Anton Chekhov famously said that if a gun appears hanging on a wall in the first act, it must be used in the second act. In the same way, the line is dangerously thin between warning about a peril and creating an atmosphere that makes that peril possible. Ever since last year’s presidential election, the press and countless voices on social media have been worrying, ever more loudly and insistently, about a looming civil war.
The warnings come from both ends of the political spectrum, and Americans seem to believe them. But civil war is a rare and exceptional moment in the life of a civilization. We should be careful how we use such a term, lest fears of political catastrophe become self-fulfilling prophecies. In the rising intensity of the Internet’s teeming egalitarianism—controlled as it is by the self-appointed deities of Silicon Valley—American democracy has reached its double-sided fulfillment in the way social media can make collective fantasies real. And after whipping readers into a frenzy in the matters of Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic, the media are loath to lower the temperature.
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