The World Is Watching America, Waiting To See If A Civil War Is Going To Erupt In This Country

Yet, violence has played a core part in this stormy, lurching American political campaign, and not only in the two apparent assassination attempts. There is now widespread concern across the globe that the November election will not end well and that American democracy, once a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking point.

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Corentin Sellin, a French history professor, said the “brutalization of American politics” had left France “wondering whether the presidential campaign will finish peacefully.”

France was stunned, he said, by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, and “there is this notion that the story that started with that insurrection has not yet ended,” and that the Nov. 5 election will determine how it does.

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Responding to the apparent assassination attempt, Carsten Luther, an online editor for international affairs, gave voice to deep concerns about the survival of American democracy in the respected Germany weekly Die Zeit. “The warnings of a civil war can be heard and no longer sound completely unrealistic,” he wrote. “It seems almost banal, as if it was bound to happen at some point.”

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The question now is how violent will this political confrontation in America prove. For many around the world, it seems to contain the seeds of rampant conflict.

“There is a sort of reciprocal delegitimization, where the political opponent is no a longer a normal political competitor, but also an existential enemy,” said Mario Del Pero, a professor of United States and International History at Sciences Po University in Paris. He called this process “a degradation of political and public discourse.”