GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

America's Coming Disunion?

Ian Morris

Board of Contributors

Nov 7, 2018 | 06:00 GMT

Protesters rally for the removal of a Confederate statue known as Silent Sam from the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill on Aug. 22, 2017. Some similarities between today's political scene in the United States and that of the late 1850s can seem striking. But they do not mean America is on the brink of another civil war.

(SARA D. DAVIS/Getty Images)

Highlights

Recent speculations of a second American Civil War stand as examples of how not to use the past to understand the present.
Broad historical patterns will tell us more about the odds of another civil war than will worrying over how much 2018 resembles the late 1850s.
The American people are divided and their politicians behave badly, but there will be no second Civil War as long as the U.S. military remains true to its traditions.

Is the United States on the brink of a new civil war? October's awful events -- pipe bombs sent to leading Democratic politicians and supporters, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh -- have only amplified fears that such a conflict could break out within the next few years. "We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860," Stanford University's Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in the National Review. The historian Niall Ferguson suggested in The Sunday Times of London that if someone were to design a "Civil War Clock" comparable to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock," the designer would probably now be announcing that it is "two minutes to Fort Sumter." Ferguson himself is more upbeat, thinking that "the time on the civil war Doomsday Clock looks more like 11.08 than 11.58." It seems to me, though, that all these speculations are deeply misleading -- so...

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