Stephen Marche

Stephen Marche (born 1976) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator.

Quotes

Originality died well before the arrival of AI; we are currently in the most derivative period of human creativity since the Industrial Revolution.
- Death of an Author (2023), co-authored with ChatGPT and Cohere

The Next Civil War (2022)

When you are fighting for freedom and your soul, what won’t you do?
- Introduction

Wherever government fails, whenever the peaceful transition of power breaks down, restoring an orderly democracy takes nothing short of a miracle. America won’t be any different. When Democrats feel that they cannot find representation, when Republicans feel that they cannot find representation, the government becomes just another resource to control. Outrage feeds all-consuming cycles of revenge. People retreat into tribes. Once the stability of power goes, it’s easy to come up with excuses to murder your neighbors.
- Introduction

The technical definition of a civil war, according to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, is a thousand combatant deaths within a year. The definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year. In the United States in 2019, domestic anti-government extremists killed forty-two people; in 2018 they killed fifty-three people; in 2017, thirty-seven; in 2016, seventy-two; and in 2015, seventy.
- Introduction

Joe Biden’s victory speech in the 2020 election announced “a time to heal.” It was wishful thinking. Even as the president-elect tried to gesture toward reconciliation, the sitting president wouldn’t concede. American liberals in the major cities retain a kind of desperate faith in their country’s institutions that amounts nearly to delusion.
- Introduction

The main reason Americans buy guns is to tell themselves the story of the failure of government.
- Ch. 1

We live in an age of what scholars call stochastic terrorism, otherwise known as “lone-wolf terrorism,” although that phrase is imprecise. “Lone wolf” sounds like something from the movies. It implies that acts of spectacular violence are the result of organization, that there are masterminds hiding, like Bond villains, in distant countries, elaborating schemes and then disseminating them over networks, to be undertaken by their secretive minions. The reality of the current threat is much more banal. The background hum of hyper-partisanship, the rage and loathing of everyday American politics, generates a widespread tolerance for violence. Eventually somebody acts on it.
- Ch. 2

The norm of bipartisan agreement has been shattered forever and, once shattered, it cannot be put back together.
- Ch. 2

The fruit of hyper-partisanship and a toxic informational environment is paralysis—paralysis at a moment of peril.
- Ch. 2

Difference is the core of the American experience. Difference is its genius. There has never been a country—in history, in the world—so comfortable with difference, so full of difference. The great insight of its founders was that they based government not on the drive toward consensus but on the permission for disagreement.
- Ch. 2

At this point in history, 240 years after its composition, much of the US Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government. I’ve seen Trump supporters at rallies with whole chunks written out on the backs of their shirts. During the 2016 election, Gold Star father Khizr Khan waved around a pocket Constitution at a Clinton rally like a talisman to deflect Trump’s insults; the New York Times reprinted the whole thing, with commentary, like the Talmud. It’s absurd. The practice of constitutional law in the United States gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history. The geniuses who wrote it, and who signed it less than 100 miles from unclaimed wilderness, never imagined for a moment that their plans for a new republic would survive for 250 years. They were much too sensible. The founders never desired their permanence. It is only their great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren who conjure the founders into gods among men. Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions. ... Before Trump and anything he may or may not have done, there was already a constitutional crisis. There is no way to govern rationally when your foundational document is effectively dead and you worship it anyway.
- Ch. 5

At the heart of tragedy is the tragic flaw: What makes the hero great destroys him. America’s tragic flaw is its openness. Perhaps it was a failure right from the start: slave owners preaching freedom and equality. But it would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction. That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.
- Ch. 5

In America, more than in any other country in the world, treason is just a matter of dates. ... The History of the Fall of the American Republic, author still unborn, will no doubt recognize who and what to blame: the nihilistic hyper-partisanship of Newt Gingrich; Bill Clinton allowing China into the WTO on the mistaken assumption that capitalism and democracy were inevitably linked and that the American middle class would rise on the world’s swelling tides; Bush v. Gore; the suspension of civil liberties in the aftermath of September 11; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the explicit rejection of the “reality-based community”; the Tea Party; Citizens United; Obama’s failure to unify on immigration and health care; Mitch McConnell’s decision not to consider the appointment of Merrick Garland; the presidency of Donald Trump. And there are thousands upon thousands of politicians who put private and party interests ahead of the interests of the institutions, who developed contempt for government in and of itself and rode contempt to power.
- Ch. 5 (see: Ryan D. Griffiths)

You might say that the North won the war and the South won the peace. But that’s not entirely accurate. The North won progress. The South won heritage. The North won the future. The South won the past. And it is not clear at all which is more powerful.
- Ch. 5

External links

Encyclopedic article on Stephen Marche on Wikipedia