What would a second American civil war look like?

You’d need a theory of fascism and capitalist crisis to understand

Imagine the American Civil War had never happened: would the world be better or worse? That’s the question I kept asking myself as I read Barbara Walter’s book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.

Walter’s premise is that America stands at greater risk of armed civil conflict than at any time since Appomattox. Her supporting evidence is data from the Polity5 project, a political science initiative that tries to code the quality of democracy against specific metrics, plus case studies from the civil wars of post-Cold War era.

The question the book asks has become highly relevant following Joe Biden’s dramatic Pennsylvania speech, in which — flanked by US marines — he attacked the MAGA movement, whose rhetoric has turned insurrectionary and which (after the Mar-a-Lago raid) may react violently to any prosecution of its figurehead, Donald Trump.

But I found two concepts absent from Walter’s writing: a theory of fascism and a theory of capitalism.

Civil wars used to be about class, now they’re about culture and ethnicity, is the book’s assumption. Stopping them is a good thing and there is stuff democratic governments can do, if they can find the…