Until the killing starts, the uprising looks like a party. By the river, near the bridge, the anti-government patriots gather around bonfires. In their torchlit evening rallies, thick with the smoke of burning effigies and chants of “Not my president” and “America for Americans” and “This bridge stays open,” the militias work themselves into livestreamed nightly frenzies, always ending with automatic weapons firing into the air. Their costumes are a mishmash, like their ideologies: Boogaloo bois in Hawaiian shirts, neo-Confederates in full array, militiamen dressed like they’re about to go hunt deer. The Sheriff, as always, wears his uniform: pressed black slacks, a tan shirt, a black Stetson. He is on the scene, with his deputies, to guarantee order, but mainly he’s the celebrity of the occasion, the man who has defied the government in the name of the American way of life, the freedom fighter, the rebel. Laughter curls up with the smoke of the bonfires. There’s a glee in the brotherhood, glee in the spectacle.
On the perimeter across the county line, the US forces wait in silence. Their mood is somber. The general in charge of the first full-spectrum operation in the homelandI has his orders. The moment is still nauseating. The General doesn’t fear the enemy. The rallies look more like Halloween than a movement, drawing a chaotic collection of angry and slightly ludicrous fanatics. Even the Sheriff has a faint tinge of failure around him—as if anyone knocking that black Stetson off his head would make him burst into tears. The anti-government patriots are armed with automatic weapons and IEDs and various ghost guns of their own manufacture, including hopped-up handmade rocket-propelled grenades and improvised drones. The General knows that their firepower, impressive to civilians, won’t amount to much against a professional army. He has Apache helicopters and Marines.
The Army of the Interstate, as CNN has christened the anti-government patriot forces massed near the bridge, are threatening the sovereign power of the United States. Still, the General has doubts. Are they a genuine threat to the Union or just a bunch of hooligans letting off steam? Are they traitors or festivalgoers? The decision to use American soldiers to spill American blood is different from a police action. The General is about to wage war on American citizens, entitled to the freedom of expression and association and guaranteed the right to possess weapons.
And how would a bloodbath look? Sixty years of American experience has taught the same lesson about counterinsurgency: If you lose, you lose. If you win, you still lose. But the General has his orders. He has no choice but to begin the next civil war. Nobody feels he has a choice.
In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s election, calls for active armed resistance against the federal government spiked. Several of the president’s lawyers called for acts of violence against election officials. Michael Flynn, a retired US Army general and Trump ally, tweeted the press release from an Ohio-based conservative group calling for a “limited form of martial law.” Later he would approve the idea of a Myanmar-style coup. A speaker at a rally led by Donald Trump Jr. said, “We’re getting ready to start shooting.” The intensity of the violent rhetoric may have been new; the message wasn’t. Since 2008, American conservatives have been actively preparing for civil war. They have been preparing intellectually by predicting civil war and rehearsing its possibilities. They have been preparing materially by training themselves and gathering weapons.
It is no longer accurate to describe civil war proponents as “far right.” Before 2008, only the most extreme groups on the margins of the conservative movement held secessionist beliefs. Now openness to violent rebellion against federal authority is a mainstream position. On September 12, 2016, when expert opinion stood in more or less complete consensus on the imminence of a Hillary Clinton victory, Matt Bevin, then governor of Kentucky, openly suggested violent resistance. “Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview, ‘Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive, that we’d ever be able to recover as a nation?’ ” he told a crowd at a Values Voters Summit. “And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood of who? The tyrants, to be sure, but who else? The patriots.
“Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren.”
That’s not some guy blasting off in a Facebook post, or a conspiracy theorist spouting dark nonsense from a random street corner. That’s the governor of Kentucky, calling for bloody insurrection.
Vague predictions of the collapse of the Republic have been a mainstay of right-wing talk radio since the 1990s. Right-wing television has made calls for disunion much more specific. “This country is headed towards a civil war in terms of two sides that are just hating each other and if Robert Mueller wants, there’s a big red button in the middle of the table,” Sean Hannity said on Fox News on April 2, 2018. “And if Robert Mueller is so pompous and so arrogant and so power hungry and so corrupt that he’s going to hit the red button, he’s going to ignite a battle we’ve not seen in this country before.”
The genre of future civil war fantasy, which is more extensive than you might imagine, is almost exclusively right-wing. The secession of Texas from the Union is a particularly rich vein. Armed conflict with the federal government is one of the most popular fantasies in the United States today. Sometimes the would-be warriors know they’re pretending. In American MilSim—an extreme sport that blends historical reenactment with live-action military simulation to come as close as possible to real combat—scenarios of American insurrection make for plausible backgrounds. Many more Americans are not aware they are fantasizing. In 2015, Jade Helm 15, a routine military exercise across the southern United States, spawned a vast labyrinth of conspiracy theories. Millions believed their own government was preparing the American people for a Chinese invasion. Others believed the operation would coincide with an asteroid collision. Alex Jones claimed that “helm” was an acronym for “Homeland Eradication of Local Militants.” Texas governor Greg Abbott, apparently swayed by the notion that the federal government was about to seize control of Texas by force, sent the Texas State Guard to monitor the operation. The disinformation pipeline flows into real power: internet-generated fantasies move through conservative media into the arena of policy. Fantastic visions bleed into real politics. The Texas governor responds with troops to theories with no basis in reality.
The fantasy of a civil war has established a place for itself on all levels of the American conservative system—radical groups, media personalities, elected officials. All it will take is a symbol, a hook, to catch their anger, their sense of being under threat, to focus their belief in the fantasy of cleansing violence.
By the time the fighting begins, no one will remember that it started over a bridge. Not an important bridge, not one of the feats of human excellence that define American achievement. Not the Brooklyn Bridge, not the Golden Gate, but a small two-lane bridge nobody bothered to name over a river ordinary people need to cross in a small rural county that loathes the federal government and has decided not to obey its mandates anymore. The bridge would make a perfect symbol for the hard right.
Nothing embodies decaying American government more completely than its bridges. Of the 616,087 bridges in America, nearly 40 percent are fifty years old or older. The United States constructed infrastructure miracles, then didn’t bother to maintain them. Maintenance requires money, and nobody notices a bridge not being dangerous. The current backlog of bridge rehabilitation stands at $171 billion. In 2016, nearly 10 percent of the nation’s bridges were structurally deficient. The bridge that will be the inciting incident of the first battle of the next civil war could be any one of them.
At this particular bridge, agents from the Federal Highway Administration show up for a routine inspection. They find crumbling concrete, water damage from improper sealants, and thinning gusset plates that could tear the line of rivets. They have no choice but to direct the county’s supervisors to close the bridge as a danger to public safety. Repairing the bridge won’t be simple, either. The Environmental Protection Agency requires an environmental assessment before any repairs can be made. Due to funding cuts and the backlog of infrastructure projects with mandated assessments, the EPA won’t be able to give a hard deadline. Meanwhile the bridge will be barricaded with concrete stanchions and barbed wire. Drivers will have to take the long way around.
The Sheriff will wake up one morning to find his constituents furious. The politics won’t matter, or even register, with the residents of the county. They’ll just be pissed that they don’t have their bridge. When the Sheriff stops in at the local diner in town, beside the county offices, his people will give him an earful. What is a government for—what do you pay taxes for—if not to keep the bridges open?
Steeped in the right-wing internet and an active member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, this Sheriff decides to turn himself into a hero. In a fit of outrage and a genuine sense of service to the community, he straddles an excavator and pulls aside the concrete stanchions and barbed wire to reopen a closed bridge. A local Fox affiliate covers the scene, and it makes great television: the Sheriff with his laughing face as he operates the wall clamp barrier lift that moves the concrete to one side. That’s his first crime, since he isn’t licensed to operate heavy machinery. In the interview that follows the bridge clearance, he stands stiffly, his uniform pressed and starched. He keeps his Stetson hat on.
“Why have you opened the bridge, Sheriff?” the reporter asks.
“The distinguished representatives of the Federal Highway Administration and the so-called Environmental Protection Agency do not, I am afraid, understand the needs of the people of this county, and I do.”
“Do you expect any trouble from the government?”
The Sheriff smiles. “I remember that Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ”
“Sheriff, have you spoken with the Federal Highway Administration or the EPA?”
“I don’t think I need to speak with them. I think the doctrine of interposition is well established.”
“What do you say to those who say the bridge is unsafe?”
The Sheriff shrugs. “This is a free country. Anyone can choose to use the bridge or not to use the bridge. You know, my grampy always told me life is unsafe.”
The “grampy” comment lifts the segment into the mainstream. The networks pick up the drama of the bridge: The Late Show jokes about how conservatives believe in “the God-given right to die in bridge accidents.” Tucker Carlson rants for ten minutes about why the left-wing media has grown so comfortable mocking law enforcement. They bully the Sheriff, he concludes, because he’s a government figure who’s done something that people wanted for a change. The Wall Street Journal publishes an editorial entitled “A New Horatio on an Old Bridge.” From the beginning, the Sheriff divides America, along the lines that already divide it.
You do not have to imagine this defiant sheriff. You can meet a version of him right now.
To this day, Richard Mack is proud that he reopened a closed bridge when he served as the sheriff of Graham County in Arizona from 1988 to 1996. “We had a bridge out on the east side of the county and two different agencies told us we couldn’t fix it,” he remembers, his voice charged with cheerful contempt. “The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers told us we couldn’t fix it until they finished their environmental impact study. Well, it went on for ten, eleven months. And the county commissioners finally got the courage and they voted unanimously to fix the bridge. Then the federal government threatened to arrest the county commissioners and all the maintenance workers at the site. I got involved. I told them, ‘I get along with everybody but you guys aren’t arresting anybody in my county. You guys make any effort to arrest anybody in my county, I’ll arrest you. You do not come in here and try to prevent us from fixing a bridge.’ ” Mack believes in the doctrine of interposition—“standing in the way”—the sheriff’s duty to resist government abuses. “The founding fathers fought a war to oppose government abuses,” he adds. In Cooper v. Aaron (1958), a desegregation case, the Supreme Court rejected the constitutionality of interposition, whether on a county or a state level. That clear ruling has done nothing to stop the popularity of the idea among local law enforcement.
Mack is not alone in his beliefs about the power imbued in the role of sheriff. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has about 5,000 members. They are what anti-government patriots with power look like. “The FBI has very little authority in the county,” Mack argues, their role being properly limited to investigations of counterfeiting, treason, border protection, piracy, and the violation of treaties. The sheriff, for Mack, is a sacred figure imbued with a constitutional role of resistance to federal authority. “The federal government is not supposed to be big,” he says. “The federal government was designed to be small and impotent.” The sheriffs elected across the United States are there to ensure that impotence, he believes.
The United States has always had resistance to government in its blood. The resistance is growing louder and angrier.
The next civil war will be a war over meaning. The division begins in the information systems: the media, the machinery of electoral politics, the internet, and social networks. Every study of virality since the origin of social media has shown that, after the experience of awe, moral outrage is the strongest driver of traffic. When you combine the power of outrage with the low risk of judgment from behind a screen, along with what psychologists call “the reduction of empathic distress”—the basic inhumanity that the facelessness of the internet permits—you have a very powerful machine for dehumanization, no matter what content goes into it. This phenomenon isn’t limited to the United States. The same effect has been seen in Bangladesh, the Middle East, and elsewhere, with mass death as a result.
Since anger drives the information networks and the networks create meaning, it should come as no surprise that twenty-first-century sheriffs love to put on angry shows. They want to be celebrities. In 2017, Arizona lawman Joseph Arpaio ignored the federal government’s injunctions barring him from “immigrant roundups,” but even after he was convicted of criminal contempt of court, President Trump pardoned him. He earned his pardon by being famous. In his tent city chain gangs, large prison camps in the 1990s in which the humiliation of criminals was used as a major deterrent, he insisted that inmates wear pink underwear. He sold pink handcuffs during his promotional effort for his book tour. It’s not just Arpaio, either. Trump-loving sheriff David Clarke has worn twenty-two medals during his media appearances despite never having served in the armed forces.
The information networks of the United States have become polarization machines. They work by anger, through anger, toward anger. The force of virality is indistinguishable from divisiveness. The power of spectacle is driving American politics, on the right and the left. That spectacle demands larger and larger stakes. It distorts all perspective. It turns small, minor issues—like the closure of a rural bridge—into the grandest possible questions—like the authority of the federal government.
Once the Sheriff becomes a celebrity, the bridge becomes a constant point of media attention.
The Sheriff speaks to Fox News earnestly on the need to rein in the federal government and the impulse to restore freedom. “This is not a country built on shutting down bridges,” he says. “It’s not a country built by bureaucrats. It’s not a country built by men who listen to bureaucrats either.” He will automatically be a hero to talk radio and cable news, appearing nightly on their shows. The Sheriff will be equally happy to speak to white nationalists and European heritage sites.
Inevitably, he becomes a meme, chopped up, parodied, pornified, set to music, idolized, demonized, worshipped, set inside pastiches of horror films or old television shows or earlier memes, yet another image to be demolished and reconstituted. To liberals he is a terrifying autocrat, an icon of the country tearing itself apart. To mainstream conservatives, he represents the dedication to small government. To the talk radio entertainment complex, he offers a mockery of the political order and a rambling carnival of ratings-grabbing turmoil. To the fringes of the hard right, he’s an outright hero.
When he speaks to mainstream outlets, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, he tends to be polite and moderate, playing up his folksiness. “I just wanted to keep the people moving,” he tells the Boston Globe. “It just seems to me like it’s my job to get out of people’s way.”
“You’re in the government’s way, though.”
“I suppose that’s so. I can’t imagine I have a great number of friends in Washington these days. But I guess I feel it’s my job to get the government out of people’s way, too.”
With Fox News and other right-wing outlets, he’s more serious, less jokey. He speaks earnestly of the need to rein in the federal government and of the impulse to restore freedom. After one of his interviewers goes on a long rant about how the government is using the EPA and other federal agencies to promote the interests of Blacks and Jews over the interests of whites, he says nothing except “I hear what you’re saying.” He never agrees or disagrees, which allows mainstream media to continue to treat him as more than a fringe figure.
“What will you do when the FBI comes for you?” Geraldo asks during a live segment.
“Well, sir, if the FBI came to arrest anyone in this county, they would need to consult with the sheriff.”
“And you have a connection there.”
“I feel like I know the sheriff pretty well, sir.”
Always at ease, always in his pressed and starched uniform, always in his Stetson hat, the Sheriff is caricature and legend at once. His humility seems as bottomless as his arrogance, his strength and formality of manners balanced by the vulnerability in his eyes. The man of quiet defiance radiates the impression that the world is about to be taken away, that the last decent glint of humanity is about to be extinguished, that he alone stands in front of a tide about to swallow the world. Half the American people love it.
He becomes two memes straightaway. In the “grampy said” meme, on one side a journalist asks him a vastly complicated or insoluble question—“How do we overcome the environmental crisis while maintaining economic growth and diminishing income inequality?” or “Why does a loving and all-powerful God allow children to get cancer?”—and in the next frame the Sheriff answers: “Grampy said…” In the “at ease” meme, the image of the Sheriff standing at ease is posted into ever more ridiculous situations—on a mountaintop, in a 1990s porn star orgy, in a scene from the Saw franchise.
Slowly, militias start filtering into the Sheriff’s county. They bring flags. They aren’t American flags.