In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil war
A protest against President Trump before his Feb. 11, 2019, rally in El Paso. Former congressman Beto O'Rourke spoke to the crowd.
With the investigative report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III said to be nearly complete, and with impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election campaign ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or in the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there is talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.
Many chalk up the hyperbolic talk of civil war to the country’s hyperpartisan atmosphere and a cable news arms race in which commentators feel compelled to amp up the rhetoric to be heard when everyone, including the president and Congress, seems to be shouting all the time. The talk has drawn particular derision from some military-veteran groups, whose members have experienced actual warfare.
Joshua Geltzer, left, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, says the country should be ready for President Trump to not “leave the Oval Office peacefully” if he loses in 2020. That issue was uppermost in the mind of Joshua Geltzer, a senior Justice Department official under Obama, when he recently wrote an op-ed for CNN urging the country to prepare for the possibility that Trump might not “leave the Oval Office peacefully” if he loses in 2020.
Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asked last summer in an essay in National Review. Hanson said the United States “was nearing a point comparable to 1860,” about a year before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, S.C.
All the doom, gloom and divisiveness has caught the attention of experts who evaluate the strength of governments around the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a measure widely cited by political scientists, demoted the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy” in January 2017, citing a big drop in Americans’ trust in their political institutions.
James Fearon, a Stanford University political scientist who researches political violence, called the pundits’ warnings “basically absurd.” But he noted that political polarization and the possibility of a potentially serious constitutional crisis in the near future do “marginally increase the still very low odds” of a stalemate that might require “some kind of action by the military leadership.
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