Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP
Protesters gather at the monument to Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, June 1, 2020.
America is as close to civil war as it has come since 1861, and once again the central driver is America’s founding stain—deep, persistent, brutal racism.
The current civil war doesn’t have front lines that you can track on a map like the pins in Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II maps. It’s more of a guerrilla civil war like Vietnam’s that breaks out anywhere and everywhere.
But while its front lines are diffuse, they are real. They include every demonstration with peaceful protesters on one side of the line, and coiled vicious cops on the other.
We see the front lines of civil war in Washington, a block from the president’s fortress mansion, where there is a literal struggle for who is in charge of the streets of our capital city, Donald Trump or D.C.’s nervy mayor, Muriel Bowser.
We’ve seen it in countless other cities where other progressive mayors are forced to admit that they can’t control their own rogue police forces.
The essence of a civil war is rival claimants to the legitimate right to use force. And we are now on the brink of a situation where force will confront force, as Trump tries to use the military against unwilling governors and state National Guards.
Until Trump, federal acquiescence in racial violence was only tacit. Now it has become explicit. Trump both foments racial violence, and leads it.
The fault lines include the trench warfare between the honorable leaders of our country’s armed services who resist this illegitimate use, and Trump’s own efforts to commandeer the military for an armed occupation of the country. In much of the world, this kind of standoff ends with a military coup.
There is civil war of American democracy versus Trump’s paramilitary storm troopers, many of whom are armed and prepared to resort to force to keep Trump in office, either by disrupting the election or by making it impossible for an elected successor to take office.
The lines include Trump and his White House loyalists versus the so-called deep state, made up of people serving in government who work to uphold the law, risking their jobs if they offend our would-be dictator.
The incipient civil war reflects a polarization of society along party lines, but contrary to a lot of commentary the polarization is anything but symmetrical. One party has shown itself willing to destroy democratic institutions for partisan gains.
The civil war is also cultural, with two deeply antagonistic cultures each convinced that the other is ruinous. But one of those cultures, despite its professed religiosity, is increasingly nihilist.
At a more fundamental level, the civil war is deeply racial, in a way that evokes the fraught period that prefigured America’s one true Civil War. From about 1820 right up until the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861, the slaveholding South never accepted federal power if there was the slightest chance that the national government would interfere with slavery. The Doctrine of Nullification, ostensibly about tariffs, was really about slavery.
The tacit civil war became open civil war well before 1861 in the proxy war in Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s, over whether that state would be slave or free.
Just as the white South never accepted the first Reconstruction of Andrew Johnson’s fraught presidency, neither did it accept the second Reconstruction of Lyndon Johnson’s a century later.
As soon as Republican presidents beginning with Nixon pursued their Southern strategy of appealing to white racism, the power of the federal government to enforce or frustrate newly won civil rights switched sides. But until Trump, federal acquiescence in racial violence was only tacit. Now it has become explicit. Trump both foments racial violence, and leads it.
The past two weeks, beginning with the capture on video of Amy Cooper attempting to use her white privilege to defend her own law-breaking, and continuing with a raising of national consciousness and conscience following the police murder of George Floyd, have created a new reality that is both hopeful and perilous.
Trump’s physical isolation behind White House walls is emblematic of his increasing political isolation. But he and his followers still have immense power to wreak havoc.
There will not be a coup d’état, either by the military to oust Trump, or by Trump to shut down Congress and recalcitrant governors and mayors. What there will be is ongoing trench warfare, over five more agonizing months.
We will then learn whether the power of an aroused people can keep a dictator at bay; and even if Trump is defeated, residual racism and hatred will linger.
An oft-quoted line of Antonio Gramsci was never more apt:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
