If the American experiment finally decides to end, how can the national breakdown begin?
California may be headed toward secession after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s strict gun control measures. Or the rioters in Texas as the dispute over increasingly dangerous abortion laws and the state’s National Guard remained loyal to the second Texas republic. Or a skirmish over the closure of a local bridge by federal inspectors escalates into a confrontation between a beloved sheriff and a popular general, and the rest of the country takes sides. Which side? Or it was the coordinated bombings of state capitals that took place during the presidential transition in 2028, with right-wing militias and left-wing activists blaming each other.
In other words: It’s not you, it’s me who hates you.
These scenarios are not created by me; They all appear in recent nonfiction books warning of a schism in America. Separatist impulses take shape in the work “ by David FrenchDivide us in the fall,” warns that the political and cultural convergence of Americans threatens to tear the country apart. (French published it before becoming a Times columnist in 2023.) Explosion at State Building by Barbara F. Walter “How did the Civil War begin?,” notes that as democratic norms erode, opportunistic leaders can easily exacerbate ethnic and cultural divisions that lead to violence. The Battle on the Bridge is one of the few Sumter moments that could happen in “The next civil war,” argues that our great divorce will stem from irreconcilable differences about what America stands for.
These authors provide examples of what could happen, not predictions of what will happen. Their view is that our politics and culture are susceptible to such possibilities. “The crisis has arrived,” Marche wrote. “There are only inciting incidents pending.”
It is the lack of provocative details that makes writer-director Alex Garland’s new film so controversial, “civil war” (its box office success is partly due to countless belong to newspaper columnist will see it), a fascinating addition to this classic. We will never know exactly who or what caused the new American civil war, or which ideology, if any, was vying for power. It was a disorienting and risky move, but it worked. A complicated back story will distract viewers from the war itself – its bouts of despair and detachment, of death and denial – as do the jaded journalists at the center of the story. lived and recorded.
Even the choice of journalists as the film’s protagonists creates an additional layer of exclusion, especially since, strangely, these journalists rarely discuss the origins of the conflict or place questions about its politics, even among themselves. (“We record so people can ask,” a veteran photographer reminds her relatives.) The story is built around their trip from New York to Washington, where they hope to get a the last presidential interview before the fall of the capital.
“Civil War” is a road trip movie, if your road trip happens somewhere in between “nomadic land” and the backwardness of “Road.” If you’re trying to see national monuments before they turn into rubble. If stopping for gas involves Canadian money and torture scenes. If only stadium camps and mass graves had become standard features of the beautiful America.
In this story, California and Texas have both seceded and somehow allied with each other. They are fighting the remnants of the U.S. armed forces as well as some loyal Secret Service agents and White House hardliners, all of whom serve the same purpose as military personnel. used in the “Star Trek” landing party. There is also an organization called the Florida Alliance, which is also trying to persuade the people of Carolina to secede from Washington.
But the most memorable fighters in this war were the unofficial militias found across the country, with motives for violence ranging from self-defense to indulgence. One fighter explained with annoyance why he was aiming at a sniper: “Someone is trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.” Another exudes slow-motion joy as he executes his uniformed, hooded prisoners. Another fighter mutters that he strung up a local mobster in part because he ignored him in high school, a casual malice that reminded me of Shad Ledue, the diligent killer feature in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.” When Ledue gains a little power – just enough – over his kind but forgetful former masters, nagging resentment fuels his vengeance.
Civil conflict is sustained by the belief of different groups that “their position and status in society” has been downgraded, Walter writes. Whether that erosion is real may be less relevant than feelings of oppression and loss and the opportunity to blame and punish someone for it. Once the door is ajar, high school slights and condescending bosses become justifiable reasons – precisely because they are so petty – for violence.
The power of “Civil War” lies in how the set pieces deepen the film’s ambiguity as well as its realism. By chance we learn that the president is serving his third term and the action begins with him rehearsing his lies before addressing the nation. (So was secession a reaction to an authoritarian leader, or was his lengthy tenure itself a reaction to regional rebellion?) The president has made decisions that cause trouble. controversy, such as deploying airstrikes against US citizens (a plot point that reminded me of the US killing radicals). priest Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011) and disbanded the FBI (this evokes decide America’s fate disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003). The war photographer at the center of the film, played by Kirsten Dunst, rose to fame in college when he took the “legendary” photo of something called the Antifa Massacre. (I immediately think of the indelible photo of Kent State from 1970, also taken by a university photographer, although whether this new massacre was attributed to Antifa activists or against remains unclear.)
“Civil War” is not so much divorced from the title as it is embedded in history; it is not a vision of what could happen in America but a synthesis of what has already happened, some here and many other places.
In that sense, the film is reminiscent of Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel “American War,” imagines a new civil conflict at the end of the 21st century, after climate change has reshaped the country and a federal ban on fossil fuel use has fueled an uprising of gun-clinging Americans and gas guzzlers. El Akkad, a journalist who covers terrorism, military tribunals, and mass migration around the world, decides to put it all in one place, a future America where principle has given way. room for retribution. “This is not just about secession anymore,” someone explained after the fighting began. “This is about avenging our dead.” It’s a book-length refutation of American exceptionalism.
“Civil War” offers a similar rebuttal in the lament of Dunst, who struggles with flashbacks to many of the conflicts she covers and also cannot accept that it is happens here. “Every time I survive a war zone and take this photo, I think I’m sending a warning home: Don’t do this,” she said. But here we are.”
The missing back story in “Civil War” does not detract from any consideration of how such a war might have begun; it forces the viewer to realize that there are many different paths that can get us there. We don’t have to be the United States of the 1850s or the Balkans of the 1990s; We can choose our own risks.
Of course, not everyone chooses sides. Political violence does not necessarily depend on mass mobilization but only on the right combination of minority zeal and majority indifference, or perhaps fear. During the Civil War, journalists stumble upon a town where time has changed, sprinklers still spraying and stores are still open, seemingly insulated from the chaos. One resident explained that she saw the fighting on television but would rather “stay out.” The coexistence of brutality and normality is a constant feature of war, and I can imagine many Americans experiencing an actual civil war with similar gaps. (Perhaps they would call it self-care.) But I doubt that too many of us would feel what Marche calls “the joy of being despised.” That joy is everywhere in Civil War, not least in the slowly developing Abu Ghraib-style photo over the film’s end credits.
In “How the Civil War Began,” Walter points to the breakdown of a unified national identity as a precursor to conflict. In Iraq, she writes, people began asking who was Shiite and who was Sunni; In Bosnia, the differences between Serb, Croat and Muslim identities overwhelmed all others. One of the most disturbing moments in Civil War shows a camouflage-clad warrior threatening journalists. When they confirmed they were Americans, he asked, “How American are you?” At gunpoint, they answered, and the deadly exchange showed that the definition of America is no longer found in the creed of freedom, equality and opportunity but in the mud of blood, soil and language.
The search for a cohesive national definition appears in recent books that warn of our deepening divisions. Walter compares the political tensions of our time to those of the 1850s and 1960s. “Both times, domestic political parties had radically different visions of America’s future. What could the country be? What is needed? Is the country okay?” She hopes that America’s enduring ideals and shared history can inspire us “to fulfill the promise of a truly multiracial democracy.” In “Divided We Fall,” French imagines but does not expect that we can rely on our federal tradition to let the various states live as they please while still protecting individual rights, not to mention to the alliance.
Such outcomes would require an acceptance of those shared ideals and history, a seeming consensus about what kind of country we want to be. This is all the more difficult in an America with rapidly evolving identities and symbols, a country where group rights and grievances threaten to overwhelm the commonalities and compromises that unite them. we are together. “Identity-based parties make it impossible for voters to switch sides,” Walter writes. “They will have nowhere to go if their political identity is tied to their ethnic or religious identity.”
Marche hoped that America would regain its swagger and reinvent its politics, but the estrangement he saw offered little encouragement. “Each side accuses the other of hating America,” he wrote, “which is just another way of saying that both hate what the other means by America.”
The debate about what kind of America we want is important and relentless. But when it moves from the universal to the individual, from the kind of America we want to the kind of America we will accept, we move from conversation to interrogation, from investigation to tragedy. You don’t have to believe that a new civil war is imminent to understand the danger of the question – “What kind of American are you?” – and realize that the more answers we grasp, the weaker we become.
