So could such a scenario happen in real life? Might America see a second Civil War, with MAGA supporters and liberals replacing Confederates and Yankees, and the culture wars as the faultline rather than slavery?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, America seems as divided on this question as on any other. For every doomsayer, others point out that the US has weathered similar upheavals in the past. Take the 1960s, for example, which saw the counterculture revolution, the anti-Vietnam War protests and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Could things really get even worse than that?
Garland, for one, seems to think so. Social media, he says, has turbo-charged the tribalism of US politics, with both sides portraying each other as not merely wrong, but evil.
“Left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state,” he told SXSW. “But we’ve made it into ‘good and bad’… it’s f––king idiotic, and incredibly dangerous.”
Ross, who has studied far-right movements in his work at Portland State University, believes that the risk of war has ebbed compared to 2020, when a “low-intensity conflict could have been feasible”. But he too is far from complacent.
“A lot of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol are now in jail, and that has taken the wind out of their sails a bit,” he says. “But if Trump gets re-elected, he wants revenge – he’ll pardon all the Proud Boys, and they’ll come straight back to places like Portland to fight people again.”
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