Jamelle Bouie and Tim Alberta explore the extent of America's polarization on "The Argument."
 | By Anabel Bacon Editor, Opinion Audio/The Argument |
We're a little over a month away from the midterms, and Americans are not feeling great about one another. |
It's frightening language — but is it the right language? |
This week on the Times Opinion podcast "The Argument," we dig into the semantics and the history of civil conflict in the United States to get specific about what we mean when we talk about the threat of civil war in 2022 — and how worried we should really be. |
One of our guests, the Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, has argued that our current political and cultural divisions, while heightened, are not the same as the ones that characterized the antebellum period of the 1850s. In this episode, he notes that political violence levels can be elevated while civil society remains relatively normal. "That's a qualitatively different thing than what life looks like under conditions of civil war," he says. |
But our other guest, Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has spent years reporting on the far right in the United States, and he's alarmed by both the recent increase in political violence and violent rhetoric and what he sees as our complacent response. "We all want to tell ourselves a story that we're Americans, and we're exceptional," he says, "and this is just another case where we're going to have to buckle up and we'll survive it because that's what we do." But, he adds, "whether or not that's true, it feels disingenuous to pretend like there's not something unique about this threat." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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