You’ll see it in on your feed, or maybe you’ll be out and catch it on a television in the corner of a coffee shop, or somebody you love will call or text. Everyone’s phones will go off at once. In your office, on the street, on the screen, horrified spectators, stopped still, with their hands to their mouths, gasping, running in vague panic. Smoke lifting over the Capitol—gray and black fumes billowing from the top of the great dome. A dirty bomb at the heart of power.
The photographs will be unforgettable: the horrifying cloud visible from Arlington cemetery, the burning mirrored in the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, a casual shot from the East Potomac Golf Course of players teeing off while the government burns behind them. Even before anyone knows who committed the atrocity, the news will report that everything has changed, that America will never be the same.
The news will be right. Everything will have changed. America is one spectacular act of political violence away from a national crisis.
Only a spark is needed, one major domestic terrorist event that shifts the perception of the country—an anti-government patriot who takes his rage against federal authority and finds expression in a drone loaded with explosives flown into the Capitol dome. The politics of the terrorist and even the violence itself won’t matter so much as the shock the violence produces, the perception it conjures.
Even a small gesture can completely alter the public’s consciousness of its own security. In 1970, in my own country, Canada, a separatist splinter group kidnapped a Quebec cabinet minister and a British diplomat. That was enough for the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, an icon of liberalism, to declare martial law and suspend civil liberties. The kidnappings were, in themselves, of very limited moment or importance. The threat to the stability of government was negligible. The separatist party in question, the Front de libération du Québec, was disorganized and minor. It didn’t matter. It was a question of perception: when the country felt out of control, the government had to respond.
That sense of control has already frayed in America. On January 6, 2020, rioters beat a policeman to death on the steps of the Capitol, smeared feces on the walls, took selfies in the House chamber, and stole souvenirs. The event was widely described as an insurrection. It wasn’t. The rioters were only loosely organized and possessed little political support and no military support. But those facts may easily change. What will it be like when they come back shooting? The riot of January 6 should be taken as evidence of how political partisans will treat the onset of violence: 45 percent of Republican voters support the assault on Washington. “There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence…,” Rush Limbaugh said on his show the day after. “I am glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual Tea Party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.” As January 6 has faded from the news, Republican talking points have continued to diminish its importance. “Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures,” Georgia Republican Andrew Clyde said in May. “You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” The representative was signaling. The Republican Party has become a movement with a political and an armed wing; the connection is clarifying. The relationship between the two is rarely direct—as in the case of the Oregon state representative literally opening the door for rioters. It’s more often expressed laterally, sometimes through gestures, like Senator Josh Hawley’s raised fist in support of the rioters, and sometimes through legislation, like the new restrictions on voting that continue to cast doubt, peripherally, on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the impotence of the government only becomes more naked: the greatest deliberative body in the world cannot manage to investigate an assault on its own members.
The question of civil war is only a matter of scale. All it would take is for the violence that’s already manifested—the LA riots in 1992; the defiance of the federal authority by Arkansas in 1957; the sagebrush rebels shooting federal authorities as they have in recent years; the January 6 storming of the Capitol; white power groups promoting lone-wolf terrorism as they do—to fuse, through the rage-fueled mechanisms of the internet, into widespread conflict after a cataclysmic event. In hindsight, the cataclysmic event will appear completely natural, a logical outcome to the trends of the country.
The United States is particularly vulnerable to terrorist spectacle. September 11 was an act of significant destruction, but its iconic status, the meaning it took on in the American consciousness, was outsized. The resonance of September 11 in public life caused the United States to enter two failed wars and to continue those wars long after any national or global interests were being served. A domestic September 11 would create the same irresistible momentum. A serious assault on the political symbols, a sense that the nation, as a body, could be under threat, would inevitably provoke the impetus for revenge and the hunger for order.
The United States would not respond rationally to an assault on the Capitol. It would not manage to find a considered policy broadly supportive of the goal of restoring peace to the country and reducing tensions within its sectarian fronts. The underlying tensions in the country are too strong, the sense of threat too developed. If history is any guide, the reaction would be oversized. It would be violent. It would be controlling. It would be vengeful.
In two separate incidents in the past fifteen years, radical right-wing partisans with violent intentions had access to low-grade nuclear weapons. They were discovered by accident. The first was in Maine. “On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased James Cummings,” the Bangor Daily News reported. The second was in Florida. In 2017, one of the roommates of a National Guardsman named Brandon Russell shot two of his other roommates. In their shared property, police found a cooler filled with HMTD, a high-power explosive, along with thorium and americium, both nuclear fuels. Russell had Atomwaffen ties. Cummings was a white supremacist. Both Cummings and Russell were caught by accident, not by anti-terrorism efforts. Cummings’s wife shot him. One of Russell’s roommates shot the others. Those peripheral crimes, not efforts by law enforcement, led to the uncovering of the nuclear materials. How many other Cummingses and Russells are out there right now?
“The effects from radiation exposure would likely be minimal,” a Department of Homeland Security report on the effects of dirty bombs makes clear. The spectacle is the main problem. “Psychological effects from fear of being exposed may be one of the major consequences of a dirty bomb.” A dirty bomb at the Capitol building would serve as an act of annihilating symbolism more than an act of physical destruction. But that wouldn’t diminish its power. “Such impacts might involve disruption to lives and livelihoods as the contaminated area is being cleaned up,” the DHS report adds. This impact could continue even after the site has been cleaned up if people are reluctant to return to the affected area.” The disruption of the legislative body would devastate the country’s faith in its capacity to negotiate solutions peacefully.
At first you won’t necessarily notice much of a change. Violence has always defined America. There have always been two sides to every story. The New York Times and MSNBC will begin by blaming the catastrophe on the Secret Service and the FBI, who, in their view, have shirked the threat from domestic terrorism for too long. Fox News and the rest of the conservative media will bemoan the rising incivility in American politics. Online discourse will be rife with conspiracy theories. Anyone who can be blamed will be blamed—the Jews, the Muslims, immigrants. “White democracy eats itself,” the radicals on the left will claim. Others will be happy, or will claim they are happy, now that the facade of democracy has been stripped away. White power groups will claim that it’s all a false flag and that the long-awaited race war is finally underway. All of this already happens after acts of political violence in the United States today.
To clamp down on domestic terrorism, the US government will have no choice but to control arms, control the movement of people, and control hate speech. Even the first of these requirements will be technically unfeasible and counterproductive. A significant portion of the US population considers any attempt to curtail, or even to register, the private possession of military-grade weapons inherently un-American. How much more un-American will they consider limits on movement and speech? The American government, in order to survive, will have to suspend the most sacred icon of the American government, the Bill of Rights. So, right from the beginning, as an inevitable element of this kind of war, a massive portion of the US populace, nearly half, would consider the actions of the US government un-American. And they wouldn’t be wrong.
The United States has been involved in counterinsurgency conflicts for over fifty years. It has never learned enough to avoid the first trap: the violence that imposes order to control violence produces more violence and more disorder. The means of counterinsurgency are in direct conflict with their ends: You cannot reach pacification by murdering people. Over and over again, the methods of control generate chaos.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have a pretty good idea of how the United States government would respond to an outbreak of mass political violence. After decades of failure, the American military has a complete manual on the subject: Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency, or JP 3-24.
There are two basic strategies at work in current military policy around counterinsurgency: they go by the acronyms SCHBT and ISIR. SCHBT stands for “Shape, Clear, Hold, Build, Transition,” mentioned earlier, and ISIR for “Identify, Separate, Influence, Renunciation.” Ultimately these are not that different from the “oil slick strategy” used during the Algerian War of Independence. The military holds areas of loyalty and moves outward from them. The first requirement is to determine areas of loyalty. During the desegregation crisis in Arkansas, Eisenhower’s first order was to hold the Arkansas National Guard to barracks. He didn’t want to test their loyalty. A military force would move from, say, Portland, where the belief in government legitimacy is comparatively strong, county by county, into rural Oregon, which is rife with anti-government patriotism.
ISIR is a strategy for de-radicalizing youth in the areas under control. How do you de-radicalize youth while at the same time taking away their most basic rights? You can’t. It’s hard to find youth so stupid that you can kill and imprison their parents and tell them you love them afterward. It didn’t work in Iraq and Afghanistan. It won’t work in the United States.
JP 3-24 is the culmination of decades of failure. It’s a manual born out of lost wars. Because it has been written by those who need to articulate some kind of operational purpose, it imagines the possibility of victory. But those who have fought in America’s counterinsurgencies have suffered enough to abandon false hopes just because they serve an institutional purpose. Not that there aren’t differences of opinion. While some veteran officers insist that counterinsurgency can never succeed, others believe that, under specific conditions and with clear limits, counterinsurgency can achieve a few, narrow goals.
Daniel Bolger, a retired lieutenant general and history professor at North Carolina State University, is the author of Why We Lost, an on-the-ground report on the failures of two decades of American counterinsurgency. Bolger studied counterinsurgency in military school and even wrote a speculative novel about the Afghan war of the late 1980s from the Russian perspective. When he found himself as part of an occupying force in Jalalabad, he knew, perhaps as much as anyone could know, the folly of occupation. “It is a militarily futile and stupid thing to engage in. Most countries regret it,” he says. “You can go back to Roman times, to ancient China. Whenever you get into these situations, it tends to bleed the occupiers.” His view about the counterinsurgency manuals is definite. “Most of this stuff is just bunk. We’re kidding ourselves if we think this stuff is going to work. There’s a flawed assumption at the base of the counterinsurgency field manual. If we, as outsiders, are going to secure the population, we are already wrong. How can we do that as outsiders?” The false premise of counterinsurgency is that you can change the minds of people through force. Wars of counterinsurgency are wars of perception. You can’t murder your way to any perception other than that you’re a murderer.
It’s in the nature of insurgent conflict that violence builds on itself. Symbolic horrors echo. Resonance compounds. The most recent counterinsurgency manual, JP 3-24, has digested, or at least acknowledged, the problem of perception. Insurgencies and counterinsurgencies are engaged in competitive storytelling. “Insurgent groups harness narratives to communicate grievances, goals, and justifications for actions to both internal and external audiences,” JP 3-24 reads. “Insurgency narratives have three elements or components: actors and the environments in which they operate, events along a temporal continuum, and causality—cause and effect relative to the first two elements.” The key word here is “audiences.” And how good can any military force be at playing to audiences?
You will be the audience. You yourself will be the battleground of the conflict. The war is over your feelings about the war. You will begin on one side or the other. Stories will accumulate. Soldiers will fill the street. Flags will hang out of windows. You will feel that the other side is all terrorists and they will feel that you are a terrorist. As they already do.
At first, the horrors will seem distant. You will talk about them with your friends. The military brings in tanks to crush a pocket of apocalyptic cultists who are preparing for armed resistance. Was it overreach? Sovereign citizens, organized in posses, stalk Chicago and the cities of the Northwest murdering protestors. Should there be armed left-wing groups to respond? The statehouse impeaches a Southern governor for hate speech after he critiques the Democratic president. What about the First Amendment, or should that be suspended? An attempt to disarm Oregon Three Percenters after they hang a government informant turns into a bloodbath on both sides. Running gun battles erupt over the rights to herd cattle on federal lands in the West. Racialized terrorism becomes as normal as mass shootings in the United States currently are. The government declares martial law and suspends the writ of habeas corpus.
The number of places you visit will shrink. Where is safe? Who is safe? Control and chaos feed into each other and feed into despair. When you see an officer of the law, you ask yourself: Which side is he on? Public spaces in general are dangerous. You can’t go to a movie without wondering who’s going to shoot it up. Fracture means threat.
You will know how you feel about all of this. The more confusing America gets, the more clear everyone will believe it to be. As your side commits evil, you will become entrenched. There must have been an even greater evil to justify it.
Who controls the military is the most important question. The US military is a true transnational institution. In 2017, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in the military is double that of the presidency and six times that of Congress. The worship of the armed forces has been ingrained into ordinary American life since the beginning of the Iraq War. No sporting event can happen in the US without a celebration of a member of the military. Many airlines give the military priority boarding on US flights. Some grocery stores offer preferred parking to military families. The US military occupies 2 percent of all federal land in the continental United States. Its economic activity constitutes 3.1 percent of the GDP. There are nearly 20 million veterans. Worried analysts in the military describe an emerging “monopoly of trust,” a position of reverence they don’t want. The military functions as a tool. That is how it sees itself. It is not supposed to be in charge. Soldiers would serve a constitutionally elected government whether they considered it legitimate or not. Right-wing infiltration into the military is less of a concern than partisan infiltration into law enforcement, because the oath and the chain of command are clear.
A coup would hardly be unprecedented in global terms: in Chile, in 1973, a constitutional democracy in place for forty-five years devolved into winner-take-all, zero-sum partisan politics until the military imposed tranquilidad. Other countries, even established democracies like Canada, have imposed martial law in the middle of severe political upheaval. But a hard coup in the United States—tanks rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue to impose military control over the country—is unlikely. The deep-seated causes of almost every coup, anywhere, are “poverty, economic activities based mostly on land, and hybrid political regimes,” according to Taeko Hiroi, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies the causes and triggers of coups. Countries which are neither authoritarian nor democratic are most vulnerable. The immediate triggers of coups tend to be “social instability, anti-government protests, economic crisis and regime transitions.” It’s not that these conditions are inconceivable for the United States, but the real reason why a hard coup is unlikely is simply that it hasn’t happened before. “One of the most important factors in a country’s propensity to experience coups is its history,” Hiroi says. “Coups are more likely to happen to countries that have experienced coups.”