“USA at risk of civil war” –

Donald Trump getting up with a bloody face following the attack and showing his fist to his supporters is “a great political manifesto that can give impetus to his election campaign in the near future”, but it is also “a warning to lower the tone because when politics becomes polarized these events risk repeating themselves and in their history the US has already experienced a civil war, as well as a long series of attacks – some of which were successful – on the lives of presidents and high-profile politicians”. Gabriele Natalizia, professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science at La Sapienza University in Rome, told Adnkronos.

“The United States of America – he explains – can become inflamed by internal divisions, once between North and South, today between the different ethnic groups as well as between the coasts and internal America, between the elites of globalized America and the working class, which tries to safeguard what remains, or the white collars, now proletarianized”. “These divisions can re-emerge in all their violence – warns the expert – So much so that in the National Security Strategy 2022 Biden spoke of relaunching the American middle class which remains the pillar of the country and the engine of its possible relaunch in the face of the challenges posed by China and Russia. America is facing them weaker than in the past, first of all because it is increasingly polarized”. “In the 1980s and 1990s we struggled to distinguish the positions of many American politicians on some issues; Democrats and Republicans seemed in some ways to be two sides of the same coin, political liberalism. Their positions on some issues – especially macroeconomic ones – were often indistinguishable. Today, however, the extreme wings of the two parties, which did not exist before, are increasingly strong. We therefore risk returning to the dark years of Kennedy and the civil war of 1861-1865. We are moving towards a European-style polarization but in a country where weapons circulate freely, so the situation is potentially explosive. The images of the attack in the USA – concludes Natalizia – recall our worst 70s”.