AFP – Civil warwhich premiered at the SXSW Festival last week and will hit theaters in April, portrays a three-term president – one beyond the legal term – in Washington, fighting separatist forces in California and Texas.
The film follows journalists (played by American Kirsten Dunst and Brazilian Wagner Moura) who travel through a destroyed nation, where the FBI has been dissolved and armed forces drones launch attacks against civilians.
In its first reviews, the magazine The Atlantic highlighted that the film has an “uncomfortable resonance in these politically polarized times”. A Rolling Stone said it “could be accidentally confused with the present.”
But what is the possibility of this scenario?
Donald Trump was recently criticized for joking about being a “dictator” from “day one” if he wins the election and returns to the White House. The former president faces accusations of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Biden, who is seeking reelection, accused his predecessor of embracing “political violence.”
A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll last year found that 23% of Americans agree that “true patriots can resort to violence to save the country.”
Political elites and Congress are more divided than ever, but the polarization among citizens is “supersized,” said William Howell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.
Answers to vague questions in surveys don’t necessarily reflect reality about how people will behave, he said.
“I don’t believe we are one step away from a civil war,” he said. “Horrible”. Author Stephen Marche believes that the “United States is a case study of a country heading towards civil war”, but not as shown in the film.
Marche’s book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, in free translation), uses political science models to suggest five scenarios that could trigger widespread internal conflict. For example, the confrontation between anti-government militias and federal forces and the assassination of a president.
Political violence “becomes acceptable and, in a sense, inevitable, because people don’t feel that their government is legitimate and it seems that therefore violence is the only answer,” Marche said. “I would say that, in a way, this has already happened in the United States.”
In Marche’s book, retired Army colonel Peter Mansoor asserts that a new conflict “would not be like the first Civil War, with armies maneuvering on the battlefield.”
“I believe it would be a pitched battle, neighbor against neighbor, based on beliefs, skin color and religion. And it would be horrible.” “Failures and pressures”. In the film, director Alex Garland deliberately alludes to the concrete origins of the conflict.
Garland states that the work is intended to be “a conversation” about polarization and populism.
“We don’t need it explained to us: we know exactly why it can happen, we know exactly what the flaws and pressures are,” Garland said at the Texas opener last week.
The film’s “three-term president” appears to invoke the fears of many Americans that Trump, if re-elected, will attempt to disregard the maximum two-term presidential term and seek a third.
“It’s hard to think otherwise if we consider his words, and I believe we would be mistaken if we didn’t,” Howell said. If this scenario arrives, according to Marche, talking about a civil war could be redundant. “If there was a three-term president, the United States would be finished,” he said. “There would be no more United States.”
Tags: Civil War controversial film fuels debate separatism United States
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