In this long excerpt from last week’s livestream, I take up the “civil war is coming” trope that has been gaining momentum for years now. What concerns me is not that people are talking about it, but which people are talking about it and how seriously. Words have consequences, and those consequences can be amplified or attenuated by a speaker with sufficient influence. So when someone like Tucker Carlson, who has a large audience and a voice that carries weight in the culture, starts speaking loosely about the threat of a civil war, we need to pay attention. Wars aren’t natural phenomena like tornados, which we can neither predict nor prevent. They can be encouraged or discouraged through human action, and I wonder whether Tucker’s “warnings” about the possibility of civil war aren’t better described as provocations toward a civil war.
I mean no disrespect to Tucker. I like the man personally and appreciate the generosity he’s shown me. But on this issue, his rhetoric is overblown and, frankly, dangerous. Such talk can do more than describe a state of affairs—it can help to create a state of affairs. If nobody is convinced that a civil war is inevitable, we won’t have one. But if more and more people become convinced of war’s inevitability, the chances of one breaking out will rise. As of today, I think there are slim odds that we’ll see domestic armed conflict in this country within, say, the next year. But if this kind of rhetoric persists, spreads, and persuades enough people, we can’t say what will happen. Racializing the discourse of war, as I regret to say that Tucker does in the clips I discuss in this show, will only make things worse.
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