License for Perpetual Alarmism?

In his most recent New York Times column Ross Douthat tries to throw some cold water on the talk about civil war:

Thus we are told that some kind of major democratic breakdown is likely “absent some radical development” (as Beauchamp puts it); that we are already “suspended between democracy and autocracy” (as Remnick writes); that “the United States is coming to an end” and the only question “is how,” to quote the beginning of Stephen Marche’s new book, “The Next Civil War.” But then it turns out that the most obvious danger is an extremely contingent one, involving a cascade of events in 2024 — a very specific sort of election outcome, followed by a series of very high-risk, unusual radical choices by state legislators and Republican senators and the Supreme Court — that are worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable.

Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year,” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s.

That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism.

I’m not quite as dismissive as Mr. Douthat but I think the media and pundits are looking in the wrong direction. In Chicago alone there were nearly 850 homicides, 251 in just four neighborhoods (Garfield Park, Englewood, Austin, North Lawndale). 846 homicides places it on the order of the Falklands War. That is obviously “civil strife” by any reasonable definition but deeming it so or taking action to end the carnage are both taboo.

And I’m not at all dismissive of the breaching of the Capitol although I think that terming it an “insurrection” is reasonably considered, in Mr. Douthat’s words, a “license for perpetual alarmism”. For some it was undoubtedly an insurrection, for others defending the Constitution, and for still others it was a demonstration that got out of hand.

The question then becomes what to do about it? My answer, as usual, is lower the stakes. If you’re intent on changing the system radically, start with your hometown or your home state.