So what does it all mean, Jan. 6, one year later? As House investigators and, we pray (evidence is slim), Department of Justice prosecutors sift through their interviews and forensic data, what all of us want to know is: Will we be OK?
Or are the people amping themselves up for a civil war really up to fighting one? If so, how? And to what end?
Michelle Goldberg consulted a couple of academic authorities on the subject and came away unconvinced that end is inevitable. It’s “absurd to treat civil war as a foregone conclusion,” she writes despite parallels elsewhere referenced by scholars. Still, this metric catches one’s attention:
The sort of civil war that Walter and Marche worry about wouldn’t involve red and blue armies facing off on some battlefield. If it happens, it will be more of a guerrilla insurgency. As Walter told me, she, like Marche, relies on an academic definition of “major armed conflict” as one that causes at least 1,000 deaths per year. A “minor armed conflict” is one that kills at least 25 people a year. By this definition, as Marche argues, “America is already in a state of civil strife.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, extremists, most of them right-wing, killed 54 people in 2018 and 45 people in 2019. (They killed 17 people in 2020, a figure that was low due to the absence of extremist mass shootings, possibly because of the pandemic.)
“Walter” is Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego:
Instigators of civil violence, she writes, tend to be previously dominant groups who see their status slipping away. “The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country ‘is or ought to be theirs,’” she writes. This is one reason, although there are violent actors on the left, neither she nor Marche believe the left will start a civil war. As [novelist Stephen] Marche writes, “Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization.”
Clearly, status anxiety is a driver for white insurrectionists, especially in areas where they see their numbers in decline. That’s why fewer of them came from regions Trump won handily. But while scenarios Marche lays out for how a civil war might begin seem to her implausible, they are “more imaginable than a future in which Jan. 6 turns out to be the peak of right-wing insurrection, and America ends up basically OK.”
Over at Politico magazine, John. F. Harris (whom Goldberg simply references) contends that civil wars tend to be about something. Civil war talk in this country is less about any issue of substance. It is not about ending slavery or segregation or a war in Vietnam. No, it is more about the fact that we don’t like each other.
Efforts to explain Trump and Trumpism end up in speculation about the psychological and emotional stuntedness behind the man’s narcissism, cruelty, and will-to-power. He hates the people his followers hate, the non-white ones moving into suburban neighborhoods from whence cometh, studies find, most Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Is that enough?
The transcendent issue of this time — no matter the specific raw material of any given news cycle — is the belief that one half of the country suspects the other half is contemptuous of them, and responds with contempt in turn. “Seinfeld” was not really, as was often said, “a show about nothing.” It demonstrated instead that with the right characters and frame of mind, you can make a show about anything that might happen in daily life. Donald Trump has shown that you can use the same approach to create a national crack-up. The violent rabble that crashed the Capitol a year ago showed that crack-ups are fertile ground for crackpots.
Are you starting 2022 in an optimistic mood? You might take solace in the argument that it’s hard to have a real civil war without a real cause — a great question that will be resolved by the outcome. Trump’s moment in national life will die out because he always has lots to say but no longer has anything meaningful to say.
Trump never did. Everything Trump says is Trump. If Trump crawled through that hidden Being John Malkovich passage, as Malkovich did, and entered a world in which everyone was Trump, even the women, he’d ejaculate into his shorts.
I don’t hate Trump fanatics. That requires more energy than I’m willing to expend. Harris believes civil wars have to be about something. The reasons for Trumpists’ anger are likely as inchoate to many of them as Trump’s motivations are to him. And he is a head case.
As we enter yet another general election cycle, our focus is better spent on what we, each of us, can do to prevent the further of erosion of the country precipitated by Trumpism. Be about that.