Protests, guns and religion – a recipe for civil war?

Is America heading for another civil war? The very idea would once have been unthinkable, said Robin Wright in The New Yorker, but a growing number of people are now worried about just such an event. They include Keith Mines, a State Department expert on internecine conflict. Having recently returned after years in strife-torn countries such as El Salvador, Somalia and Sudan, he was alarmed to “find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home”. In March, Foreign Policy magazine asked Mines and several other experts to evaluate the risk of a second US civil war. He concluded that there was a 60% chance of one over the next 15 years. Other predictions ranged from 5% to 95%. The “sobering” average was 35%.

Wright’s article paints a “scary” picture, said Josh Barro on Business Insider, but “it’s nonsense”. America is not heading for a civil war – at least not as most people would define that term. The experts weren’t talking of pitched battles between rival armies, but of the sort of upheaval the US saw in the 1960s and early 1970s, when race riots engulfed major cities and National Guard troops were sent into Southern states to enforce racial integration. There is indeed a grave risk that the US will return to that level of social unrest. “But calling such a situation a ‘civil war’ just makes everybody dumber.”

America is still a long way from the level of civil strife seen in the 1970s, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Despite the fact that the country’s political parties are “more ideologically polarised than at any point in the 20th century”, and social divisions – between religious Right and secular Left, between the coasts and the US heartland – are wider than ever, things remain relatively amicable. “There is still more to life than politics for most of us.” And there is no “existential issue” with the power to force a cataclysmic rift. Abortion is not slavery; voter-id laws are not segregation; toppling Confederate statues isn’t the post-civil War Reconstruction.

Let’s not get too excited about the recent antics of white supremacists and neo-nazis, agreed Garrison Keillor in The Washington Post. “This is a gang of freaks that social media gives the power to unite – in a nation of 325 million, you can Google the secret words and get 700 sociopaths to come to Charlottesville. This is not a meaningful phenomenon.” You could just as easily summon up “700 people who are getting messages from Lucifer through their dental fillings”.

Cranks they may be, said David Frum in The Atlantic, but they are heavily armed ones. It was alarming to see many of them parading through Charlottesville with assault rifles and wearing pseudo-military outfits, including body armour. “They had better equipment than our state police had,” remarked Virginia’s governor, Terry Mcauliffe. Until recently, the idea of individuals carrying visible weapons to a political event in the US was all but unheard of. But over the past few years, with the passage of more “open-carry” laws, elements of the Right have become increasingly brazen – and threatening. In 1994, the average gun-owning household in the US owned four weapons; by 2013, they owned eight. People are accumulating arsenals that would “do credit to a Somali warlord”, and they’re carrying that hardware in public “to brandish against fellow citizens who think differently”. As Americans ponder on events in Charlottesville, they should give some thought to the “even graver tragedy that might have happened – and that sooner or later surely will”.