What an amazing time to be alive.

What an amazing time to be watching the news and having conversations about the news

and consuming all kinds of bits and pieces and opinions from hither and thither,

like a little bowerbird pecking around the internet and social media,

trying to figure out what's true and what's not.

But also what an amazing time to be

susceptible and vulnerable to stridency, to misinformation, to what aboutism, to people

trying to distract us from what really matters, jangling keys in front of our face in order to

get us to look over here instead of remaining

stable and calm and even keeled about our own opinions, our own vision of the truth. Now is a moment

to reach across aisles, to set aside differences, to have faith in democracy, to have faith in bigger ambitions and

bigger things to believe in than just the day to day. The only way we can do that is by

having conversations that resonate with all of us, conversations that make sense to all of us,

conversations that are difficult, conversations that are important, conversations that are, as

always, a little bit uncomfortable.

On today's show, what a bracing, fascinating chat with a really interesting guy.

This is not as depressing and gloomy and terrifying as you might think it is on the basis of the title,

because it is about a book called The Next Civil War, which openly speculates about how the United States could descend into civil war.

Not just how,

but sort of prognosticating that it's very hard to envisage how it doesn't happen.

It's written by a Canadian journalist, novelist, essayist.

But we go into interesting areas about just the differences between American democracy

...