Know Your Enemy: A Second Civil War? With Jamelle Bouie

Know Your Enemy: A Second Civil War? With Jamelle Bouie

Jamelle Bouie returns to the show to discuss the rise of rhetoric—not only but especially from the right—about a “second Civil War” in the United States.

Civil War reenactors in Bridgeport, Alabama in 2010 (Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress)

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

The past few months have seen a lot of talk of a “second Civil War” or a “national divorce” between red states and blue states. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie joins Matt and Sam to discuss why the analogy to the Civil War fails, what such rhetoric does for those who deploy it, and the real challenges to a better politics in America.




Further listening: Check out Jamelle’s podcast, co-hosted with fellow Know Your Enemy guest John Ganz, Unclear and Present Danger.


Sources and further reading:

Jamelle Bouie, Why We Are Not Facing the Prospect of a Second Civil War, New York Times

Michelle Goldberg, Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?, New York Times

Nate Hochman, Let’s Stay Together, Spectator

Michael Anton, Right Flight: The War Between the States, Claremont Review of Books

Helen Andrews, Reconstruction Revisionism, American Conservative

Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, University of Chicago (1959)



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