'How Civil Wars Start,' a Warning About the State of the Union
'In the year since the rampage at the Capitol, chatter about a 21st-century American civil war has seeped from the fringes into the mainstream. During the Trump presidency, there were of course any number of books about political fracture; still, they mostly discussed widening but (usually) peaceable differences (Lilliana Mason’s “Uncivil Agreement,” Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized”), or they focused mainly on the historical roots of political violence (Joanne B. Freeman’s “The Field of Blood,” Kathleen Belew’s “Bring the War Home”).
By contrast, predictions of an imminent conflagration tended to come from those quarters that also celebrated it, on MAGA Twitter and its companion talk shows, invoking the paranoid fever dreams of the far-right. The logic was hard to follow, but it often went something like this: Snowflakes (i.e. liberals), despite being so wimpy that they’re cowed into wearing “face diapers” (i.e. masks), were physically preparing to muscle their way to a gun-free hellscape of gender-neutral bathrooms and critical race theory.
Who wanted to dignify such dumb scenarios with sober analyses? “These prophecies have a way of being self-fulfilling,” Fintan O’Toole recently wrote in The Atlantic, in a critique of a new book by the Canadian novelist and cultural critic Stephen Marche, “The Next Civil War.” O’Toole recoiled at Marche’s lamentations that catastrophe was inevitable, and at his speculative narratives of what might hasten the collapse. Such visions don’t just distract us from the chronic, less spectacular problems the country faces, O’Toole argued; apocalyptic premonitions are “flammable and corrosive,” making people so fearful of one another that “the logic of the pre-emptive strike sets in.”
When Barbara F. Walter began writing “How Civil Wars Start” in 2018, the few people who heard that it was “about a possible second civil war in America” thought it was “an exercise in fear-mongering,” she writes in her acknowledgments, “perhaps even irresponsible.” That “even” gives you a sense of Walter’s cautious inclinations. As a political scientist who has spent her career studying conflicts in other countries, she approaches her work methodically, patiently gathering her evidence before laying out her case. She spends the first half of the book explaining how civil wars have started in a number of places around the world, including the former Yugoslavia, the Philippines and Iraq.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/books/review-how-civil-wars-start-barbara-walter.html
((Author Barbara Walter interviewed on C. Hayes' show.))
