After his victory in Iowa, Donald Trump is the favourite to become the Republican nominee. Leading commentators on the Left warn that, should he get re-elected, he will become a dictator and end democracy. On the Right, meanwhile, the belief is unshakeable that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of fulfilling the duties of president and won’t survive a second term.

These raw emotions are not simply the quadrennial outbursts of partisan feeling that emerge in an election season. Rather, they are portents of a much deeper dislocation in American society. For over two decades now, Americans have been battered by non-stop crises at home and abroad — from the long War on Terror to Covid and the George Floyd protests — leading to what feels like national exhaustion and a deep pessimism about the future of democracy.

Our pessimism has resurrected the once-unthinkable idea of disunion, or in today’s parlance, “national divorce”. In a 2021 poll conducted by the University of Virginia, more than 80% of both Biden and Trump voters stated that elected officials from the opposite party presented “a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Most shockingly, 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters stated that things were so bad, they supported secession from the Union. Two years later those numbers remained essentially the same in an Ipsos poll, with a fifth of Americans strongly wanting to separate.

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By Martin Gurri

For those who believe that such concerns are simply hysteria, we should remember that America’s road to the Civil War took decades. In March 1850, southern statesman John C. Calhoun gave a prescient warning to the Senate: “It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bound these States together in one common Union, are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time.”

It took roughly 40 years — from the first passions unleashed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861 — for the cords to snap. Since Bush v. Gore in 2000, America is now nearly a quarter-century into a process of delegitimising national elections and demonising our political opponents and fellow citizens. An entire generation has been raised on the cynicism of their elders, fed by social media and sensationalised news media.

The tragic story of the gradual split of North and South offers stark warnings for today. The election of 1860 reflected the culmination of decades of failure to reach an acceptable settlement over the expansion or restriction of slavery in new territories of the West. The 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act all were grand attempts at coming to a stable modus vivendi. Yet they led ultimately to feelings of betrayal and suspicion, as old agreements, such as Missouri, were undone by later manoeuvrings. Worse, each side felt the other was trying to destroy its way of life, especially in the case of southerners, who knew they were falling behind the North economically and demographically, and who saw any attempt to restrict the expansion of slavery as part of a move ultimately to end slavery everywhere in the Union.

That year, Abraham Lincoln was the nominee of a new political party, the Republicans, and an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Though he repeatedly promised to do nothing to threaten slavery where it already was legal, Lincoln nevertheless was labelled as a “Black Republican”, an anti-slavery zealot. Southern activists and leaders all warned that should Lincoln be elected, the South could ensure its survival only by seceding from the Union. Within a month of his victory, South Carolina took the fatal step, followed over the next few months by most of the Lower South. A month after his inauguration, the Civil War erupted with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour.

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Inside the American Redoubt

By Jacob Furedi

A century and a half later, what seems to be shaping up as a Biden-Trump rematch will further divide the nation. If we are to avoid a potential repeat of 1860, we must remember the powerful warning of Lincoln, in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

For the past several decades, American citizens and their political class have chosen to court the danger Lincoln identified. Why this is so remains a puzzle. Clearly, the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate never fully healed. Some observers, such as Christopher Caldwell, blame a now-endemic entitlement mindset; others, such as George Packer, point to the unwinding caused by an inequitable social and economic system. Back in the mid-Sixties, Philip Rieff warned of the “triumph of the therapeutic” that unleashed emotion over reason. Whatever the cause, the former middle ground has been blasted apart.

The more America devolves into a nation of extremes, the more difficult politics becomes. A president who encourages his followers to march to the Capitol and a Speaker of the House who physically rips up the president’s State of the Union speech on national television both weaken the bonds of civil society. Zero-sum politics is not politics at all, but rather the result of a failure of politics to create a shared if not entirely satisfactory feeling of compromise and accommodation. Power will wax and wane for both sides, but each increasingly will feel oppressed by the other. As the historian David M. Potter noted in his magisterial history of the coming of the Civil War: “Southern nationalism was born of resentment and not of a sense of separate cultural identity.”

If left to fester long enough, such feelings of oppression and resentment either lead to the belief that one side must utterly triumph, as Lincoln thought, or that the only solution is disunion. As Lincoln warned during his 1858 Senate campaign, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. The steady poisoning of public opinion in antebellum America fatally undermined a sense of common national identity. Instead, citizens embraced divisive stereotypes of the other side that reinforced feelings of alienation. “This process of substituting stereotypes for realities could be very damaging indeed to the spirit of union,” Potter writes, “for it caused both [sides] to lose sight of how much alike they were.”

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The same is true in today’s America, where both sides see the other party as illegitimate and its supporters as “deplorables”, as immoral if not evil. But there can be no national community when there is no sense that one’s political opponents are at the same time fellow citizens with legitimate beliefs. As our knowledge of American history declines, we are in danger of forgetting that in a republic there is always another side to accommodate to some degree, or else politics is simply about power, leading to unending and worsening struggle.

Those who shout down opinions they oppose, who advocate to curb speech with which they disagree, who intimidate or silence political opponents, or who censor the free flow of information bear a heavy burden for the looming breakdown in our society. Dogma drowns out reason and less strident voices, making it increasingly difficult to find the middle path that alone ensures the survival of a republic.

Most of us, however, do not want to think about all of this. In going about our daily lives, we can be lulled into thinking that this is simply the new normal, or that it is entertainment, or that nothing truly serious will ever happen, and that we will never see widespread civil unrest or actual disunion during our lives. Such insouciance may be a fatal mistake. As Potter reminds us of antebellum America: “The very familiarity of crisis — its chronic presence during three decades — had bred contempt for it. So many rumblings had been heard without a sequel that men began to take the frequency of warnings as a reassurance that nothing would ever happen, rather than as an indication that something ultimately must happen.” Henry Adams wrote a half-century later in his Education that, except for a small minority of secessionists, “not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it”. And so, despite all the frenetic political activity of the 1850s, Americans largely sleepwalked into the maelstrom.

As hate and panic spreads, is the terrible prospect of citizen pitted against citizen in our current society truly unthinkable? Exactly how 21st-century disunion or civil war would play out is beyond the knowledge of any of us. It could not repeat the course of the 1860s — for we face today not a distinct sectional division, but rather a clash within each city, each state. Even deep-red states have hard-blue cities, making a replay of state secession nearly impossible.

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What about a general social breakdown that pits neighbour against neighbour? Again, the infinite complexity of such a conflict may keep it from ever breaking out, but in Spain during the Thirties, regular clashes between Leftist Republican supporters of the government and conservative Nationalists eventually led to all out civil war in 1936, with the army itself splitting into opposing forces. Have we seen the beginnings of that in our cities since 2020, after George Floyd and now with anti-Israel protests?

The point is, once a people decides that it cannot live together or when a citizenry divides into clearly opposed blocs, it is impossible to predict just how conflict may erupt. But to say that it cannot happen is to ignore history. Even Lincoln downplayed the threat of southern secession during the 1860 campaign, not believing until it was too late that the South ever would take such a final step.

Today, for all the hope that enough citizens will come together to recreate a middle ground, it is hard to avoid the feeling that whatever the outcome this November, large swathes of the country will see the election as illegitimate, their fellow citizens as the enemy. While this time we may escape the full force of a social hurricane, it will likely take its toll, wearing down our defences for the next assault.

All this was due to Nicholas, who came to the throne in 1825 with the potential of turning into an enlightened ruler, supposedly being opposed to the serfdom of the Russian peasant. As Adam Ulam notes in his magisterial book The Bolsheviks, however, the aristocratic Decembrist revolt that welcomed Nicholas’s accession forever stamped a suspicious mindset on the autocrat.

For the next 30 years, until his death in 1855, Nicholas created the prototype of the modern police state. The infamous Third Section, the forerunner of secret police throughout the modern world, penetrated all levels of society. Nearly a quarter-century after the Decembrist revolt, Nicholas’s police crushed the reformist Petrashevsky Circle, comprised of lower officials and small landowners, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, cruelly waiting until the very last minute to commute the decreed death sentences to Siberian exile.

On the surface, Nicholas’s domination of Russian society seemed complete. Yet his iron grip had two fatal results. First, in the words of Ulam, “the stability and the power of the regime were bought at the price of neglecting the needed reforms and of leaving the Russian Empire incomparably farther behind Western Europe” at Nicholas’s death in 1825. As tragically demonstrated in the 1854-56 Crimean War, and then more devastatingly in the Great War that erupted in 1914, Russia could no longer match the national power of the Western capitalist-industrialist nations.

Second, Ulam concludes that Nicholas’s complete control over Russian society taught its intellectuals and elites the “dangerous lesson that everything in the last resort is dependent on politics”. Unwittingly, the autocracy itself prepared the ground for professional revolutionary parties and the socialism that ultimately overthrew the Romanovs.

Much like Russia nearly two centuries ago, the People’s Republic of China today seems impervious to reform or liberalism, riding waves of global upheaval such as the 2008 financial crisis and even Covid with little long-term threat to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, over the past decade, hesitant reforms have been reversed and political oppression has increased, thanks to the increasingly personalised rule of Xi Jinping.

Could Xi become a modern-day Nicholas I? Since rising to the position of general secretary of the CCP in 2013, Xi has exerted increasing control over Chinese society while buttressing his own power. Most notably, he has ended the tradition of Chinese leaders stepping down after two terms and has successfully named his own allies to the latest line-up of the CCP Politburo’s Standing Committee. He has dominated the CCP through anti-corruption campaigns, revitalised Marxist-Leninist ideological indoctrination, and inserted Party cells into every group in the economy and civil society. Many, such as former Central Party School professor Cai Xia, argue that Xi has fostered a cult of personality second only to Mao’s.

On the face of it, Xi’s policy has been successful. China appears stable, its society politically docile. Xi’s campaign against liberal values has steadily permeated the country, accompanied by exhortations to recover the virtues of Confucianism and its social hierarchy. Various economic sectors have been reined in as reform plans have petered out, and Xi’s campaigns against powerful tech executives such as Jack Ma or high-flying lenders have registered nary a peep of protest from their targets.

As riots and unrest sweep through America, France, the Netherlands, and other countries, China sits seemingly serene. Beijing continues to suppress Xinjiang and Tibet, and crush Hong Kong democracy, but little domestic outrage has resulted. There was indeed significant protest against Xi’s draconian “Zero Covid” policies, but there were no further outbursts once Xi relaxed the most onerous restrictions, and certainly little that seemed to threaten his personal control and that of the CCP. If anything, Xi’s triumphant coronation at last autumn’s 20th Party Congress seemed to show his complete mastery over China.

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Here, perhaps, is where Xi, the Party, and the world should be wary. Nicholas I, too, seemed invulnerable, having swiftly disposed of potential threats and built barricades against the viruses of liberalism and reform. Xi is by all accounts increasingly living in an echo chamber, surrounded by toadies, and unhampered by any need to share either decision-making or power. So far, he has avoided making any catastrophic errors, such as Nicholas’s attempts to defeat the Ottoman Empire, which led to the disastrous Crimean War against Britain and France. Yet fears of a conflict over Taiwan have reached unprecedented heights.

Unlike Nicholas, of course, Xi has focused on building up national power, especially military might and advanced technology. One might think, then, that China will avoid the first fatal flaw of Nicholas’s repressive policy — the material weakening of the country. Despite increasing trade with the US even after Covid, however, China’s macroeconomic picture continues to darken, and it is unclear just how much growth is actually occurring. Similarly, despite years of investing billions in semiconductor development, to take one example, China remains at least a half-decade behind America, a gap that seems remarkably stable. Similar questions dog other aspects of China’s technological growth, despite the hype of Chinese research into machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The once-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative, which supposedly invested $1 trillion in infrastructure and trade around Eurasia, has been plagued by corruption, shoddy construction, and wasted investment. By some measures, Chinese personal wealth is decreasing, and the elites remain desperate to offshore both their money and children. As for the Chinese military, until it is tested in combat, there simply is no way to know if all the shiny hardware and advanced weapons will either work or be operated by a well-trained, disciplined, and capable human force. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that we have already seen China peak, and that in another decade or two, its relative strength will seem much less than today. Thus, a major mistake, such as a move on Taiwan, could turn out to be Xi’s equivalent of Nicholas’s Ottoman war: the beginning of an unravelling of the very system he is trying to maintain.

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By Rana Mitter

That then leaves Nicholas’s second fatal flaw: the politicisation of all aspects of life and the inadvertent sowing of the seeds of destruction of tsarist autocracy. In the PRC, of course, almost everything has been political since 1949, and Xi is simply further enhancing the state’s power and reasserting control over areas of consumerism and civil society that emerged in the Nineties and 2000s. Yet in doing so he is running against the imperfect spheres of freedom that middle-class and elite Chinese appear to have taken for granted over the past generation. What we can tell from online discussion indicates widespread dissatisfaction with the Party’s reassertion of control; combined with the exposure of endemic corruption among Party nobility such as former premier Wen Jibao, public anger at the hypocrisy and unfair advantages of the Chinese elite roils beneath the surface. Xi’s attempts to smother such anger risks driving it deeper underground but not extinguishing it. While China’s democratic dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng are safely out of the country, the long-term effects of Xi’s repression could possibly engender a new generation of reformists or those opposed to Party control.

The question, of course, is what would replace a Party overthrown in response to Xi’s repressive excesses and weakening of China. In the case of Russia, tsarist autocracy was eventually replaced by the far worse evil of communist totalitarianism. It is hard to see anything worse replacing the system perfected by Stalin and Mao, but few could have predicted the ravaged 20th century. What prevents such an outcome is the current lack of ideological alternative to autocracy (whether socialist or not) and democratic liberalism. There is no nascent movement or ideology on the horizon comparable to the socialism of the mid-19th century that entranced intellectuals and workers.

So, there is at least the chance that a post-Xi, post-Party China would not become more repressive and totalitarian, but less so. Democracy has been having a hard run of it lately around the globe and is far from attracting new acolytes, but in the condition of complete political and even social breakdown, the pull of self-determination would be a powerful one. By attempting to crush all heterodox thought, Xi Jinping may in fact help to ensure its survival. At least, we in the West can so hope.

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By N.S. Lyons

Another possibility is an internal political oscillation from repression to comparative moderation, as happened when Khrushchev succeeded Stalin and Deng Xiaoping followed Mao. Xi could be succeeded by someone who relaxes some of his restrictions without in any way loosening the CCP’s grip. But there are risks in such an approach as well. In Russia, the autocrat Nicholas I was succeeded by the “Tsar Liberator” Alexander II, who freed the serfs only to fall victim to the terrorists of the “People’s Will” socialist revolutionary group. This in turn led to the reassertion of autocratic control under Alexander III and Nicholas II, and the final confrontation with revolutionary movements.

However, for now, there seems little threat to the CCP. Despite its corruption and inefficiencies, the Party continues to rule largely unopposed — watchful and often vengeful, but not fearing for its immediate future. Such was the tsarist system of Nicholas I. His success in staving off change helped ensure cataclysmic transformation just over a half-century after his death. The lessons for Xi Jinping could not be clearer.