Today’s journal entry will not be about Covid; it will address the question of whether the United States is on the brink of a second civil war, as some scholars and political commentators believe.

Civil war, once unmentionable in our political discourse, has recently become a fashionable topic among academics and pundits. The anniversary of the insurrection or, if you prefer, the riot, in the nation’s capital last Jan. 6 has been the conversational ice-breaker, assisted by the publication of two new books: How Civil Wars Start, by political scientist Barbara Walter, and The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, by Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist and journalist. Both have inspired spirited essays by heavyweights like The New Yorker‘s David Remnick and The New York Times‘s Michelle Goldberg, who tend to agree with Walter and Marche’s theory — the U.S. is swiftly heading toward the abyss. Other writers, among them John Harris, the founder of Politico, and Ross Douthat, also of the Times, have pushed back, characterizing such forecasts as alarmist hyperbole. There has even been pushback to the pushback. Charlie Warzel, who writes a newsletter for The Atlantic, recently criticized Harris for portraying people “worried about insurgent violence as hysterical neurotics.”

All this is not sound and fury signifying nothing. The mere fact that the chance of civil war, considered unthinkable just a few years ago, is now being discussed signifies plenty. The columns and reportage I’ve been reading lately have got me thinking about two things from my own past.

The first is the cross-continental road trip my wife and I took from the Florida Keys to the Arctic Ocean in 2010. We were seeking adventure but also our fellow citizens’ views on what holds a country as vast and diverse as the United States together. In The Longest Road, the book I wrote about our journey, I noted that American society was beginning to resemble a shattered windshield still in its frame. It had been fractured by, among other things, the Great Recession, which threw millions out of work as foreclosures evicted them from their homes, by protracted wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and by ever-widening inequality, with the Haves getting more while the Have-Nots got less. People were justifiably angry. Crowds at a political rally in Texas called on their then governor to secede from the Union; a candidate for the U.S, Senate in Nevada warned that if conservatives like herself didn’t get their way they might resort to armed insurrection; in Arizona, the state senate was considering legislation to empower Arizona to invalidate any federal law it deemed unconstitutional  — a notion with disturbing echoes of the Nullification doctrine promoted by southern politicians like John Calhoun prior to the Civil War.

The rage, smoldering for a decade, fanned by President Trump and his disciples, accelerated by disinformation and propaganda on social media, burst into flame one year and ten days ago in the nation’s capital. It was as if that Nevada candidate’s threat had come to pass. I can’t say that I was shocked or even surprised, I wondered then (as I do now) if the insurrection was a harbinger of a real shooting war, something like John Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal in 1859. 

The second thing goes further back in time: the civil war that raged in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, a conflict I covered for the Chicago Tribune, and in which I was seriously wounded.

Before the first shots were fired, Lebanon did not seem ripe for fratricidal bloodshed. It was a democracy of sorts. Its capital, Beirut, was a sophisticated, pleasure-loving city, touted as “the Paris of the Near East” in tourist brochures and promotional videos. But after living there a while, one sensed tensions underlying the cosmopolitan ambience — ethnic, religious, and economic tensions among Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Maronite and Orthodox Christians, Druze Arabs and Armenians and Palestinians. Some of these groups, distrustful of the government’s ability to protect them, maintained heavily armed militias. Governing the country was a delicate balancing act, with political power carefully apportioned among the various sects. The causes of the war were complex and multifaceted, but they can be summed up as a “crisis of insecurity.” As the Muslim population grew, members of the Christian elite, led by the Maronites, began to view their majority status as imperiled. On April 13, 1975, gunmen belonging to a Maronite militia, the Phalange, ambushed a bus transporting Palestinians to a refugee camp. That was to the Lebanese Civil War as the firing on Fort Sumter was to ours. It went on for 15 years, resulting in 100,000 deaths and billions of dollars in destroyed property and infrastructure.

If you are still with me, I’d like to make three observations: One, that war was not a clash of ideologies but of identities. Lebanese Christians saw themselves as Christians first, Lebanese second; ditto for Lebanese Muslims. Two, although all sides in the conflict felt threatened, the Christians were the most insecure, viewing their dominant position as under siege by the growing numbers of Muslims. Three, the presence of armed militias, pledging allegiance to their ethnic or religious leaders rather than to the state, transformed what could have been, and should have been, a parliamentary argument into a ghastly conflict.

Today’s America is not remotely what Lebanon was then; but there are parallels worth considering. Politico’s Harris argues that civil war in the U.S. is highly unlikely because there is no real, concrete cause, like slavery, underlying our current divisions. He’s right in one sense: there is no cause ideologically; however, that doesn’t mean there is no cause whatsoever. As Ben Rhodes, a national security advisor in the Obama administration, points out in his somber, incisive book, After the Fall, 21st-century politics center on identity, more specifically on national identity.

And so to Point One: The people who stormed the Capitol last January did what they did because they believe that their American identity is being lost to minorities and immigrants, legal and illegal, as well as to liberal elites. Some grievances of the working class do have merit. Since the turn of the century, median income has all but stagnated, and skilled, well-paid jobs have been lost to automation and globalization, resulting not only in a decline in wages for blue-collar workers but a decline in their sense of self-worth. Many of the insurrectionists were not working class, however; but almost all were white.

Hence, Point Two: That demographic is beset by feelings of insecurity, of a diminishment of status. They fear that they will soon by living in a country they no longer recognize. It is estimated the people of color will be a majority in America by mid-century. Progressives and left-wing activists, by the way, are not off the hook in creating polarization.They practically invented identity politics, alienating white Americans by urging minorities to think of themselves strictly in racial terms, and as victims hopelessly oppressed by the majority. Iconoclasm, toppling statues of revered historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, have further undermined faith in the nation’s foundations. It should come as no surprise, then, that millions of white Americans have been encouraged to view themselves as a distinct racial group, defending America from internal enemies. In the end, however, the right takes the lion’s share of blame, stoking the fires of distrust and resentment. Demagogues like Trump — an elitist if ever there was one — have convinced a large percentage of Americans that progressive Democrats, blacks, and hispanics despise them and are out to rob them of what little they have left.

Add to identity and insecurity Point Three: the presence of armed, anti-government militias. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps track of far-right groups, estimates that there are at least 165  militias in the U.S. Three of the largest, and also the best armed, best trained, and best organized, are the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys, all of whom were in the forefront of the 1/6/21 insurrection. The Oath Keeper’s leader, Stewart Rhodes (a Yale Law graduate, incidentally), has been charged with seditious conspiracy. 

These paramilitary groups would be frontline troops in a second American civil war, should that dreadful possibility become reality. Consequently, it will bear no resemblance at all to the first one. You won’t see the Red State and Blue State armies facing each other on some misty battlefield as dawn breaks, because the ruptures in this country lack geographical coherence. There are Blue enclaves in the Red States and vice-versa. The conflict, in all likelihood, will look more like Lebanon’s in the last century, or Syria’s today — localized insurgencies waged all over the country, bombings, assassinations, random acts of terrorism. Whatever form it takes, it will result in the final disuniting of the United States

One final point: the influence of social media, which exploits human ignorance and gullibility. In her book, Ms. Walter cites how the voices of Buddhist extremists in Myanmar were amplified by Facebook. In 2015, their dire warnings about the dangers posed by Muslim Rohingyas reached a wide audience almost instantly, inciting murderous panic The Rohingyas suffered genocide, and Myanmar is now engulfed in a civil war. Walter also describes how legacy media like television contribute to a descent into internal strife. When the former Yugoslavia broke apart, she writes, Serbian TV broadcast stories about Croatians feeding Serbian children to lions in the Sarajevo zoo.

Sound familiar? If not, I’ll remind you of the QAnon conspiracy theory that went viral in 2016: Hilary Clinton and her campaign manager were running a child pornography and sex-trafficking ring from the backroom of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Thousands of Americans bought into that wild fiction; one of them, Edgar Welch, traveled to Washington from North Carolina and burst into the restaurant wielding an assault rifle. His personal mission was to break up the ring. He was arrested before he could shoot anyone.

I recalled that incident as I read the conclusion of a review of Walter’s book in The Economist: “Ms. Walter mentions only fleetingly why today’s America is not like the former Yugoslavia or other imploding states. No country as sophisticated, modern, liberal and democratic as contemporary America has ever descended into civil war.”

In other words, it can’t happen here. Well, it probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean it can’t.