America’s next civil war has already started – this is how it will end

Very few people saw the first civil war coming, but the signs that the next one has already begun are everywhere, says Stephen Marche, whose book charts what could happen next. As Alex Garland’s film ‘Civil War’ hits the big screen, the author tells Alex Hannaford why Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and how the nation can avoid another violent showdown...

Trump supporters participate in a rally in Washington, on 6 Jan 2021, that some blame for fuelling the attack on the US Capitol (AP)

When Stephen Marche began writing a book that imagined a future civil war in the United States of America, he repeatedly found himself having to throw out large chunks of text because the very things he conjured on the page suddenly started happening in real life: sheriffs across the country refusing to obey federal law; white power groups getting their hands on nuclear material. Marche soon realised that the civil war he was predicting had, in a way, already begun.

There is something in the air, in the streets, and now on our screens in the form of Alex Garland’s new film Civil War, which imagines a dystopian future – the American presidency has become a dictatorship and rebels descend on the White House.

Marche says that when the first civil war happened in the 1860s, very few people in America saw it coming – even when the first battle began, at Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina. There is a quote near the beginning of his book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, from a retired army colonel who says that a new American civil war would not be like the first one, with armies manoeuvring on the battlefield.