Canadian writer and commentator Stephen Marche has been paying attention to the United States since he covered the Trump inauguration in Washington, DC in 2017.

“The whole point of democracy,” he says, “is that people feel—even when their party isn’t in power—that a legitimate representative of the people is in power. That’s basically evaporated” in the United States. And he believes it’s going to keep declining.

That’s the subject of Marche’s latest book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. For today’s show, he joins Friday host Esty Dinur to talk about America’s legitimacy crisis, the decline of governance, why January 6 may only be the beginning, and more.

Stephen Marche is a novelist, culture writer, and commentator who has written for Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other outlets. His latest book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (Simon & Schuster, 2022).

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