Is the US headed for a cold civil war?

Are we heading into the final season of America?

It seems fair to say that the country hasn’t been so divided since the (first?) Civil War. The more pessimistic pundits claim this is a terminal diagnosis: The fabric of our society is too damaged to be repaired. There’s too much anger, too much entrenched hatred, and too many powerful people willing to break laws, commit violence, and scrap elections to get their way. It seems inevitable, they argue, that the United States is coming apart at the seams.

The Open Society Barometer, a global opinion poll by the Open Society Foundation, offers evidence that bears on this question.

Some of the findings are reassuring. Worldwide, overwhelming majorities of people still desire to live in a democracy and value human rights as a force for good. Despite the clamor of the culture war, only a tiny minority opposes rights for migrants, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups. The issues that people rank as their biggest concerns, like climate change and inequality, are real and legitimate.

On the other hand, there’s a small but non-trivial faction that pines for authoritarian rule. And while most people support democracy, there’s widespread skepticism about whether democratic states can deliver on their promises. It’s not surprising, in an age of polarization and collapsing trust, that we’re increasingly cynical about whether elected officials truly represent the public, whether they can deliver on their promises or even want to.

Most worrisome is that, in many countries, majorities of people agreed with the statement, “I fear that political unrest in my country could lead to violence in the next year.” In the U.S., a shocking 67% agreed with this, more than in Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Russia or China.

You could interpret this number in several ways. The easiest way would be to dismiss it as mere negativity bias, similar to the way that majorities of people wrongly believe that crime is rising every year. However, countering this, you could argue that people are simply going by recent experience. In the past few years, there has been violence sparked by political unrest all over the world: the January 6 insurrection in the U.S., the yellow vest protests in France, the far-right assault on the Brazilian seat of government, and more.

It’s also ambiguous whether people’s agreement with this statement indicates their endorsement of violence—as in, “My country’s been taken over by a traitorous cabal and we have to reclaim it by violent revolution”—or disapproval of violence but fear that it could happen regardless—as in, “I don’t want violence, but you can’t trust what those treacherous bastards on the other side might try.”

When Mitt Romney stood alone

One politician who has a firsthand answer to this question is Mitt Romney. In the Atlantic, McKay Coppins published an astoundingly candid interview with Romney, who has been a fierce critic of Donald Trump since 2016.

It’s ironic that Romney—the say-anything candidate, the one who signed the first version of Obamacare as governor of Massachusetts and then campaigned against his own idea when running for president—has morphed into one of the few Republicans with principles.

He’s disgusted by Trump’s corruption and ignorance. Even more, he’s disgusted with his fellow Republicans who agreed with him in private but abased themselves to defend Trump in public—even after the January 6 insurrection that could have killed them. Romney stands out for being the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial.

But he hasn’t gained anything from it. On the contrary, he torpedoed his own political career:

Having become an object of hate in his own party, it's no surprise that Romney is retiring from the Senate. But he leaves us with this breathtaking line:

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Romney has since been joined by a large and growing number of anti-Trump Republicans, including Liz Cheney, George W. Bush, Jeff Flake, a long list of current and former members of Congress, and a majority of the high-profile figures who worked in his administration. But Romney, who first warned about Trump in clear terms on March 3, 2016, deserves credit for coming out first when no one else would.

The iconography of violence

Mitt Romney is out of step with his own party, and another report shows just how out of step. Not only has the Right fully embraced Trump’s lawlessness and bigotry, but in certain quarters, there’s a genuine hunger for bloodshed. They’ve bedecked themselves in the rhetoric and iconography of violence, as Katherine Stewart wrote:

This sounds alarming, and it is. We shouldn’t dismiss these calls for bloodshed as mere posturing or assume they’ll never translate into action. However, we should keep them in their proper context.

The Right fetishizes weapons and loves to cosplay as macho tough guys. However, wearing a T-shirt is a long way from actively being willing to commit violence against a fellow human being. When push comes to shove, most of these people are nothing but keyboard warriors. They’ll send death threats from a distance, but that is the extent of their willingness to commit crimes.

Although America still suffers every day from the bloody plague of mass shootings, there hasn’t been anything like what we might call organized political violence aimed at the Biden administration. There haven’t yet been any bombings, or assassinations, or other major acts of terrorism intended to prevent Democrats from taking power or governing.

January 6 was the obvious exception, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. The insurrectionists, for the most part, didn’t have a real plan. When they broke into the Capitol, they did nothing but engage in childish looting and petty vandalism. They seemed as surprised by their own success as the rest of us. And the prosecution of the insurrectionists, especially the long prison sentences for the ringleaders, seems to have thrown cold water on the Right’s ardor for violence.

Donald Trump has been hinting his hardest, but his supporters have been notably reluctant to try rescuing him from prosecution by force. There wasn’t even much of a protest at the courthouses when he was indicted.

A cold civil war

It’s not likely that we’re headed for a new civil war in the sense of armies clashing in open combat. But it’s plausible that the US will suffer, and is already suffering, what we might call a cold civil war.

As we head into and through the 2024 election, there will be more death threats and attempts to intimidate officeholders and election workers. There will be more acts of stochastic terrorism, as a constant drumbeat of violent rhetoric pushes disturbed people over the edge. There will be more random shootings, hate crimes and other outbreaks of violence, some of it politically motivated.

But a cold civil war would be defined less by these occasional violent acts than by a rapid intensification of the ongoing culture war.

A poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics in Fall 2021 found that 41 percent of 2020 Biden voters—Biden voters—said it might be "time to split the country." A large majority of Trump voters in the poll saw little difference between Democrats and socialists, and a majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agreed that there is little difference between Republicans and fascists. There is no reason to think that these numbers have softened since then.

The director of the center characterized the split between right and left as "deep, wide, and dangerous."

There will also be more Republican “lawfare”—trying to subvert the legal mechanisms of society and bend them to their own ends—like voter suppression laws, drummed-up investigations of political opponents, and pressuring legislatures to nullify elections that don’t go their way.

Faith in the institutions that might prevent deepening conflict continues to decline. More than half of young Americans (56%) in the Harvard Youth Poll agreed that “politics today are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing.”

A cold civil war is less likely to split along state lines than between urban and rural populations, which brings the conflict to every state. Picture a patchwork of states refusing to acknowledge the authority of the federal government and local leaders refusing to acknowledge the authority of the state. Add courts and judges passing out edicts according to personal allegiances. Top it off with law enforcement and military factions of uncertain loyalties and an estimated 400 million guns currently in the country—and the potential for a descent into chaos is overwhelming.

And when a population feels itself descending into chaos, history shows not just a tolerance but a demand for authoritarian rule.

The eventual death of Donald Trump will be the real test of whether the fascist fever on the right cools. The faction of Republicans champing at the bit for violence is devoted to him and him alone, with the fervor of religious fanatics following their messiah. He has no heir apparent, and so far, no other politician has shown the ability to capture his audience. When he passes from the scene, it’s possible that his cult will become rudderless, and will dissipate or splinter into infighting. The movement he founded has imperiled American democracy and America itself, but it may not survive him.