Trigger Happy

MAGA’s Cold Civil Wars

A few years ago, I visited the ruins of Belchite, in the Spanish province of Aragon. The town was destroyed in the two-week Battle of Belchite in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, when the Republicans took it from the Nationalists and were subsequently driven out of it. After the war, the ruins were kept as they were on Franco’s orders, as an example of ‘Red barbarism’, and more recently, they have been re-imagined as a permanent monument to war in general.

Visitors to the town are given tours of the ruins by young guides, most of whom live in the new Belchite that was built by Republican prisoners. These guides are passionate anti-militarists, who can tell you exactly what happened to each building, and point out where a child was shot by a sniper and on what day. This is not intended as war pornography. The guides will show you the former theatre, the town hall, the marketplace and houses, and tell you things about the living community that once inhabited these ruins that you’re unlikely to hear from anyone else.

Some of them have relatives who lived in Belchite and survived the war, and it was moving and inspiring to be taken round the town by young people who clearly see their work as a form of anti-war activism.

Belchite is a testament to the horrors of war in general, but it also stands as a memorial to the particular horrors of civil wars. Unlike wars between states over territory and resources, civil wars reach into the heart of societies, communities and families. Because they are fought over the political present and future of the societies that fight them, such wars demand the annihilation of the enemy, not negotiation, and absolute rather than partial victory.

This is why the ancient Greeks dreaded them. As Herodotus wrote: ‘civil war within a tribe or people is as much worse than a united war against a foreign/external enemy as war is worse than peace’. In the final scene of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Chorus expresses its hope for the Athenians that ‘My prayers ward off the storms of civil strife/ never, here, may the greedy undertow of party hate drown their public life in woe/ never their dust soak dark with their citizens’ life.’

In my lifetime, many states have seen their dust soaked dark with the blood of their own citizens, in Northern Ireland, in the former Yugoslavia, in Liberia, El Salvador, Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, and Sudan, to name but a few. There was a time when such episodes were seen in the West as an expression of alien barbarism, from which supposedly more sophisticated democracies were somehow immune - regardless of the fact that so many democracies came to be what they are today, in part, as a result of their own civil conflicts.

Nowadays, that security - and the self-satisfaction that comes with it - is not what it used to be. And in our toxic new century, a new concept of the ‘cold civil war’ has entered the political vocabulary to describe the extreme polarization unfolding in the UK over Brexit, and particularly in the United States. In 2022, an Economist/YouGov poll found that ‘two in five Americans believe a civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next decade.’ The same survey found that another three in five Americans (63%) ‘anticipate an increase in political violence in the next few years.’

Media commentators regularly discuss whether the US is on the brink of civil war, or civil breakdown, and - particularly after the storming of the US Capitol building in 2021 - some believe that the civil war has already started. These anxieties have inevitably intensified in America’s gerontological election contest, as a cornered and vengeful Trump seeks the second term that he hopes will enable him to avoid criminal convictions, and to wreak havoc on the individuals and institutions he believes are responsible for his ‘persecution.’

A perfect moment for Hollywood to come out with a blockbuster called Civil War, to explore these possibilities, or simply transform them into popcorn-crunching Red Dawn/Sum of All Fears-like entertainment. As The Dude might say, like wow man, what if there really was another civil war in America?

I haven’t seen the film, but I have read the reviews, and seen an interview with the film’s director Alex Garland, which didn’t endear him to me. Asked why his film didn’t go into the motivations of the civil war it depicts, Garland replied

I make assumptions on the audience, one of these assumptions I make is they know. They know the answer to that question already, and I don’t need to say it…I can see why an uncharitable/stupid criticism might be that it’s an act of, as it were, cowardice, or abdication of political responsibility…to not say that these were the reasons why.

Garland goes on to say that ‘there are political statements that relate not what people disagree about, but what they agree about, and the broad sense that I have that most people are not extremists, but extremists have a loud voice’.

So, in order to avoid perpetuating ‘the division that we are dealing with as an issue’, Garland opted to leave ‘a certain kind of space’ regarding the motivations behind his civil war, and he asks his interviewer to look at ‘the facts within a fiction context’:

We all know Texas and California have very different political positions, so clearly what they are doing, is they are saying ‘our political differences are less important, are less serious, than the threat of a president who is undermining the constitution, intimidating or threatening journalists, removing systems of law that might threaten him’…they are saying, ‘our political differences are lesser.’

Call me uncharitable or stupid, but this is shallow and also nonsensical. So Texas might join California, if a ‘fascist president’ took power in America, because somehow both states share some kind of deep loathing of fascism that transcends their political differences? Tell that to Jack Abbott.

And why does Garland think a ‘fascist president’ would come to power and do the things he mentions? What social and political forces would make such a president possible? What is the most likely source of a fascist presidency in contemporary America?

Clue: It isn’t the left and it isn’t the Democratic Party, though there are those who would have you believe otherwise. In October 2017, stories appeared in Google search results supposedly reporting that ‘Antifa’ was planning a civil war in the US on November 4 that year. These stories contained headlines such as ‘ANTIFA Planning a ‘Civil War’ to Overthrow the US Government’ and ‘Antifa Planning Communist Revolution for America on November 4’

PBS NewsHour investigated this story and found that this ‘conspiracy’ referred to a a single traffic-blocking protest on Route 21 organized by an antiracist group called Refuse Fascism on November 4, and turned by Google into a ‘Top Story.’

That’s pretty much it.

Civil Warriors on Crack

On the right, it’s a very different matter. Some years ago, the murderous Nazi hate-text The Turner Diaries described a future race war in which all Jews, Black people and ethnic minorities would be killed or enslaved. The Trump era has coincided - and by no means coincidentally - with variations on the theme of a new American civil war, which has become increasingly normalised both outside and inside the Republican Party.

In his brilliant forthcoming study of the far-right fringes of the MAGA movement, Day of Reckoning, the BBC’s US National Digital Reporter, Mike Wendling, argues that the American far right ‘has constructed a parallel infrastructure and a separate language of paranoia, a system of logic that works to sow doubt on anything that it has deemed progressive or mainstream, democratic or Democratic, ‘ which ‘has a figurehead in Trump, but will outlast him’.

The ultimate goal of these marginal groups, Wendling argues, is a ‘day of reckoning’ when

…the hot civil war starts, or the mass arrests of QAnon’s “storm” begins. It’s when Donald Trump conquers the deep state or when the trials of the vaccine pushers end in executions. For the even more extreme elements, the day of reckoning is when non-whites are purged from America or the start of the holy racial war.’

Wendling ends his book with the hopeful reflection that ‘this movement, despite its intensity, violence and hatred, also contains the germ of its own downfall. Because ultimately, the day of reckoning never arrives.’

Right now, that downfall still seems a long way off, as even supposedly mainstream MAGA Republicans yearn for civil war with the quasi-erotic longing with which members of the Red Brigades once talked about knee-capping factory foremen and shooting university professors. In May 2020 Steve Bannon was promising to ‘go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right?’ - the ‘heads’ meaning Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray.

In the same discussion, Bannon praised the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia during the American revolution, declaring ‘That’s how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war.’

It’s definitely easier to imagine the lard-like revolutionary lying drunk on the floor of a Munich Beer Hall than leading a putsch, but that doesn’t mean Bannon won’t look for other people to do it. And there is no shortage of rhetorical volunteers calling for a ‘national divorce’ and civil war if Trump is indicted, or if he doesn’t win, or even if he does.

In June 2021, the sinister QAnon former general Mike Flynn called on the military to emulate the generals in Myanmar, and overthrow the US government. More recently, Georgia Senator Colton Moore told Steve Bannon, ‘I don’t want to have to draw my rifle,’ in the event that Trump is indicted, while a former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor told another podcaster, ‘This is war, and I hope and pray it gets resolved before we use guns…we’re at war now, a war for our freedom.’

Trump hasn’t exactly dampened this kind of war talk - not that anyone would expect him to. Warnings of a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election were clearly not intended to bridge divides or lessen political tensions. Asked by Tucker Carlson if the US was headed towards civil war, Trump praised the ‘tremendous passion and love’ of the January 6 mob. There isn’t much passion and love in Trump’s descriptions of the ‘radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country’ or the immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’

It’s sometimes forgotten that before the actual American Civil War, there were many people on both sides who believed that civil war would have a morally-regenerative effect on American society. Today, such sentiments are the exclusive preserve of the Republican Party and the American far-right, and it is astonishing that Alex Garland appears unwilling to point this out, because doing so might alienate someone or increase ‘polarization’ and ‘division.’

As Mike Wendling has observed, ‘Conspiracy theories can act as a balm to the powerless, assuaging their fears that the world is random, or that their misfortune or the misfortune of those around them are the fault of grand forces…But when they’re pushed by the powerful, they become dangerous. They can turn mobs against scapegoats and consolidate the power of dictators.’

In today’s America, there is no shortage of powerful figures supporting the MAGA agenda, and using the rhetoric of war to describe it. Meet Tom Klingenstein, the billionaire financier, Chairman of the Claremont Institute and one of largest donors to the Republican Party - a whopping $11.6 million to candidates and Political Action Committees. Klingenstein is the writer and presenter of a number of pro-Trump, pro-MAGA videos which are available on his website.

I’ve watched some of them, so you don’t have to, because believe me, these videos exude the kind of paranoia, hatred and the kind of fascistic longing that makes the John Birch Society look like the Woodcraft Folk. One video on ‘The War’ shows Klingenstein standing outside a big house on a stormy day, with the kind of sinister background music that you might expect from The Omen, while his voice intones gravely, ‘We find ourselves in a cold civil war. This is a war not over the size of government or taxes, but over the American way of life.’

Cut to Klingenstein putting wood in a log fire and smoking his pipe, apparently talking to a wall, interspersed with footage of Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and Black Lives Matter riots, as he invokes ‘the war between those who want to build America, and those who want to destroy it. These differences are too much to bridge, this is what makes it a war.’

Echoing Tom Paine - Tom Paine! - the woodburning billionaire calls on ‘our generals’ to ‘ fight as if the choice were between liberty and death. This is no time for sunshine patriots.’

In one of his videos, psylocibin appears to have entered the water supply, as Klingenstein tells his viewers:

We should not be surprised if someone tries to blow up Mount Rushmore. And as far-fetched as it may sound, one day, the Woke Leftists may well, in their ignorance and indiscriminate rage, tear down the Statue of Liberty.

Imagine, a headless Statue of Liberty. Her torch has been ripped from her grasp. Her crown sits at the bottom of New York Harbor. The Statue’s grand base is overgrown with weeds and small trees. Graffiti defiles everything. Vines crawl up her body, they remind you of vipers encircling their prey. And the Woke Leftists cheer. 

Who will keep Lady Liberty upright and proud? Who will defend our country? 

Who indeed, with vines crawling up her body that look like vipers? But the second question is answered in Trump’s Virtues II, (the long-awaited sequel to Trump’s Virtues), in which Klingenstein’s scowling face looms out of the darkness of existential horror as he tells Republicans to get behind the man he calls ‘our commander-in-chief’, who understands that there is a war on, and ‘knows who the enemy is, and knows how to win.’

Who is the enemy in this ‘war’ that the Orangeman has been called on to lead? It’s the usual paranoid grab-bag: Socialism, Affirmative Action (‘the group quota regime’), women who ‘denigrate’ motherhood, Black Lives Matter, Democrats, the deep state, statue pullers, and other ‘revolutionaries that kick and spit on America.’

It’s all ‘existential’, and the worse it is, the more Klingenstein heaps praise on the ‘most towering figure of our time’ who he believes will ‘go after the deep state without pity or compassion’, and lead the fight against the ‘immensely powerful army of woke modernity that will attack him.’

For a man appalled by people who supposedly hate America, there is a lot of hatred in this fascistic paean to the would-be great leader who falls asleep and farts at his own trial for allegedly illegal payments to a porn star.

But as easy as it to mock this startling drivel, we should remember that millions of Americans believe, and beyond America there are millions who believe it too.

Trump is Klingenstein’s man, and he wants him to be America’s, and if that happens, and even if it doesn’t, there is every possibility that the ‘cold civil war’ could turn hot. This wouldn’t have to entail secession, let alone an alliance of Texas and California. It might not even involve actual battles. It could simply turn into persistent low-level violence, with armed militias taking over neighbourhoods, attacks on state houses, assassinations of politicians, Oklahoma City-type bombings, and so much more.

And then of course, you would need ‘order’, and at that point you could begin to imagine some would-be Caesar, MacArthur, or maybe Videla.

So, how to defeat MAGA extremism, and how to find a way to coexistence and the restoration of faith in basic democratic institutions, are only some of the basic questions that America will have to answer.

But one thing ought to be clear: only one political party and one political movement is threatening civil war here. And that is the party and the movement that should be called out, because these civil warriors may look like dangerous clowns right now, but history has many occasions in which the clowns burned down the circus, and ushered in times which every society should try to avoid, when ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean.’

And whatever Alex Garland might say, our present-day clowns are showing us who they are, and who they want to be.

We need to believe them.