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History.
Politics.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.
"Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government." ??TheNew York Times Book Review* "Well researched and eloquently presented." ??The Atlantic * "It's not a matter of if but when: A civil war is on the way...In a time of torment, this is a book well worth reading." ??Kirkus Reviews
In this deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction that reads like Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized crossed with David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth, a celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight??a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts?? and tips America over the edge into ruin.
These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts??civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists??journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels.
No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe??of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its l… (más)
I was very disappointed by this - basically nothing more than a catalog of current political grievances left and right, with only one scenario fleshing out to anything resembling a civil war (an intractable insurgency) and only one showing a (completely unrealistic) breakup map. It's readable, and not really unbelievable, but the text just doesn't fit the title. Meh. ( )
In what appears to me to be a comprehensive review of numerous aspects of US life and decisions over the past 30 years the author has determined that collapse of lots of the US is coming, and soon. The primary issue is political collapse because of the rural bias in the Constitution & the alignment of so many people into one of two camps that hate each other (his words), such that there is no ability of people to accommodate the needs & wishes of each other. He is clear that he believes major violence will come soon, not necessarily as civil war - altho maybe that - but frequent violent attacks by individuals aligned with RW & "sovereign citizen" groups ... or by coordinated attacks by one or more of those groups. The book reviews a lot of historical data about the US but also about the decline and collapse of numerous previous democracies or semi-democracies, and what caused those declines & collapses. The book is compelling although I acknowledge my belief over many years that our society would collapse due to hypocrisy and beliefs supposedly held that conflict with other beliefs. ( )
Incredible book. For whatever reason I didn't log this book as read when I was done so I don't remember particular examples but this overall "fictional" version of this story seems spot on to me how it would play out in real life. The way politics are going in this country, it wouldn't be a bad idea to read. ( )
Incredible book. For whatever reason I didn't log this book as read when I was done so I don't remember particular examples but this overall "fictional" version of this story seems spot on to me how it would play out in real life. The way politics are going in this country, it wouldn't be a bad idea to read. ( )
Grim recognition makes this book horrifying. Every rebuttal is deconstructed if not by the turn of the page then certainly by the evening news. If there are winners to this march, it will not be America or the majority of people - on either side - who live here. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die of suicide. -Abraham Lincoln
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
To Elijah and Aviva
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The United States is coming to an end. - Introduction
Until the killing starts, the uprising looks like a party.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
If democracy falls, the peace and security of the global order falls. No one will escape the consequences.
Canada is the Horatio to America's Hamlet, a close and sympathetic and mostly irrelevant witness to the grand dramatics on the other side of the border. I am a foreigner who has lived in the United States, who works in the United States, who loves the United States. While I'm pretty much in the dead center on the political spectrum of my own country, I don't want to hide the fact that on policy questions my underlying assumptions would be considered liberal by most Americans.
The people who know what they're talking about come from both sides. They serve larger interests than partisan politics.
Trump is far less meaningful than either side understands. The smartest thing he himself ever said about his political career was in a 2017 press conference: “I didn't come along and divide this country. This country was seriously divided before I got here.” Trump is, at most, a symptom.
if Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, all the forces pointing toward the fall of the Republic would be no less powerful than they are right now. Those forces—the hyper-partisanship, the bifurcation of the country into blue and red, the violent loathing for the federal government, the economic unsustainability, the incipient crises in the food supply and urban environmental security, the rise of the hard-right anti-government patriot militias—are the subject of this book.
American liberals in the major cities retain a kind of desperate faith in their country's institutions that amounts nearly to delusion.
Americans have taught themselves for 250 years that their country, in its ideals and systems, is the solution to history. It is tough, under those conditions, to accept being just another of history's half perpetrators, half victims.
The Republican Party now has an elected wing and an armed militant wing.
The US system is an archaic mode of government totally unsuited to the realities of the twenty-first century.
The Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press reported presidential crimes. Americans took the press seriously. The political parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption. You could not make one of those statements today with any confidence.
The nature of war against insurgents is so vicious exactly because meaning is at stake: When you are fighting for freedom and your soul, what won't you do?
Bloody revolution and the threat of secession are essential to the American experiment.
The anti-government patriots, and the sovereign citizens who are their most extreme members, are the most overt reflection of lost white privilege in the United States.
The resistance movement to the United States is broad and deep and violent. It is intellectually incoherent but ferociously devoted.
The lack of a coherent or stable ideology means that the knowledge is esoteric, the world illuminated by a hidden meaning known only to the initiated.
The audience is full of veterans and police officers. The armed anti-government forces are rising among those who serve or once served the government they condemn. Finicum Finch loves the police forces and those who serve. She repeats that she isn't anti-government; she's just anti–corrupt government. That line is the line on which the new radical Americanism rides.
The hard right has strategically infiltrated law enforcement in the United States to such an extent that no police department or federal agency can be relied upon in a struggle against white supremacy.
“If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,' and the government says, ‘Oh, my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.' And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn't used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”
The current state of American law enforcement reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces that provoke domestic terrorism.
Any future legislation on guns—more consistent background checks, assault rifle bans—is at this point moot. The United States is saturated with weaponry. The weapons, as impressive as they are, matter less than their symbolism. The main reason Americans buy guns is to tell themselves the story of the failure of government.
When you murder a president, you murder an America that should have been.
The Assassin, wherever he might be, is stewing in his failure and idealism. He's a loser, a dreamer, a man-boy denied a destiny who feels a destiny is owed to him. His sense of his own importance only rises with each personal failure.
During the Obama era, 66 percent of white Republicans scored high on the racial resentment scale. For white Democrats it was around 32 percent.” White Republicans have become more intolerant about the country's growing diversity. White Democrats haven't. That's the big change.
The more an underclass peacefully approaches economic and political equality, the more violent and resentful the overclass grows.
white Americans don't resent growing poorer. They resent losing their comparative superiority to non-white Americans.
The Democrats represent a multicultural country grounded in liberal democracy. The Republicans represent a white country grounded in the sanctity of property. America cannot operate as both at once.
partisanship has already compromised nearly every institution in the United States. Congress has popularity numbers below 10 percent. The presidency, as it becomes less and less representative of the popular vote, loses its capacity to act with unified executive function. Since Bush v. Gore in 2000, everyone recognizes that the Supreme Court no longer represents transcendent interests of national purpose. It's merely a collection of partisan hacks, like any other branch of the US government.
The greatest threat to the United States today is not the rise of the hard right. It is the general decline of legitimacy in government that underlies the rise of the hard right.
The great insight of its founders was that they based government not on the drive toward consensus but on the permission for disagreement.
Climate crises and mass inequality have been preludes to civil war and to revolution everywhere—Europe, Africa, South America, Asia—and they'll be preludes to crisis in the United States as well.
every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions. There are precisely zero historical precedents that don't end in destruction.
“When you're very unequal, there's not just inequality of outcomes but inequality of opportunities. People are not going to have access to health care, to education, to the political process, so you're going to be leaving a lot of your population disenfranchised and not participating. It's going to mean that your economy is being run by a very small group. Those societies are going to be more brittle and less resilient to shocks.” Inequality leads to crashes, which lead to further inequality.
The first climate model appeared in 1967, created by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald, and it remains more or less completely accurate.
If massive pieces of glaciers collapse, sudden sea level rise will follow, and with sudden sea level rise, the complex cascading system will spiral out of control.
the most likely scenario is that those with enough resources will flee, leaving behind the poor and vulnerable.
The resonance of September 11 in public life caused the United States to enter two failed wars and to continue those wars long after any national or global interests were being served. A domestic September 11 would create the same irresistible momentum. A serious assault on the political symbols, a sense that the nation, as a body, could be under threat, would inevitably provoke the impetus for revenge and the hunger for order.
The American government, in order to survive, will have to suspend the most sacred icon of the American government, the Bill of Rights. So, right from the beginning, as an inevitable element of this kind of war, a massive portion of the US populace, nearly half, would consider the actions of the US government un-American. And they wouldn't be wrong.
Wars of counterinsurgency are wars of perception. You can't murder your way to any perception other than that you're a murderer.
You cannot punish people out of hating you.
as for the “resolution of the underlying issues,” what would such a question even mean? The resolution of a country devoted to liberty but founded on slavery? The resolution of a political order built on revolutionary overthrowing? How do you resolve the glorious contradictions of the Republic, the contradictions that have made it great? What would that even look like?
Once the state gets involved in political violence, the machinery of the peaceful transition of power is superfluous.
An insurgent conflict in America, the only country in the world where there are more guns than people, would eclipse all previous insurgent conflicts.
Huge geographical inequalities are baked into the system of government—which is, after all, nearly 250 years old. Sixty-two senators represent one quarter of the American population. Six senators represent another quarter. The same discrepancy, though to a much lesser extent, causes presidential victories without the popular vote, which further skews the power imbalance.
Whoever is in power, on either side, forges the structures to keep themselves in power. Everybody wants democracy but nobody wants democracy. Gerrymandering leads, quite naturally, to voter suppression, which is increasingly an overt tactic.
in most countries in the world, secession is illegal, just as it is in the United States. That's not to say it doesn't happen. The laws adapt to the reality of history.
America is founded on the right to break up political unities. That's what makes America separatism so fascinating, so distinct.
They are living their original national contradiction to the full—patriotic treason and treasonous patriotism.
Separatists in America love America... They have devoted themselves to the basic proposition that America is no longer possible in the United States of America.
White Americans have always suspected that America is not essentially a white country and that their whiteness is incompatible with its future.
The practice of constitutional law in the United States gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Once again, as before, the hope for America is Americans.
History.
Politics.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.
"Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government." ??TheNew York Times Book Review * "Well researched and eloquently presented." ??The Atlantic * "It's not a matter of if but when: A civil war is on the way...In a time of torment, this is a book well worth reading." ??Kirkus Reviews
In this deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction that reads like Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized crossed with David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth, a celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight??a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts?? and tips America over the edge into ruin.
These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts??civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists??journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels.
No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe??of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its l
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