The Forever War: America's Unending War With Itself, by Nick Bryant

Nick Bryant explains how America has always been a deeply divided country, and has little prospect of changing. 

​British journalist Nick Bryant has long had a love affair with the United States, a fascination that began when he was a teenager. He first visited the country in the late 1980s, armed with a student visa. He would later spend years living in New York covering the Trump presidency. Over his many decades as a journalist he has not only lived in the US, but studied its history. The Forever War mixes the personal experience of the outsider with impressive historical research. He argues that America’s current toxic political divide - a cold civil war threatening to turn hot - has strong historical antecedents. Moreover, America, Bryant argues, has never reconciled itself to its racist, fractured past. The culture war over critical race theory, he argues, is excessive. The reality is the country was built on a racist scaffolding. From enslavement, to Jim Crow, and in our own day, voter suppression. 

The picture Nick Bryant paints of America, past and present, is a carnival of violence and mayhem. Political assasinations, lynchings, mass shootings, children murdered at school, children unwitting killers themselves, handling guns they shouldn’t, in any rational world, have access to. And yet gun laws are deeply entrenched, in part due to a selective reading of the constitution.

We often think of America as a premier global democracy, but this is a myth. In an exhaustive dissection of the electoral system, we are exposed to a deeply flawed democracy that aims more to stop people voting than encourage it. The vagaries of the electoral college system means American democracy is unrepresentative. This is a country where everything is politicised, especially cultural issues. The courts - even the supreme court - which should be impartial, are openly politicised as well.  

There is not much cheery news in The Forever War. Nick Bryant, a one time fan, describes leaving his New York apartment and travelling to JFK airport, but not looking back nostalgically to the Manhatten skyline, which he once thought was studded with diamonds. As the title suggests, America’s war with itself will continue on, its many historical issues unresolved. If violence does break out, Bryant suggests it won’t be a full blown civil war, but more like violent spot fires. The one half of liberal voters who believe in the evidence based law will keep the country from going off the rails. 

A sobering portrait of the real America so often obscured by its glossy, rich, wonderland-like side.

The Forever War: America's Unending War With Itself, by Nick Bryant. Published by Viking. $36.99

JUN24