“Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national angst. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.
One subject seems to be unifying the right and the left today: Disunion.
From the multiplex to social media, the prospect of America collapsing into armed conflict has moved from being an idea on the tinfoil-hat fringes to an active undercurrent of the country’s political conversation.
Voters at campaign events bring up their worries that political division could lead to large-scale political violence. Pollsters regularly ask about the idea in opinion surveys. A cottage industry has arisen for speculative fiction, serious assessments and forums about whether the country could be on the verge of a modern-day version of the bloodiest war in American history.
And “Civil War,” a dystopian action film about an alternative America plunged into a bloody domestic conflict, has topped box office sales for two consecutive weekends. The movie has outperformed expectations at theaters from Brownsville, Texas, to Boston, tapping into a dark set of national anxieties that took hold after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.
But Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies civil wars, says the prospect of such a conflict isn’t just metaphorical. She believes the country is facing a decade or two of political instability and violence that could include assassinations of politicians or judges and the rise of militia groups.
The movie’s realistic portrayal of such violence taking place in deeply American settings — a golf course, a roadside gas station, the Lincoln Memorial — put the scenes of violence Americans associate more with foreign conflicts into sharper relief, she said.
David W. Blight, a historian at Yale University who specializes in the Civil War period, said he did not believe the country stood on the precipice of another one. But if the country were to reach that point, he said, the conflict could share more with the movie version than the historical one.
“For the last couple of years, there’s been all this chatter and a few books out about whether the U.S. is on the brink of a new civil war, and you have to keep telling people, ‘Well no, not in the way you may think about it,’” he said. “Our real Civil War blinds us in that sense.”
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