The warning that “the unimaginable has become every day in America” doesn’t read like metaphor anymore. Stuart says he lingered on that line from The Next Civil War, not because it shocked him, but because it so perfectly captured the way chaos has been absorbed into the ordinary. Riots, militias, even assassinations no longer carry the weight of rupture — they blur into routine. The normalization itself is the collapse, a slow acceptance that democracy can function alongside violence.
What counts as civil war isn’t cannons at Gettysburg but something closer to “Ireland in the Troubles,” as Stephen Marche described it. Low-level clashes, targeted killings, the steady presence of fear — these don’t come with banners or declarations, but they tear at civic trust all the same. That’s why the term “political violence” undersells what’s underway: It’s governance by threat, a society reshaped by intimidation. Once fear becomes the organizing principle, there’s no real boundary left between war and politics.
Consider the party that once competed for nearly 40 percent of the Black vote under Eisenhower, now hovers at eight percent under Trump. Stevens used that decline to show how Republicans shrank their coalition by design, abandoning diversity in favor of loyalty. The reward went to those most willing to comply, and over decades the result was a hollowed-out political class. Competence was traded for obedience.
“Soft secession” is how Marche framed the rise of state-level resistance, blue governors fending off federal intrusion as Washington weakens. That patchwork may look like strength, but it signals fragmentation. Abroad, authoritarian regimes have already proved that control doesn’t equal competence, Hungary’s stagnant economy being case in point. Here at home, the trajectory is the same: as Marche put it, “a country becoming more and more unrecognizable every day,” its democracy fading without a formal death notice.
Tune in to this discussion between Stuart and Stephen Marche to hear why “the unimaginable” is now just daily life.
How Our Democracy Is Being Dismantled from Within
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
