“The Next Civil War – Dispatches from the American Future” by Stephen Marche, 2022
This book is a mixture of speculative fiction and journalistic
reporting, using present facts to populate a possible coming reality. These two views take their turns in the
telling. Marche imagines some kind of civil war will break out in the 2030s,
though he understands that there has been a slow-burning one for years. His outlook is of a dismayed bourgeois liberal
looking at the fraying institutions in the U.S. with little understanding of
economics or the dual ‘Party’ nature of political decay. To Marche it is now a question of
partisanship run amok.
The book is marked by making specific predictions based on the situation in 2022, though conditions have changed quite severely. The ‘guvmint’ is now in the direct hands of
billionaires and dictatorial Libertarian privatizers, not a female Democrat.
The fiction part is a ‘sovereign citizen’ and
‘Constitutional’ sheriff’s revolt against the repair of a run-down bridge in a
rural town. Fixing the bridge by the
federal government would force residents to drive the long way around. The Sheriff’s standoff attracts a host of
armed right-wingers. It profiles a
young, isolated loser radicalized by the internet who decides to shoot the
female President as part of his intervention in history. It is a return of a
virus that the government and part of the population can’t agree on how to
combat, involving a NYC producer who temporarily visits her 'red-state' sister and mother
in Davenport, Iowa. This visit is
compounded by a financial crash in the markets. It is a hurricane barreling
into New York City, even when it is protected by 3 water gates. New York is
flooded and mostly destroyed, while climate refugees run.
The fact part is Marche’s visit to the largest gun show in
the U.S. in Oklahoma and a recounting of the large number of killings involving
fascists of various kinds in the U.S. He
looks at the various right-wing ideologies that combine and develop, mutating
in a kind of viral reactionary soup. He includes a psychological profile of
assassins and mass shooters. He analyzes
the predictions of climate modeling on drought, farming, food and
property issues. He interviews losing alt-right
figure Richard Spenser. Marche retails
the stats on the vast increase in inequality in the U.S., which he attributes
to the 2006 financial crash especially.
He predicts a severe economic contraction, based on a theory of
capitalist cycles and inequality. Like
most liberals he thinks inequality is unsolvable, citing an ostensible failure
of the workers’ states to reduce it far below capitalism. Yet they did.
As you can see, Marche’s theme is interrelated crises,
cascading crises, multiple crises, threat multipliers all at one time, which
the capitalist system cannot handle.
What he doesn’t mention is that profit rates are the only goal, which makes crises absolutely inevitable and multiple serious crises
liable to lead to some kind of barbarism if not confronted in a mass way.
Marche predicts violence is the result, sort of like those
dystopian films of zombies, riots, thieves, killings, refugees and civil war. Marche visualizes a dirty bomb dropped from a
drone on the Capitol dome, a sort of domestic 9/11 that rearranges the synapses
of the U.S. population. A pivotal event
so to speak, a match dropped on a dry prairie, but the reverse of Mao’s idea. He first pictures a sort of war of ‘all
against all’ – not defined by any geography.
He wonders whether the Left will be armed. He thinks the military’s occupation and counter-insurgency
tactics will not really work, showing that he expects the military to protect the
state and that it will not split. He
predicts a military dictatorship that will end ‘the Republic.’ All this is marked by a breathless
liberalism. Yet the real Left will be armed.
Many cities will be redoubts of resistance to fascism. The military will split. It could become a class war – if all this actually
comes about as he thinks.
Marche posits that the solution to this conflict will be a splintering
of the U.S. – but done rationally like a reasonable divorce, though probably also violently. The country is done as he puts it. He discusses secessionist movements in
California and Texas, though secession is illegal but ultimately will be accepted as a logical solution. He endorses the conventional map of ‘blue’
and ‘red’ areas, of Democratic zones and Republican zones, suspiciously like
the 2020 electoral map. He has no
thought for class, but only psychology, identity and such as the sources of
division. The first Civil War was based
on a very grievous and potent economic construction – slavery. The present economic structure that plays a
similar role now is wage slavery and capitalism itself.
Marche’s cheery and cheesy map of the U.S. split into 4 pieces looks like this: #1) Cascadia – California, Oregon and
Washington; #2) the Texas Republic alone; #3) the South, Mountain and Central
states, called ‘The Republic of the United States’ and #4) Minnesota all the
way over to Virginia, as ‘The United States.’
Hawaii would be part of #4 and Alaska #3. Seems there is no role for
Canada or Mexico, while some states would dicker about where to belong. Colorado?
Arizona? Nevada? His plan was, I think the fictional basis for the movie “Civil War’ starring Kirsten Dunst, reviewed
below.
Marche did not anticipate ‘sovereign citizen’ billionaires
directly taking over the federal guvmint and becoming the ‘not so deep’ state,
an anaconda of attempted Orbanism. Is
this really a prelude to a geographic civil war waged by bourgeois factions of Democrats
and Republicans? Or by the working
classes against the rich and corporate government instead? It seems to be our
choice, not his.
Marche claims at the end that “The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit.” He advocates ‘starting over’ as the “ghostly
Constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirt
that animated their (the founders’) enterprise.” Not sure what any of that means, but these
words don’t seem to relate to a 4-way secession. At any rate, a think piece book for people
who don’t think about these things, with some thoughts, scenarios and solutions
untouched.
Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search
box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Civil
War,” ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming.’
And I got it at the Library!
Red Frog / March 8, 2025
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