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I am thinking a lot today about the way the idea of "civil war" has been mobilized around this election. I spent a few years studying the history of civil war as a concept and I have been perplexed by it all. It's hard to imagine what exactly people are talking about
Some point to extra-legal violence, lynching, polarization, families torn apart, Earth ravaged and poisoned beyond repair. But these are everyday facts of life in the US. Civil war is the nexus in which US power operates. It is the norm.
Civil war as politics means that politics happens as a result of polarization and effective action. It means that we do not enter the political as "equal actors" but must fight. It means "rights" aren't natural givens, but the result of and tools of a succession of open conflicts
There is no political change that was not accompanied by extra-legal violence, nor one where the political actors engaged on equal footing: Black people do not enter the normal political sphere as fully human or citizens. Civil war describes asymmetrical conflict as the political
The "citizen" is riven by division and conflict. There is no neutral core for political oppositions to comfortably reside in. Even one's status as human has always been in question in the US. When qualitatively unequal and legally different actors engage, this is called civil war
This is certainly true in the US. Peacetime is the management of low-level conflicts in time and space, a suspension that was won through and maintained with extra-legal violence. The fear around broken norms is confusing; US norms are types of extra-legal violence, what is new?
To some extent, the language of civil war is the barely coded fear that extra-legal violence is increasingly affecting white people. Trump has certainly emboldened the far-right, but right wing terror is the law, not the exception here, and it's just not true that it's at a peak.
Not saying that major left/right confrontations aren't possible, but heralding these as the arrival of a "civil war" displaces and muddles the everyday sort of violence that non-white people face. Managed to stay away from "civil war" discourse until election day, fuck
