The US is at a 'greater risk' of civil conflict now than during the Great Depression, according to a presidential historian

• Historian Jon Meacham said the US may soon experience a period of civil chaos.
• The Abraham Lincoln biographer said it is due in part to a "passionate minority."

The US is at "greater risk" of civil conflict than during the 1930s, a presidential biographer says, in part due to a "passionate minority that is putting its own interests ahead of those of the nation."

In an interview with NPR's "Morning Edition," historian Jon Meacham, who occasionally served as a speechwriter for President Joe Biden, reflected on the current political landscape ahead of contentious midterm elections.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, who has an upcoming book about Abraham Lincoln, spoke about how Lincoln set an example by putting democracy ahead of politics.

"He was under immense political pressure to say, 'We'll settle all that in due course,'" Meacham said. "Well, guess what that meant: If the Confederacy came back, it would all be set and settled and slavery likely would have endured again."

He added: "And Lincoln said no, that he had made his position clear. Ultimately, we would get the 13th Amendment a few months later, but he was willing to go down politically for that principle."

Meacham said he thinks that there's a greater chance that the US could see more "civil chaos" now than during the Great Depression, "when there was such a lack of confidence in our institutions."

"Tragically, I think we will see more of civil chaos. I think we are going to see it with violence," he said. "I do not believe we're going to see the massing of great armies in the way we did in the 19th century. But we are at greater risk of that kind of civil conflict far more, I believe, than we were even in the early 1930s during the Depression, when there was such a lack of confidence in our institutions."

"And part of it is that there is a passionate minority that is putting its own interests ahead of those of the nation," Meacham continued. "And without the capacity to both vote perhaps against your short-term interest, without the capacity to recognize that there is a larger force that requires your support of the Constitution over your narrow partisan interests, without that, then we will continue to descend into ever greater chaos."

On the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol earlier this year, Meacham discussed the historical significance of the insurrection, referring to it as an "inflection point" in US history.

"It's either a step on the way to the abyss, or it is a call to arms, figuratively, for citizens to engage and say, 'No, we are more important," Meacham said. "The work we are about is more important than the will and the whim of a single man, or a single party or a single interest.'"

"To lose this gift through selfishness and a greed for power through autocratic impulse would be beyond tragic," he added. "I don't believe that's going to happen, but I believe we're as close to that as we have been since Sumter," referring to the battle that started the Civil War.