Maybe our politics and culture are moving in that direction, but I don’t see it yet.
That happened in the 1860s, in part because people had come to see their political opponents in extreme, even demonic, ways and found it impossible to find any middle ground. I’m troubled, too, by the role the president plays in contributing to this atmosphere.īut it would have to be something else to call this a “civil war.” That would indicate a willingness on the part of masses of people to engage in violence against their political enemies. I can imagine a future in which we deal with even more incidents of, or plans for, political violence-and that’s definitely a disturbing development. This could be seen, for example, in the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, when the shooter spoke explicitly about targeting Jews who expressed sympathy for immigrants, or the recent case of the Coast Guard officer who was making plans to kill Democrats and journalists. More ominous, I think, are indications of political violence and the willingness to enact political violence. Silber: I wouldn’t identify this most recent development as the “beginning of a civil war” since I’m not sure that reflects anything other than the political divide we’ve already witnessed for the last several years and the fact that Democrats are taking steps they could not have taken before they regained control of the House. Is it irrational to say this could be the beginning of a civil war? The political divide seems to be getting worse. BU Today: Democrats are demanding documents from President Trump, his family, and many associated with him. Read her answers about the proliferation of headlines referencing the possibility of another civil war. So if anyone would have a knowledgeable perspective on the question of whether we are headed for civil war, it’s Silber. Along with her teaching and research, she has worked on numerous public history projects, including museum exhibitions at the Gettysburg National Military Park and film projects on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Silber has done extensive research on the Civil War over more than two decades and has written several books on the subject, including Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992), Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (2005), and most recently, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Is that legitimately where we stand today in the era of Donald Trump, particularly in the wake of the ramped-up rhetoric stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow, or is Civil War talk just crazy hyperbole? BU Today put three questions to Nina Silber, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of history and American studies and the current president of the Society of Civil War Historians. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.” A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war.
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