A divided America is closer than ever to its next civil war

At the time of writing, the suspect in the shooting of Charlie Kirk is still at large, and his motivations are unknown, but the identity of the killer and their reasons for killing hardly matter. Whoever they are and whatever their intentions, the fallout is utterly predictable: divided America will divide further.

- STEPHEN MARCHE

Political violence, already surging, will surge further. America will continue further down the road to the perdition of the republic.

When I published The Next Civil War in 2022, the experts on civil war and assassination I spoke with were clear with me: what is uniquely dangerous about the current moment the United States faces is not the political violence in itself, but the collective reaction to it. America is now, and it has always been, an outlier of political violence. Far more political figures have been murdered in American history than in the history of any other democracy. More than a quarter of US presidents have either survived an assassination attempt or died at the hands of a killer. But, in the past, each assassination of a president or a judge was treated as a collective, national tragedy. It was understood that the violence, perpetrated by whomever, was a disaster for the body politic as a whole. Politics exists, after all, to save us from violence as a means of resolving disputes.