Sense of an Ending

Maybe digging into Stephen Marche’s new book, The Next Civil War, while in West Virginia — where Donald J. Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote more than a year ago — wasn’t wise. Maybe reading Marche’s book in a state where forty-nine of the fifty-five counties were in one of the two highest categories of COVID infection and where the governor, diagnosed a few days later with an inconvenient case of the virus, had lifted the indoor mask mandate six months earlier showed bad judgment on my part. Maybe spending a good deal of the week of the first anniversary of the U.S. Capitol insurrection poring over an argument setting out how the world’s oldest, and arguably once the best, democracy soon will be in tatters distorted my perspective.

But I can say this: Marche’s 250 pages or so constitute a terrifying book, scarier than anything contemplated by Stephen King or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley or Daphne du Maurier.

Read it and weep. For in these...