Sir Isaac Newton coined the phrase that became his third law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But this isn’t just true for science—it’s painfully true for politics, too.
Canadian author Stephen Marche, whose new book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future chronicles what he saw while reporting on the far right in Ohio, aka Oath Keepers’ country, came on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal to talk with host Molly Jong-Fast.
“Things feed into each other,” he explains. “Inequality feeds into bad electoral decisions, which leads to bad policies, which leads to…” Well, not great things. A prime example Marche gives is Donald Trump.
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It’s almost too easy, but also incredibly serious. While in office, Trump refused to build a protective sea wall by New York, where, as Marche says and everyone else knows, “88 percent of the world’s international currency goes through.” This seems like a minor dumb decision, until, as Marche wrote in his book, models show that a Category 5 hurricane would completely wipe the city off the map, and it’d be virtually impossible to rebuild.
Then, Marche tells Molly about his trip to meet with members of the far right in Ohio. What he saw and heard from them is shocking to most, but especially jarring to him as a Canadian. He was told that property taxes are a form of slavery and—this one left Molly speechless—that America could actually benefit from a civil war. But they’ll take secession first.
“It would be more complex than even Brexit, much more complex than Brexit because you have the military, you have federal institutions like NASA, you have pensions. It’s a complete mess to do,” he says. But also, it’s just… not smart.
There is one form of secession Molly is actually interested in: “Could there be a world where part of the United States went to Canada?”
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