No, America is not on the brink of a civil war | Musa al-Gharbi

It's time to tell the truth about the big lie

According to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of Republican-aligned voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate.

Taking these data at face value, a growing chorus insists that we're living in a post-truth" era, where members of one political party, the Republican party, can no longer tell facts from falsehood. As a result of the Republican party becoming unmoored from reality, the narratives typically continue, America is drifting headlong into a fascist takeover or a civil war.

Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F Lazarsfeld fellow in sociology at Columbia University