When people toss around references to 1861, they are referring to the great “bellum” (“war”) that organises all of US history into two distinct “before” and “after” periods. This industrial-scale armed slaughter killed 2.5 per cent of the US population, still the largest mass casualty war in American history. So it is important to establish a sense of proportion. The US is a large, impossibly diverse country. At this moment in its history, it is probably no less difficult to govern effectively than it would be to divide into well-organised camps battling for supremacy, precinct by precinct. The conventional red-blue election maps not only distort the marbled grain of US political contention, but also much of the ordinary, if grudging comity of everyday life in a society where most people work, day in, day out, with others to make their lives liveable. The consequences of the staggering loss of life from the pandemic will unpredictably affect our politics for years to come. That reliable bellwethers of elite, middlebrow common sense now imagine that the US is on a path toward a civil war is a good indicator that we are in the presence of a shallow or hyperbolic reading of our predicament.
That said, the turn to civil conflict directs us to some crucial questions. The idea of war among people who acknowledge their enemies as members of the same political community tells us something significant about the societies in which we live. Use of this concept, as the historian David Armitage suggests, generates contests over its proper meaning and disagreements about the character of social conflict itself: is it a riot or revolution, an insurgency or a reactionary backlash, a protest or a criminal action? Walter and Marche try to add a veneer of objectivity by employing the minimalist, low-threshold definition of civil war as “major armed conflict” resulting in more than 1,000 fatalities per year. But given that US police forces kill approximately 1,000 people per year, it might be fair to say that the country already subsists in a state of low-grade civil war. The recurrence and scope of popular protest, including rioting after the killing of Michael Brown and George Floyd by police in 2014 and 2020 respectively, lends credence to this suggestion: in the zones of precarity where many people dwell, impoverished, unsheltered and overpoliced, civil war is ongoing.
Complicating matters further, interpreting the meaning of the actual US Civil War is an aporia at the heart of America’s politics. Historical interpretation of the meaning of the “antebellum” period remains contested by what we call the left and the right, where it is alternatively understood as beginning in 1619, with the start of racial slavery in America, whose baleful legacies continue today; or in 1776, with the compact of self-governing republics whose founding constitutional design is supposed to transparently constrain all positive law. Similarly conflicted is interpretation of the postbellum politics of an industrialising nation and its reformed constitutional order, whose centralised state, racially inclusive citizenship, extensions of immigration and naturalisation and substantive due process rights have been repudiated by political opponents on the right ever since. From certain intellectual and partisan standpoints, the Civil War either settled nothing of consequence, or never really ended.