Though a work of fiction, the 2024 dystopian film “Civil War” resonates unsettlingly with Americans’ real anxieties over escalating political and social polarization facing their country.
The film depicts a harrowing scenario where 19 states secede from the Union, the Lincoln Memorial is blown to pieces, and the White House falls. The New York Times said it reflects “the bipartisan sense of unease that has permeated American politics.”
The fear of political violence and chaos has long gripped Americans. Back in August 2022, an Economist/YouGov poll showed that over 40 percent of surveyed Americans believed a civil war was likely in the next decade.
Having captured American discourse, the scenario of “civil war” exposes the increasing divisions and flaws in the American democratic system.
POLITICAL CHAOS, PUBLIC FURY
Scenes in “Civil War” have been echoed in reality.
Earlier this year, the southern U.S. state of Texas, which in the movie unites with California to overthrow the president, found itself in an armed standoff with the federal government over immigration tensions. More than 20 Republican-led states openly opposed the federal government, reviving memories of America’s Civil War.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has lambasted the White House over illegal border crossings, which he described as an “invasion,” claiming the state has the right to self-defense due to what he sees as President Joe Biden’s failure to secure the U.S. border. However, Texan Democrats view this as another political maneuver to exploit the immigration issue, a major Republican agenda point in an election year rife with partisan strife.
Ultimately, it is the migrants, used as political pawns, who bear the brunt of these conflicts.
Recent American history has been marred by a series of unprecedented political incidents: the Capitol was stormed by protesters on Jan. 6, 2021; two consecutive presidents faced impeachment; a former president, who is campaigning for re-election, was criminally convicted; and a sitting president’s child has been convicted of a crime for the first time.
Political conflicts have exacerbated social divisions, pitting movements like Black Lives Matter against white supremacists, gun control advocates against opponents, and liberals against conservatives on issues like abortion rights.
“The U.S. is now more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s,” Bruce Stokes, an associate fellow with the Chatham House, a London-based policy institute, remarked in February.
“The United States has become a Disunited States. There are effectively two Americas — and they are at war,” he said.
Beneath the turmoil lies a profound erosion of livelihoods. In the United States, 37.9 million people live in poverty, while 26 million remain without health insurance. Over 650,000 individuals find themselves without a home, and the average student borrower faces a daunting 20-year struggle to extinguish their educational debt.
The health and safety of American citizens are increasingly imperiled by drugs and firearms. If alcohol and tobacco users are included, the number of people in the United States who are abusing substances totals 165 million. More than 100,000 Americans succumbed to drug overdoses in 2022, and nearly 43,000 died from gun violence in 2023. Additionally, the nation grapples with a suicide rate of 14.8 per 100,000 people.
ILLUSION OF VOTING
Despite the dire situation, American politicians remain entrenched in bipartisan conflicts instead of offering effective solutions.
Both parties leverage issues like immigration, climate change, and gun control to deepen polarization and expand their political bases. This partisanship has hindered the legislative process, with a Republican-controlled House and a Democrat-controlled Senate making consensus and effective lawmaking almost impossible.
Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, wrote in January that the United States, faced with “the dilemma of democracy,” is “incapable of finding rational solutions, or for that matter any solutions to its most pressing problems at home,” be it immigration, energy, or gun control.
Ong Tee Keat, former deputy speaker of the lower house of the Malaysian Parliament, criticized the current U.S. election system, noting that candidates are far from representing the common people.
Ideally, candidates should be “people’s choice,” but in reality, they are “cherry-picked” by contesting parties, with some of them even being “novices remaining unknown to the people,” Ong told Xinhua.
Moreover, candidates are usually mandated through rhetoric like “populist appeals, bold and undeliverable promises,” and administrations often fail to address public needs after taking office, Ong said.
A Medill School of Journalism/NPR/Ipsos survey on non-voters in the 2020 presidential election found that two-thirds agreed “voting has little to do with the way that real decisions are made in this country,” and 53 percent agreed that “it makes no difference who is elected president — things go on just as they did before.”
DEMOCRACY FOR THE PRIVILEGED
The malaise of today has deep historical roots. The “American democracy” system was not designed to foster consensus but to ensure the power and interests of monopolistic capitalists.
James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, once said, “In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. … Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
Friedrich Engels, in 1891, noted that nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America.
“The nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it,” he wrote.
Ideally, American democracy allows various parties to represent different groups. However, in reality, politicians often align with interest groups, manufacturing divisive issues and trapping citizens in mutual antagonism. As a result, politicians and interest groups exploit divisions over race, immigration, gender, social care, and environmental protection for economic and political gains.
In “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class,” Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade the middle class to support political candidates who promise to crack down on crime and curb undocumented immigration. Once elected, they slash taxes for the rich, give corporations regulatory control over industry and financial markets, and aggressively curtail social services.
In 1944, Hungarian economic sociologist Karl Polanyi lamented the decay of American democracy in his book “The Great Transformation,” stating: “In spite of universal suffrage, American voters were powerless against owners.”
“The separation of powers … was now used to separate the people from power over their own economic life,” he said.
According to a Pew Research Center survey last September, only 16 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government, the lowest in over 70 years of polling. Nearly two-thirds of Americans said they always or often felt exhausted when thinking about politics, which they described as “divided” and “corrupt.”
