In fact, we’re closer to one in our country than most Americans think, or are willing to believe.
When I was writing my first book, a history of the White House and the presidency, I came across a quote from John Adams. “Remember,” he wrote in December 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.”
Walter knows her stuff “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” Barbara Walter, a professor at the University of California at San Diego tells me, and writes in a new book out next week. What’s eye-opening here is that when you look at the 200-plus civil wars since 1946 and their root causes, it sounds eerily like America right now.
Political and cultural decline As I’m listening to Walter, the images that immediately come to mind are of the torch-bearing white men marching through Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, shouting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Remember them? The angry white men waving Confederate flags and a few Nazi swastikas? This is a bullseye example of the political and cultural decline of once-dominant groups that have sparked conflicts elsewhere.
By this definition, a civil war may already be underway in the United States. You can think of, prominent examples like the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, failed kidnapping plots two years ago involving Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and, of course, last year’s attack on the Capitol.
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