One issue seems to be uniting the right and the left today: disunity.

From multiplexes to social media, the prospect of the United States descending into armed conflict has gone from a fringe idea to an active undercurrent in the country’s political conversation.

Voters at campaign events express concern that political division could lead to large-scale political violence. Pollsters periodically ask about the idea in opinion polls. A cottage industry of speculative fiction, serious assessments and forums has emerged about whether the country could be on the brink of a modern version of the bloodiest war in American history.

And “Civil War,” a dystopian action film about an alternate United States mired in bloody internal conflict, topped box office sales for two consecutive weekends. The film surpassed expectations in theaters from Brownsville, Texas, to Boston, tapping into a dark set of national anxieties that took hold after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.

Of course, the notion of a future civil war remains a mere notion. But as another presidential election approaches, it has suddenly become a topic of heated debate, reflecting the bipartisan sense of unease that has permeated American politics. In polls and interviews, a segment of voters has said they fear that the country’s divisions have become so deep that they could lead not only to rhetorical battles but also to real battles.

“Personally, I don’t think we will descend into a formal armed civil war,” said Maya Wiley, who ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 and now serves as president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights organization. group that has conducted several surveys on the subject. “But it’s up in the air. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that we’re seeing very explicit fear about where things could go.”

That fear has been stoked by the violence and chaos that subtly and overtly permeate American politics. Violent threats against members of Congress have reached record levels, as have reports of hate crimes in the country’s largest cities. The husband of Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House of Representatives, was beaten with a hammer in her home. The criminal trial of a former president took place in a courtroom while a nearby man doused himself with an accelerant and set his body on fire.

In his first campaign speech of the year, President Biden warned of threats to the country’s democracy and suggested that former President Donald J. Trump could stoke political violence in the future.

“I make this sacred commitment to you: the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will continue to be, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency,” he said in a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where one of the darkest periods of the American Revolution.

Trump has glorified the January 6 rioters as patriots and maintained his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When the former president They Asked Last August, Tucker Carlson refused to directly answer whether the country was headed toward open conflict.

“I don’t know,” Trump said. “There is a level of passion that I have never seen. “There is a level of hate that I have never seen before and it is probably a bad combination.”

The film has no basis in such partisan politics. The sides are unclear and the ideology (a “Western Alliance” of secessionists from California and Texas) is impossible to imagine given the stark partisan divisions between the states. No details are given about the cause of the conflict or the different visions that each side has about the future of the country. There is no mention of Congress, the courts, or other civic institutions other than the presidency and references to the FBI.

That political vagueness was an intentional choice by British writer-director Alex Garland, who began working on the film in 2020 before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. “I would say this movie is about checks and balances: polarization, division, the way populist politics leads to extremism, where extremism itself will end, and where the press is in all of that,” Garland told the New York Times. .

His goal was to create a film that could illustrate the risks of polarization, not just in the United States but globally, and reach the widest possible audience, said Eric Schultz, a Democratic strategist who met with Garland in the fall of 2021 and Worked as a consultant for the film.

The opaque politics have helped the film attract an audience across political divides. Exit interviews conducted for A24, the studio that produced the film, found that half of moviegoers identified as “liberal” and the other half as “conservative,” according to a person with knowledge of the film’s performance in various markets. .

The film exceeded expectations in traditionally conservative markets such as Oklahoma City and Colorado Springs, as well as more liberal markets such as Portland, Oregon. In Phoenix and Dallas, most viewers identified as moderate or conservative. The main reason viewers cited for seeing the film was not interest in independent cinema or action films, but rather the “dystopian political plot.”

Interest in political chaos is accompanied by a growing body of research showing a dramatic increase in public fears of violence.

The poll by Ms. Wiley’s organization found that 53 percent of likely voters believed the country was on the path to a second Civil War.

Other surveys show related concerns. Forty-nine percent of adults said they expected violence from the losing side in future elections, in a CBS/YouGov poll conducted this year. And a poll by The Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that majorities of adults, both Democrats and Republicans, said American democracy could be at risk depending on who wins the next election.

Jess Morales Rocketto, leader of Equis Research, which studies Latino voters, said the discussion of a civil war could arise more from a feeling of insecurity than a reality for voters.

“I think people believe we are on the brink of a civil war,” he said. “When people say things like civil war or World War III, what they mean is volatility and instability. They’re saying, ‘I feel insecure.'”

But Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies civil wars, says the prospect of such a conflict is not just metaphorical. She believes the country faces a decade or two of political instability and violence that could include assassinations of politicians or judges and the rise of militia groups.

The film’s realistic depiction of such violence taking place in deeply American settings (a golf course, a roadside gas station, the Lincoln Memorial) highlights the scenes of violence that Americans most associate with conflict. foreigners, he said.

“This notion that the United States could never have a civil war; we’ve already had a very, very big one,” said Walter, author of “How Civil Wars Start.” “There is a sense of naivety, of innocence, that we are too good for that kind of thing. They were not.”

David Mandel, producer and writer of the television show “Veep,” said the most successful movies and shows about American political life had a “reciprocal relationship” with public opinion about politics. His show, a comedy about a bumbling vice president that began during the Obama administration, was based on the idea that politicians behaved differently in private and that a misjudged public comment could lead to their political destruction. As president, Trump routinely defied that norm, and “Veep” ended before he left the White House.

“A couple of weeks into the Trump administration, there was nothing ‘behind closed doors’ and there was no payoff,” Mandel said. “The show became impossible to do.”

David W. Blight, a historian at Yale University who specializes in the Civil War period, said he did not believe the country was on the brink of another. But if the country reached that point, he said, the conflict could share more with the film version than with the historical one.

The Civil War was a regional and ideological crisis that featured some of the largest armies ever formed, he said. A second will most likely be much more local and vigilant, and driven by growing polarization and institutional distrust.

“Over the last few years, there’s been all this talk and some books published about whether the United States is on the brink of a new civil war, and you have to keep telling people, ‘Well, no, not the way you could do it.’ . think about it,’” he said. “Our real Civil War blinds us in that sense.”