By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia:The U.S. has always been argumentative. Its political culture is built on disagreement, contest, and loud public debate. What is different today is not the volume of that argument but its character. Surveys from institutions such as the Pew Research Center show that nearly two-thirds of Republicans and more than half of Democrats now express "very unfavourable" opinions of the opposing party. This represents a dramatic shift from 1994, when fewer than 25 percent of Americans felt this way.

The more troubling finding is how Americans now view their political rivals. According to Pew, 72 percent of Republicans consider Democrats to be more dishonest or immoral than other Americans – up from 45 percent in 2016. Among Democrats, 63 percent now say the same about Republicans, a figure that has nearly doubled over the same period. This matters because it marks the erosion of the idea of a loyal opposition – the informal understanding that while political rivals may disagree profoundly, they still accept the same constitutional rules.

When citizens begin to doubt not only policies but the legitimacy of the system itself, the ground beneath democratic governance starts to move. As one academic study recently noted, roughly 80 percent of both Republicans and Democrats report harbouring strong negative feelings toward people affiliated with rival parties. This phenomenon – what political scientists call "affective polarisation" – is no longer merely about policy disagreements. It has become tribal.

A Movement Dividing Within Itself

The strain is not limited to the divide between Democrats and Republicans. Within the Republican coalition, visible tensions are emerging between different factions. Recent reporting from the BBC highlights how the debate over military action has exposed cracks while polling indicates that while nine out of ten self-identified "MAGA" Republicans support current military action, among Republicans who do not embrace that label just over half approve, with more than a third expressing opposition.

These differences are subtle now, but they complicate leadership and messaging. One faction emphasises restraint abroad and an "America First" agenda, while another is more willing to prioritise confrontational tactics and personal loyalty as political currency. If these differences deepen over issues like foreign intervention, federal authority, or legal accountability, the result could be rival factions competing for the same political space, weakening internal cohesion at a time when unity is already under strain.

Meanwhile, frustration with the two-party system itself is growing. Pew found that 27 percent of Americans now hold unfavourable views of both major parties – more than quadruple the figure recorded in 1994. Seventy-nine percent of political independents say they wish there were more parties to choose from. This disaffection creates space for further fragmentation, not necessarily through the emergence of new parties, but through growing numbers of voters who feel represented by no one.

When Institutions Become Ideological Battlegrounds

The more profound rupture lies in how both parties increasingly view core institutions. Disputes over election integrity, the authority of the courts, the role of federal law enforcement, and the balance of power between states and Washington have turned procedural questions into ideological wars.

The legitimacy of governance itself is now in question. A recent analysis of the so-called "governance legitimacy crisis" describes a process where institutional authority dissolves because decision-making mechanisms are perceived as incapable of securing long-term societal wellbeing. This crisis begins not with a sudden collapse but with the slow, systemic decoupling between what governing bodies claim to do and what they actually achieve.

As more Americans come to believe the system is rigged against them, the danger is not immediate revolt but something more corrosive: selective obedience to laws, refusal to accept political outcomes, and rising sympathy for extra-legal action. This is how systems lose their stability – not in a single moment, but through a gradual withdrawal of public consent.

The numbers here are sobering. In April 2024, 19 percent of Americans agreed that violence might be necessary to "get the country back on track". By October 2025, that figure had risen to 30 percent. Scholars who typically study civil wars in other countries have noted that the current level of public acceptance of political violence in the U.S. is approaching that exhibited in Northern Ireland during the height of the conflict there in the early 1970s.

The Shape of a Modern Civil Conflict

Talk of a new civil war often conjures images of 1860, with armies, front lines, and secession. That is unlikely. The U.S. today is too economically integrated for such a clean fracture. What is more plausible is a prolonged period of chronic instability marked by sporadic political violence, waves of protests and counter-protests, and legal confrontations between states and the federal government.

This would not be a war in the traditional sense but a slow, grinding erosion of cohesion that makes governance increasingly difficult and public life increasingly tense. The data already show this pattern emerging. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, the U.S. now records between 5,000 and 9,000 demonstrations each month, compared with fewer than 1,500 at the start of President Donald Trump's first term. What was once episodic dissent has become a permanent condition of mobilisation – a republic in near-constant confrontation with itself.

The drivers of this volatility are well documented. Academic research points to four key factors: toxic political polarisation, identity-based extremist ideologies, assaults on democratic norms, and the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories. These factors do not operate in isolation. They reinforce one another, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of mistrust and hostility.

Fragmentation Without Formal Breakup

While a literal breakup of the country into separate nations is unlikely but the U.S. faces other very serious problems. The Constitution, economic interdependence, and federal funding structures make secession an extraordinary hurdle. Yet a form of de facto fragmentation is easier to imagine. States could increasingly refuse to enforce certain federal directives. Legal and policy environments could diverge so sharply that Americans effectively live under very different systems depending on where they reside.

This is already happening in areas such as climate policy and immigration enforcement. Scholars have documented how state and local governments have stepped into policy voids left by federal inaction or deliberate federal retreat. In some cases, this represents productive federalism – laboratories of democracy at work. But when divergence is driven by outright refusal to accept federal authority, the dynamic changes. What emerges is not cooperative federalism but uncooperative federalism: states using their powers not to complement national policy but to resist it.

In such a scenario, the U.S. would remain united on paper while becoming deeply divided in practice. The question would not be whether the country formally splits but whether the bonds of mutual obligation and shared identity that hold it together would survive such sustained strain.

The Military, Neutrality, and the Nuclear Question

One of the most powerful stabilisers in this picture is the professional structure of the U.S. armed forces. Command authority flows through a strict constitutional chain, and the nuclear arsenal is governed by rigorous procedural safeguards designed to prevent unauthorised use. Analyses of nuclear governance emphasise that the risk is not that rival factions would seize nuclear weapons. The procedural barriers are simply too high.

The real risk lies in the strain that prolonged political conflict could place on civil–military relations. If large segments of the public lose trust in civilian leadership, the military could find itself under intense political pressure to take sides – something it is institutionally trained to resist. That neutrality, long a hallmark of American stability, would be tested in ways not seen for generations.

There are already warning signs. When a significant minority of the population believes the political system is illegitimate, and when that belief is distributed unevenly across geographic and demographic lines, the military cannot remain entirely insulated from those divisions. Its ranks are drawn from the same polarised society. The question is not whether the military would remain professional – there is every reason to think it would – but whether that professionalism would be sufficient to withstand sustained political pressure from a commander-in-chief or from Congress.

A Slow Erosion Rather Than a Sudden Collapse

The most realistic threat facing the U.S. is not a dramatic implosion but a slow degradation of governance. Legislative paralysis, executive overreach, cycles of political retaliation, and collapsing public trust could combine to make the country more brittle and reactive over time.

This trajectory would not shatter the nation overnight. It would, instead, weaken the foundations that have long made it resilient, leaving it more vulnerable to internal unrest and less capable of managing external challenges. As one commentator recently observed, a society that cannot agree on its own direction cannot lead others through crisis. When every decision is contested, every deployment politicised, and every ally forced to question whether the U.S. can still act as one, the cumulative effect is paralysis.

The warning from abroad is clear. Strategic competitors read America's domestic unrest as proof that time is on their side. They believe that Western democracies, worn down by social fragmentation and moral fatigue, will answer pressure with debate rather than decision. The longer Washington's attention is consumed by its own legitimacy crisis, the more freedom its rivals have to act – cautiously, cumulatively, below the threshold of open war.

America's strength once lay in the belief that disagreement was not a weakness but the essence of freedom. The Cold War strategist George Kennan once observed that a democracy is peace-loving precisely because it is not sure that it is right. That humility once anchored American power. Today, it risks paralysing it. The challenge for the U.S. is no longer whether it can deter its enemies but whether it can still persuade itself to act. History rarely punishes weakness directly; it rewards those who move while others hesitate. And today, the world sees a republic that has begun to hesitate – still powerful, yet unsure of its purpose, and increasingly aware that the spirit of contention which once sustained its democracy now threatens to consume it.