The Forever War, Nick Bryant, Bloomsbury Continuum, £25

In the wake of the riots that took place in Britain during this summer, Elon Musk trolled the United Kingdom with a post on X saying that civil war was inevitable. In the United States a recent YouGov survey found that 84 per cent of US voters said America was more divided than ten years ago and more than a quarter said that civil war could break out after this year’s presidential election.

Nick Bryant’s perspicacious new book seeks to explain the increasing polarisation of American politics in historical terms, reaching back not just to the 1980s but through the past 250 years. Far from being an aberration, the phenomenon of Donald J. Trump is a culmination of American democracy, which is now beset with ‘performative polarisation’ in the shape of state nullification of federal laws and threats of ‘modern-day secessionism’. In today’s Washington, bipartisan cooperation is largely absent. After Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, hardline conservatives are pushing for a nationwide abortion ban, even a ban on contraception and IVF. ‘That is a problem with America’s forever war,’ writes Bryant. ‘Its combatants still want to engage in battle.’

Our memories are short. Trump may have claimed that the presidency was stolen from him in 2020, but Bryant reminds us that he accused the Clinton campaign of fraud in 2016 when he failed to win the popular vote. The commission he set up to investigate the matter reported that there was no evidence for his assertion.

Bryant was born in Bristol, read history at Cambridge, did a PhD in American politics at Oxford, spent a year as a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has served as a BBC correspondent in both Washington and New York. Love of America has been a ‘continual thread’ in his life, from embracing the first branch of McDonald’s to open in his hometown, becoming spellbound as a child by Disney’s Magic Kingdom and the Camelot myth of JFK, and then rejecting the ‘valorisation’ of JFK in a doctoral thesis that concluded that he had been essentially a ‘bystander’ rather than a leader of the civil rights movement during his presidency: ‘What this exercise taught me was that my entire historical belief system was flawed, and that even the American history that I knew off by heart was often inexact.’ Since then he has been ruminating on and re-examining this history.

Contemporary America suffers from what he calls ‘a problem of historical overload… it is not the American deep state that is the problem, but rather America’s deep history’.

Those that rioted in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, many of whom invoked the spirit of 1776, were part of a tradition that stretches back to Shay’s Rebellion of 1786 and 1787, in which army veterans led a violent insurrection against debt collectors. No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson wanted to keep alive the spirit of resistance. ‘I like a little rebellion now and then,’ he declared. ‘It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.’

Trump is part of a long line of demagogues as well as an authoritarian tradition that stems from the administration of Andrew Jackson. ‘His “You’re fired” approach to presidential staffing meant that he racked up four secretaries of state and five treasury secretaries, more even than Donald Trump.’ We fool ourselves, says Bryant, if we swallow the media narrative that Trump is a president like no other. Nixon spied on his political opponents and authorised wiretaps on journalists he disapproved of. ‘His “enemies list,” including reporters, businessmen, labor leaders, politicians and the Hollywood actor Paul Newman was the stuff of tinpot totalitarianism.’

In an excellent chapter on America’s history wars (‘1776 and all that’), Bryant explains how revisionist approaches that were once confined to the halls of academe are now debated by politicians with little sense of proportion and even less knowledge. (Surveys have found that half of Americans think that the Civil War predated the War of Independence.) This process began in the Clinton years, and has become amplified under Trump and Biden. While Bryant is all for teaching schoolchildren about the darkest episodes in American history, he also wants to see received wisdom challenged; for example, the notion that the American Revolution was a straightforward, preordained matter when in actuality ‘somewhere between a fifth and a third of white colonialists remained faithful to the crown’. Indeed, he urges greater contextualisation across the board. ‘Whatever the frame, complexity is the key to unlocking the past’, he concludes, ‘for it is the very contradiction of the American story that help us make more sense of it.’

The fundamental architecture of American democracy – the apportionment of Congressional seats and electoral college seats to individual states – is derived from the notorious three-fifths compromise, whereby only three out of every five of the slaves among the populations of slaveholding states were counted as equivalent to their non-slave populations. The Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which 26 African Americans were killed and 35 square blocks of a Black residential district put to the torch, was not only banished from Oklahoma schoolrooms but pretty much erased from public consciousness till 2000. Bryant calls race America’s constant curse and laments that Obama was unable to bring about a post-racial America ‘because there could never be a post-historical America’.

Gun violence is ‘yet another realm where America is a prisoner of its history, both real, invented and imagined’. Congressional tinkering with gun laws might be possible, but serious gun-control measures are an illusion.

In one chapter, Bryant uses the abortion issue as a prism through which to study the history of the US Supreme Court. It was never supposed to have supremacy over Congress and the presidency. Its judges, who were once remote scholars, gradually became political players, and are now ’super-legislators’ (as Senator Elizabeth Warren has put it) as well as ‘improbable celebrities’.

There is no mention of God in the US Constitution, since the Founding Fathers were intent on separating church and state, nor is there any mention of marriage or women. Hence, originalism – the doctrine which insists that the Constitution should be interpreted through the eyes of its framers – is the enemy of originalism. It might, however, surprise you to know that there is no right to vote enshrined in the constitution of the world’s most famous democracy either.

It was Joseph Stalin who coined the term ‘American exceptionalism’ in reference to the failure of Bolshevism there, whereas its champions have used it to denote a positive model of capitalism and democracy working hand in hand. This positive model has now given way to what Bryant calls ‘toxic exceptionalism’. Gun culture, which is ‘rooted in exceptionalism’, and the oppression of women’s rights have joined racial disharmony and misguided foreign interventions in a noxious brew of America’s least appealing attributes for outsiders. Indeed, the doctrine of American exceptionalism has ‘obscured how national self-doubt is as integral to the American story as national self-confidence’.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be puzzled by all this. Bryant’s sharply observed and witty dive into American history shows that it has always been subject to deep divisions – over slavery, over immigration, over post-Civil War reconstruction, over McCarthyism, and over the civil rights movement.

Yet paradoxically, ‘the dysfunction of the US system serves as its own safety valve’. If Trump were to be re-elected or if he were to challenge a Harris victory, ‘the simple fact that the Constitution makes it so hard to alter the Constitution – the constitutional Catch 22 – is actually a safeguard against the country spiralling out of control’. Not only Americans but also the rest of us can but hope. Meanwhile, Bryant’s measured tone and lack of shrillness throughout The Forever War makes it an unalloyed pleasure.