It has only been three years since Canadian writer Stephen March took a hard look at his country’s downstairs neighbor and found us… well, let’s just say that we aren’t going to get our deposit back. Like a tenant that has decided to start cooking meth in the kitchen at night, what the United States does affects the entire building, and March smartly surmised that the future of the American experiment would best be sussed somewhat from arm’s length.
When one is fully immersed in the the circular firing squad of 21-century American politics, it is difficult to shift one’s eyes anywhere than your neighbor’s trigger finger. As an outsider, March peered through the front window, and what he found is disturbing.
March walks us through traditional, and very familiar-sounding, lead-ups to civil conflict. Economic and environmental instability worsens every year? Check. Political gamesmanship overrides all other governmental concerns? Checkedy motherfuckin’ check. Under those sorts of strains, March points out that even long-established national identities can fracture with shocking speed. Iraq in 2006 had a “relatively high” Shia/Sunni rate of intermarriage. “The supposedly permanent and intractable religious rift was a relic from antiquity,” he writes. “Then it wasn’t.”
Our Canadian judge sees the cleaving of national purpose as a done deal, a problem inherent in the very founding of the union. “There is very much a Red America and a Blue America,” he writes. “They occupy different societies with different values, and their political parties are emissaries of that difference.”
“Democrats represent a multicultural country grounded in liberal democracy,” he illustrates. “Republicans represent a white country grounded in the sanctity of property. America cannot operate as both at once.” But, man, it is fun to point fingers. March points his own finger at media empires who make fortunes on what Friedrich Nietzsche called the pleasure of contempt. “Blaming one side offers a perverse species of hope,” March admits. “Such hopes are not only reckless, but irresponsible.”
As a foreigner, March is in the position to say what would be unthinkable to the average American. “The U.S. system is an archaic mode of government totally unsuited to the realities of the 21st century. The forces tearing America apart are both radically modern and as old as the country itself… bloody revolution and the threat of secession are essential to the American experiment.”
After detailing several scenarios that might touch off a conflagration—some of which, such as the movement of outside National Guard troops into another state’s territory, and assassination, albeit, still attempted and ancillary at this time—March warns that once started, civil wars are really hard to stop. He writes that in 50 years of counterinsurgency we still have not learned that “violence that imposes order to control violence produces more violence and more disorder.” You can not achieve pacification by murdering people. I think Bob Dylan said that.
Even if you were compelled to go that route, the overwhelming force of the state is useless against stochastic resistance. “A succession of winning firefights makes exactly no difference.” Lt. General Daniel Bolger, author of Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars writes. “The local people have to run their own government.”
March goes further, saying that it is impossible to de-radicalize the next generation while at the same time taking away their most basic rights. “It’s hard to find youth so stupid that you can kill and imprison their parents and tell them you love them afterward. It didn’t work in Iraq and Afghanistan. It won’t work in the United States.”
“This is the other thing that would occur,” writes retired colonel Peter Manor, “massive detention centers across the United States where people who were suspected of being disloyal… would be warehoused on a massive scale.” The U.S. is already the most incarcerated society in the world. A civil war would explode those numbers. Who would support or pay for that? Let’s not even get into the political morass of donor states vs. recipient states.
The traditional intractability of the American populace may be the key to avoiding this scenario all together, given the hopelessness of fighting it out. “If you’re in a situation where you’re using armed force to try and quell a population, you’re either going to have to kill a bunch of them, or you’re going to pull out and let them have local control,” writes Lt. General Bolger. “You’re never going to talk them into seeing it your way.” The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all.
Even the paperwork is daunting. March points out that uncertainty over small questions of daily life is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. Pensions, passports, national debt, dual citizenship, the military… are all things that would quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare.
Once again, March leans into his innate Canadianess to say what an American would not. “At this point in history… much of the U.S. Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government.”
He goes on, “Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions.” March, perhaps naively, calls for a new Constitutional Convention, not understanding the very real possibility for real chaos to ensue, not grasping that there is always more to lose.
March does understand that the failure of the American experiment, and he does claim that it is failing, would left the world a lessor place. “The world needs America,” he writes. “It needs the idea of America… [a place] where contradictions that lead to genocide elsewhere flourish into prosperity.”
He does believe that the problems that plague our society at this point in our history are not beyond the capacity of the American people to solve. “There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times,” March warns. “It won’t.”
“If history has shown us anything, it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations,” March sounds the alarm. “Once again, the hope for America is Americans.” Let’s not let him, the world, and ourselves, down.
Román Leão 