Yes, the United States is on the Brink of a Second Civil War

The ubiquitous gender and racial discrimination, rampant xenophobia, the “Occupy Wall Street,” and the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) are all examples of the United States’ inherent propensity to devolve into dangerous conflicts, social tensions, and anarchy.

Analysts argue that Trump supporters’ violent occupation of the Capitol in protest of the presidential election results on January 6, 2022, for the first time, dangerously exposed the looming spectre of a second American civil war.

In fact, the horrendous episode demonstrated how much the country’s bifurcated political milieu has deteriorated, prompting the frustrated American masses to demolish the current political system and form a new establishment that bypasses the political elites in Washington, DC.

Today, millions of Americans seek short-term remedies to their economic predicament by purging the loathsome government bureaucrats, scholars, and progressive intelligentsia [1] to resuscitate a national ethos like the “American Dream.”

There are growing fears among eminent sociologists, like Stephen Marche, that the rapid rise of populism and flourishing aggressive chauvinism, the partisanship of the state bureaucratic structure, the erosion of democratic institutions, the widening class divide, the dilapidated state of America’s infrastructure, and moribund industries have put America on the brink of a civil war. [2]

Within the ailing American society where both parties, Republicans and Democrats, have proved utterly incapable of reinvigorating the US shrinking economy, most citizens will support anti-democratic figures like Trump. The inflammatory nature of the latter’s rhetoric and populism appeal to conservative and underprivileged white communities. However, this strident jingoism and philosophy of exclusion will stir fatal social fault lines and grievances that can lead to a bloody civil clash between different segments of US society.

As the US is embroiled in its worst political turmoil in decades, according to a new study conducted by The Economist magazine and YouGov, 43% of respondents expressed fear that another civil war might break out in the nation within the next ten years. [3]

Meanwhile, for many American philosophers, the increasing desire of US citizens to increasingly procure weapons[4] and their profound scepticism of the electoral system, as described by Thomas Hobbes, is a clear sign of society’s transition from civil society to the state of nature:

The natural condition of mankind is a state of war in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” because individuals are in a “war of all against all.”

This society, according to Hobbes, is on the edge of socio-economic and political anarchy, where “man is a wolf to man.” [5]

One of the most recent symptoms of the Hobbesian state of nature in the United States was the outburst of rage and indignation by Donald Trump’s loyalists at the FBI’s inspection of his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The former US president is being investigated for hoarding nuclear weapons-related classified documents at his sumptuous Florida mansion.

Following the incident, according to The New York Times, there has been a sharp surge in threat messages against FBI agents and soaring firearms purchases throughout the United States. [6]

According to Eric Hoffer, whose sociological masterpiece “The True Believer” examines the nature of mass movements, societies in which their isolated citizens lack civil identity would pursue emancipating leaders such as Hitler[7], or today’s neo-fascists like Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, and last but not least, Trump in the US.

These ascending constellations of neo-fascists promote de-constructive ideologies and profess their ultimate goal of resuscitating the golden past, in the same vein that Franco promised the Spaniards in the 1930s by waging civil war; “Brother Against Brother.”

To express her sorrow for the plight of millions in the United States and the country’s dreadful future, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on her Twitter account:

“Removing God, promoting drug use, and years of bad government policies that have driven the cost of living to be unaffordable has created a homeless crisis in America that’s rapidly increased in the past few years. American greatness has peaked and is now in a heartbreaking decline.”[8]

[1] https://www.une.edu/events/2022/bifurcation-america-and-other-countries

[2] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Next-Civil-War/Stephen-Marche/9781982123215

[3]https://www.anews.com.tr/americas/2022/08/31/americans-believe-current-political-climate-likely-to-lead-to-another-civil-war?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/25/why-even-more-americans-are-arming-up-with-ar-15-

guns.html

[5] Rossello, D. (2012). Hobbes and the Wolf-Man: Melancholy and Animality in Modern Sovereignty. New Literary History, 43(2), 255-279.

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/us/politics/trump-search-violence.html

[7] Hoffer, Eric. “The True Believer: thoughts on the nature of mass movements.” NY: Harper and Row (1951).

[8] https://twitter.com/Abolfath/status/1565378704414572544?t=Ph8UZBm7C3djhiTjuke1VQ&s=35