The Second American Civil War Is Not Taking Place

beneath which this comment appears. I agree for the most part with Kahn's depiction of the actuality of the United States, but I disagree with his overarching categorization of this as "civil war." I do not believe a second U.S. civil war is sensu stricto either in progress or even in prospect. The political situation in the United States is not a war. This is a fact that Kahn himself is hardly unaware of, although he seeks to avert it through a redefinition of the term "war." I will hence contest this redefinition. Kahn rightly calls our attention to two distinct and interrelated problems. One is a crisis of legitimacy in the United States. Many Republicans regard the Biden administration as illegitimate because they believe his election was fraudulent. This really amounts to a kind of factual dispute of the dominant narrative, although one that at its fringes (in particular the incredible continuation of the QAnon movement) is delusional in a fairly strict sense. Democrats, by contrast, regard the Republican Party-or at least its Trumpist wing-as eo ipso illegitimate because it is animated by concerns that they consider ultimately fascist, racist, sexist, et cetera, and hence absolutely impermissible. The discourse of the left also involves some rather extraordinary and contestable factual claims but ultimately disallows right-wing opposition to its agenda on the basis of values. In all this, we see the second problem: there is an absence of a terrain of agreed values or facts that might ground a public sphere in which democratic politics might take place. This is all surely shocking and lamentable. However, I believe it is ultimately not terminal to the United States qua either polity or society and that they can continue to function indefinitely, albeit not as well as they