Episode 441

The Threat of Civil War

A Conversation with Stephen Marche

October 31, 2025

Sam Harris speaks with Stephen Marche about his book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. They discuss tensions between the United States and Canada, what a modern American civil war might actually look like, the key risk factors for a civil war, diversity and immigration, extremism on the right and the left, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the assassination attempts on President Trump, conspiracy theories, how a civil war might be avoided, the possibility of secession, and other topics.

Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist, and the author of On Writing and Failure and The Next Civil War, among many other works. He has written features and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Walrus. He collaborated with artificial intelligence on the first AI-generated novel reviewed in The New York Times, Death of an Author. His most recent novel, The Last Election, was co-written with Andrew Yang.

 

Website: stephenmarche.com
X: @stephenmarche