I've recently been digging into the emerging media narrative that suggests the US is headed for a new civil war. Behind this narrative, which emerged in coordinated fashion around Jan. 6, are warnings from academics. There's the book How Civil Wars Start by political scientist Barbara F. Walter. There are papers on the subject published last fall by the Brookings Institution, a prestigious think tank. Reading over these materials and the many news stories they're inspiring, I've been wondering what the goal of this new narrative is.
Today, an opinion piece in the New York Times titled "Let’s Not Invent a Civil War" broke from the emerging narrative to present an alternative perspective:
"Presumably we’ll find out more about all this when the case comes to trial, but for now it’s reasonable to wonder whether [MI Gov. Gretchen] Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds. And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country. ... If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism."
This NYT piece is more in line with my perspective than anything else I've read on the subject. In a big, diverse country like the US, there will always be extremists who attempt to use violence to achieve their objectives. Our history, including recent history, is filled with examples of this. But that's not war. And calling it a war seems both confusing and unnecessary.
I personally know people in the red camp who are well-armed and might violently resist a vaccine mandate if such a mandate were enforced in a certain way. I also know people in the blue camp who are comparably well-armed, and have a friend who toured a leftist paramilitary training grounds last year, where blues ran drills as if preparing for war. While some may find such fringe groups frightening, these groups will mostly just keep doing their thing quietly, in obscurity, irrelevant to the national conversation. Unless, of course, their fringe status is elevated to legitimacy, such as by partisan fear mongering in the media.
I'm old enough to remember the bombing in Oklahoma City. I recall Waco and Ruby Ridge being used as rallying cries by a militia movement that may have actually believed itself to be capable of overthrowing the federal government. What would have happened then, if mass media had given these fringe groups legitimacy by naming them one side of a new civil war? Nothing good would have happened.
Since the pandemic began, the government at all levels has been awarding itself new powers. It has rolled out disastrous policy after disastrous policy, failing time and again to get the virus under control while adding hardship to the lives of the lower classes. In light of this, it makes perfect sense that a growing number of Americans would be dissatisfied with the government. Personally, I think our government is hopelessly broken, in ways that no election could possibly fix. Many other people likely harbor similar views, but that doesn't mean civil war is on the horizon, as the new narrative would have you believe.
It's possible that this new narrative is being pushed to prepare us for even more intrusive policies than we're already subjected to. Surveillance. Limitations on movements. Phone-based vaccine passports that are retooled to control the population in new ways once the covid threat has passed. It's also possible that the purpose behind it is merely to continue ratcheting up our fear of one another. A frightened population, divided against itself, is a population easily manipulated by the control regime.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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