Sarajevo in 1984 was something of a backwater, a city behind the Iron Curtain in socialist Yugoslavia. However, it was enough of a First-World location that it hosted the Winter Olympics that year. Just a couple of Olympic cycles later, in 1996, the city was in ruins, destroyed by a four-year siege during the Bosnian War. The fighting began when Yugoslavia, which didn’t have a strong constitution like ours, dissolved.
That’s what can happen in a civil war. It doesn’t matter what triggers the fighting, because the conflict can quickly spread beyond any initial causes and rage out of control.
That concept sets the table for the new novel “Exit Party,” by Emily St. John Mandel. The author begins her tale in the year 2031. That’s far enough into the future to seem otherworldly, and yet near enough to today to seem plausible. The United States has fractured after some sort of civil conflict. The author is smart enough to avoid details of what triggered the fighting, since it hardly matters. Her main character, Ari, has recently been released from prison, so she presumably missed all the disagreements and, like everyone else, simply must live with the aftermath.
The country has splintered. California and Texas are independent. So is Ohio, mostly, although it is frequently under attack from nearby city-states such as Pittsburgh. Everything is more difficult. “Ari needed groceries, which in those days was an all-day errand,” the book notes. Indeed, it takes the character hours to gather what she needs, and she never does manage to find some staples. “Milk trucks keep getting robbed at the border,” a store clerk says, although she isn’t sure which border that might be. “You don’t notice the supply chain till it collapses,” Ari realizes.
St. John Mandel has written about that topic as well, in a way. Her 2015 book “Station Eleven” tells the story of a world where a COVID-like virus spreads almost instantly (this one comes from Russia rather than China, but we get the idea), except in that book the bug is almost universally deadly. Within a week, almost everyone on Earth is gone and a handful of people must rebuild from the wreckage.
The wreckage of “Exit Party” isn’t the end of humanity, it’s the end of the United States as we’ve known it. While trying to drive from Arizona to Texas, Ari and her partner pass multiple roadblocks. “The checkpoint felt like a border, but it wasn’t a border that existed on any map, just some new demarcation between shifting territories,” the book notes. “It took eleven hundred dollars in bribes to get to the Port of Houston, where they waited for six hours in a parking lot [for a shipment of weapons].”
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Most of the checkpoints are manned by teenagers who couldn’t possibly know what the fighting is all about. In a world of warring fiefdoms there’s little point in going to school; it makes more sense to shake down travelers for cash or clean water.
Around this point, the novel takes an odd turn by introducing a parallel universe where the characters live in a United States that hasn’t divided but instead survived by becoming a surveillance state. It isn’t clear that this is preferable. “The thing about living in a place like this was how hard you work to not see the obvious,” a character who works “in Service” for this “State” thinks at one point.
These possible futures seem especially relevant in 2026, when talk of civil war is too much in the air. “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote in 2023. “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Perhaps her ardor for separation cooled when Donald Trump was reelected in 2024. Although perhaps not: she has since had a falling out with the president and Trump has nicknamed her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green.” More insults to come, no doubt.
But Americans should be careful if that’s what we wish for. Our Constitution is far from perfect, but it provides a solid framework that has held a continental nation together for a quarter millennium. The amendment process, as broken as it seems to be, is far preferable to “a national divorce,” in MTG’s words. The United States is far more powerful with both blue California and red Texas in it, even if it requires compromise to keep them together. Especially because it requires compromise to keep them together.
“Societal breakdown is exhausting,” one character who lived through the 2030s says late in the novel. Indeed it would be. We should read “Exit Party” as a cautionary tale, then make sure we spend our time fighting to protect our Constitution, not replace it.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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