The United States elects a divided and contentious president. State governments oppose his authority. In numerous states, popular anger has erupted into low-level violence. What happens next?
We’ve already been here. To avoid a suspected murder plan, Abraham Lincoln had to be taken via Baltimore on a private train to Washington DC in 1861. A five-year civil war broke out not long after he gained office.
Despite losing the American Civil War thoroughly, the racist right in the United States has for decades consoled itself by reading insane “alternate history” books in which things turn out differently. According to Time magazine, Steve Bannon, the White House chief of staff and Donald Trump’s closest advisor, believes the next chapter of American history will be as devastating and horrific as the war of 1861-65.
“What if…” novels about the civil war entered popular literature in the 1950s, during the time that black protestors were challenging apartheid’s Jim Crow regime. Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s 1953 book, depicts the Confederacy winning the war but releasing the slaves.
If the South Had Won the Civil War, a fictional history written by McKinlay Kantor, was released in 1960. In these and other twentieth-century explorations of the Confederate victory dream, the south triumphs but is compelled to abolish slavery in order to unleash industrial capitalism. The implication is clear: the conflict between white American brothers was futile since economic growth would have handled the slavery problem anyhow.
After the 1980s, however, the new American right viewed things differently. Newt Gingrich, then-Speaker of the House and now a strong Trump supporter, took a break from impeaching Bill Clinton to co-author three achingly grim alternate history books about the civil war. In the last instalment of the trilogy, Never Call Retreat, written by Gingrich with William Forstchen and Albert Hanser, the Union side wins the war but, by implication, the south wins the peace. With Sherman’s Union force on the verge of annihilating Atlanta, Confederate leader Robert E Lee persuades the south to surrender. “Our opponents’ patience has run out,” this fictitious Lee tells the Confederate authorities. “We will reap a dreadful storm that will harm our country for decades.” Lincoln then delivers the Gettysburg Address to a country that, by inference, has made peace with the slaveowners and the white supremacy ideology they practised.
Consider this comment from Bannon, given on his radio show in December 2015 to illustrate the worldview of his Breitbart website: “This is war. It’s wartime. Every day, we put up signs saying, “America is at war, America is at war.” We’ve declared war.”
Islam, according to Bannon, is the number one opponent in this “war,” with China coming in second. However, there is a fifth column in America that must be dealt with as part of a “global existential conflict.” According to Bannon, this fits into a generational theory of American power in which the nation fulfils its destiny through a cycle of catastrophic crises: first, the 1776 revolution, then the civil war, then the involvement in WWII, and ultimately the crisis Bannon plans to trigger through Trump.
So, in Bannon and Gingrich, you have two persons influencing the world’s most powerful office whose opinions about the dynamics of US history are best defined as hazardous nonsense. Bannon fantasises about escalating the cultural war; Gingrich fantasises about the survival of an undamaged South. Trump, whose fancies tend to focus around ladies, riches, and huge structures, has a lot less hazardous imagination in comparison.
The destruction of UC Berkeley in a riot against Breitbart star Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as recurrent physical encounters between white nationalists and anti-Trump supporters, indicate the possibility of escalation. Dan Adamini, a Michigan Republican Party leader, stated that leftwing demonstrators should be dealt with in the same way the Ohio National Guard did in 1970: by shooting them dead.
One significant distinction should be noted for a new generation of demonstrators raised on post-1968 falsehoods. This time, we are not dealing with cold-blooded conservatives protecting an established system, for whom the massacre of four Kent State students triggered a political crisis. This time, we’re dealing with people who want the United States’ institutions to blow apart. That is what happens in the “Fourth Turning” paradigm, which Bannon believes in.
It’s unsettling to admit it, but we must: significant segments of the American right desire another civil war. They’ve spent years gathering the necessary equipment, and their preferred signifier – hunting camouflage – also hints at what they’re thinking. In this circumstance, the US left, minorities, and women should choose to resist – but not to give the adversary what they want.
Last week’s biggest screech came from the Trump camp in response to the judicial suspension of the anti-Muslim travel ban. More squeals will be heard if progressive-run states and towns start exercising their constitutional rights to resist Trump, as San Francisco police did by stopping cooperation with the FBI’s counter-terrorism activities.
The possibility of widespread civil disobedience against Trump exists. When combined with judicial defence of the constitution and vigorous opposition in Congress, it has the potential to turn the White House into a mental jail for these fantasists rather than the command bunker for American civil war 2.0.
