Barbara F. Walter is a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.

[1] She wrote in the book that she initially began pondering the concept of an impending civil war in 2018, during Donald Trump's tenure as president of the United States, but her viewpoint was not entertained by her colleagues at the time.

According to Walter, the U.S. has gone from +10 a few years before the book was written to +5 when it was published, making the current United States an anocracy—a partial democracy.

[2] Writing for The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai called the book's advice "well-meaning but insufficient", although she also commented that given the scenarios Walter describes, this might be understandable; she thought that several pieces of guidance the book gave, such as "The U.S. government shouldn't indulge extremists", were rather obvious.

Szalai commented that the rating scale gave Walter a rational way to justify "blunt conclusions", such as the idea that "the Republican Party is behaving like a predatory faction".