The Next Civil War Quotes

“At this point in history, 240 years after its composition, much of the US Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging in delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government.

It’s absurd. The practice of constitutional law in the United States gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history. The geniuses who wrote it, and who signed it less than 100 miles from unclaimed wilderness, never imagined for a moment that their plans for a new republic would survive 250 years. They were much too sensible. The founders never desired their permanence. It is only their great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren who conjure the founders into gods among men. Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless transitions. Jefferson himself believed it was the ‘solemn opportunity’ of every generation to update the constitution ‘every nineteen or twenty years.’ Before Trump and anything he may or may not have done, there was already a constitutional crisis. There is no way to govern rationally when your foundational document is effectively dead and you worship it anyway.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“The main reason Americans buy guns is to tell themselves the story of the failure of government.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“Perhaps it was a failure right from the start: slave owners preaching freedom and equality. But it would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction. That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“When you are fighting for freedom and your soul, what won’t you do?”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“Jefferson himself believed it was the “solemn opportunity” of every generation to update the constitution “every nineteen or twenty years.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“We live in an age of what scholars call stochastic terrorism, otherwise known as ‘lone-wolf terrorism’, although that phrase is imprecise. ‘Lone wolf’ sounds like something from the movies. It implies that acts of spectacular violence are the result of organization, that there are masterminds hiding, like Bond villains, in distant countries, elaborating schemes and then disseminating them over networks, to be undertaken by their secretive minions. The reality of the current threat is much more banal. The background hum of hyper-partisanship, the rage and loathing of everyday American politics, generates a widespread tolerance for violence. Eventually somebody acts on it.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“The norm of bipartisan agreement has been shattered forever and, once shattered, it cannot be put back together.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“The fruit of hyper-partisanship and a toxic informational environment is paralysis—paralysis at a moment of peril.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“The federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“Whenever government fails, whenever the peaceful transition of power breaks down, restoring an orderly democracy takes nothing short of a miracle. America won’t be any different. When Democrats feel that they cannot find representation, when Republicans feel that they cannot find representation, the government becomes just another resource to control. Outrage feeds all-consuming cycles of revenge. People retreat into tribes. Once the stability of power goes, it’s easy to come up with excuses to murder your neighbors.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“In America, more than in any other country in the world, treason is just a matter of dates. ‘In the long run, all countries are dead,’ Ryan Griffiths says. ‘The same will happen to the United States.’ The History of the Fall of the American Republic, author still unborn, will no doubt recognize who and what to blame: the nihilistic hyper-partisanship of Newt Gingrich; Bill Clinton allowing China into the WTO on the mistaken assumption that capitalism and democracy were inevitably linked and that the American middle class would rise on the world’s swelling tides; Bush vs. Gore; the suspension of civil liberties in the aftermath of September 11; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the explicit rejection of the ‘reality-based community’; the Tea Party; Citizens United; Obama’s failure to unify on immigration and health care; Mitch McConnell’s decision not to consider the appointment of Merrick Garland; the presidency of Donald Trump. And there are thousand upon thousands of politicians who put private and party interests ahead of the interests of the institutions, who developed contempt for government in and of itself and rode contempt to power.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“You might say that the North won the war and the South won the peace. But that’s not entirely accurate. The North won progress. The South won heritage. The North won the future. The South won the past. And it is not clear at all which is more powerful. The reconciliation is “how we chose to lie to each other for a hundred and fifty years,”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“The technical definition of a civil war, according to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, is a thousand combatant deaths within a year. The definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year. In the United States in 2019, domestic anti-government extremists killed forty-two people; in 2018 they killed fifty-three people; in 2017, thirty-seven; in 2016, seventy-two; and in 2015, seventy.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

“At a Trump rally after the election, a reporter spotted a pair of Republicans wearing shirts that read, I’D RATHER BE A RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT. Centuries before, George Washington, riding out of thriving Philadelphia toward the lush hills of Mount Vernon, recognized what the failure of American democracy would look like. It looks like them.”
― Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future