A journalist and the author of the book The Next Civil War has published a terrifying but credible overview of the status of American democracy today, just two days before the anniversary of Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection.
“The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions,” writes Stephen Marche at The Guardian in “The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it.”
“January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry,” Marche says. “Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.”
He says Americans should not place false hopes in law enforcement officials, including police, saving us.
“Hard right organization[s] have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.”
Marche writes that “white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions,” as he quotes a former undercover FBI agent who used to work on domestic terrorism cases:
“The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.”
And he blasts the left which he says “has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment.”
The left “must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.”
Read the entire piece here.