Stephen Marche - The Next Civil War - Dispatches from the American Future
Dec 9, 2022

Researcher and prolific writer Stephen Marche talks to Ed Opperman about the state of America, and the likely directionit is heading in. In a disquieting interview, Marche details his work looking into the abyss America teeters on the edge of, and with global, financial, economic and environmental disaster just standing close behind, his conclusions should worry us all.

Book Review from Goodreads

In this deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction that reads like Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized crossed with David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, a celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds.

On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts— and tips America over the edge into ruin.

If there was an interview which will make people sit up and take notice of where the U.S. is at, then this is surely a contender for that position.

Book: The Next Civil War - Dispatches from the American Future

Website: Stephen Marche

Twitter: Stephen Marche