One hundred and fifty-seven years after the end of the Civil War, is the United States heading for a new civil war?
The question is now being seriously asked, not only by the media quick to dramatize, but by researchers of several tendencies who, for the most part, find the question relevant. They are now divided between alarmists and (moderately) optimistic or nuanced.
Repeated surveys, in 2021 and 2022, yield very high — and sharply rising — positive response rates to the question, “Is the United States heading for civil war?” »
Latest: an IPSOS poll for the University of California, released on July 19, which reveals that more than 50% of Americans expect an imminent civil war.
Faced with a statement that “in the next few years, there will be a civil war in the United States”, 47.8% of respondents say they “disagree” and 50.1% “agree” (36.4% “rather agree” and 13.8% “totally agree”).
Several nationwide surveys over the past twelve months — including from the University of Virginia in 2021 — point in the same direction, with the percentage of “worried” fluctuating between 40% and 60%.
Affirmative responses about the imminence of war are more common among Republicans than among Democrats, but are high everywhere, among young, old, men and women.
The same survey, conducted on a supersample of nearly 9,000 people, found that more than two-thirds of Americans agree that “yes, there is a serious threat to our democracy.” More than 40% believe that “having a strong leader for the United States is more important than having a democracy”.
As for opinions in favor of the use of violence, “justified” in some cases, they are no longer at all marginal: between 25% and 40%, according to the surveys.
The fierce division of the country between left and right, even between extreme left and extreme right, the widely shared discredit of institutions such as the federal government, the media, universities (especially the ultra-politicized humanities), the idea – which has become commonplace and almost obliged to the Republican Party – that the 2020 election was “stolen”, etc. : all this testifies to a marked weakening of the foundations of a democracy.
On the right, the term “civil war” is a leitmotif in the discourse of many politicians and radical commentators. It is also present on the left, more – but not exclusively – in the tone of denunciation and lamentation.
Admittedly, such measures of public opinion, and media rants, are not worth an analysis of the objective probability of such an event.
And if many experts see “a division of American society unprecedented for a century and a half” (Barbara Walter, University of California), they generally do not believe in the scenario of a real civil war.
That is to say: a war in the classic sense, front against front, for the control of territories, like that of 1861-1865. What is more at the time, around a specific question: slavery, a pillar of the economy in the 18e and XIXe centuries, a gigantic moral fault whose psychological and political effects persist 150 years later.
Walter’s words are not reassuring. In a recent interview with washington postshe says:
“When people think ‘civil war’, they think of our Civil War. In their minds, this is what a new conflict would look like. But it’s not that. […] What we are heading towards is an insurrection, which is also a form of civil war […] more decentralized, using unconventional tactics, targeting infrastructure, civilians. Internal terror and guerrilla warfare, hit-and-run raids, bombs,” etc.
One thinks of these hundreds of groups followed by the secret services, of the “Proud Boys” type, which Donald Trump has never clearly denounced, and which made January 6, 2021. On the side of institutional politics, one thinks of the latest generation of politicians promoted by Trump in the Republican primaries.
For the post of governor of Arizona, the ex-president has set his sights, for example, on Kari Lake, a former television news presenter. This woman harangues the crowds with blows of “the government is rotten to the marrow”; “America is dead”, “Joe Biden is satanic”. With such speeches, we go to politics as we go to war.
Of course, the rhetoric of war is much more common than war itself. But these “end of the world” speeches can encourage people to take action.
The threat to democracy in the United States comes mostly from the right. This is not to minimize the misdeeds of “wokism” in the academic, media and literary world. But in that country, there is clearly a camp which, with or without arms, in the political space and beyond, is today trying to organize a real subversion of democracy.
Was January 6 a singular “peak”, or the harbinger of much worse?
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Ici Radio-Canada.
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