UK Paper Doubts U.S. Is Drifting Toward 2nd Civil War

Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognized the full scale of the current threat to American democracy, David Smith reported for the Observer.

Photo Insert: A photograph from the first Civil War

“At this moment, we must decide,” Biden said in Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. “What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?”

It is a question that many inside America and beyond are now asking. In a deeply divided society, where even a national tragedy such as 6 January only pushed people further apart, there is fear that that day was just the beginning of a wave of unrest, conflict, and domestic terrorism.

A slew of recent opinion polls shows a significant minority of Americans at ease with the idea of violence against the government. Even talk of a second American civil war has gone from fringe fantasy to media mainstream. “Is a Civil War ahead?” was the blunt headline of a New Yorker magazine article this week.

“Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?” posed the headline of a column in Friday’s New York Times.

Three retired US generals wrote a recent Washington Post column warning that another coup attempt “could lead to civil war.” The mere fact that such notions are entering the public domain shows the once unthinkable has become thinkable, even though some would argue it remains firmly improbable.

Among those raising the alarm is Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and author of a new book, “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.”

Walter previously served on the political instability task force, an advisory panel to the CIA, which had a model to predict political violence in countries all over the world – except the US itself.

Yet with the rise of Trump’s racist demagoguery, Walter, who has studied civil wars for 30 years, recognized telltale signs on her own doorstep. Not even the gloomiest pessimist is predicting a rerun of the 1861-65 civil war with a blue army and red army fighting pitched battles.

“It would look more like Northern Ireland and what Britain experienced, where it’s more of an insurgency,” Walter continued. “It would probably be more decentralized than Northern Ireland because we have such a large country and there are so many militias all around the country.”

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