An Expert on Civil War Issues a Warning About America

Two new books look at the dangerous state of American politics and the growing divsiveness and insanity on the right where Republicans are literally choosing death by Covid-19 rather than give in to Democrat backed mask and vaccine mandates.  Here in Virginia - which has the highest vaccination rate in the South, the new Republican regime is signaling that it will oppose mask and vaccine mandates and thus endnager the lives of Virginians (cynically, the only silver lining if such a thing exists is that one can hope the death rate will be highest among the Republican base which put the science denying regime in place). The books, “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” by Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and “The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future.” by Stephen Marche, Canadian novelist and critic, make clear that the majority of the danger to democracy and societal stability comes from the political right that favors white, right wing "Christian" - I use quotations because these people are anything but true followers of Christ's gospel - rule over everyone else.  Columns in the New York Times and The Economist look at the danger and whether American democracy will survive.  First these excerpts from the Times:

Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, has interviewed many people who’ve lived through civil wars, and she told me they all say they didn’t see it coming. “They’re all surprised,” she said. “Even when, to somebody who studies it, it’s obvious years beforehand.”

This is worth keeping in mind if your impulse is to dismiss the idea that America could fall into civil war again. . . . The sort of civil war that Walter and Marche worry about wouldn’t involve red and blue armies facing off on some battlefield. If it happens, it will be more of a guerrilla insurgency. As Walter told me, she, like Marche, relies on an academic definition of “major armed conflict” as one that causes at least 1,000 deaths per year. A “minor armed conflict” is one that kills at least 25 people a year. By this definition, as Marche argues, “America is already in a state of civil strife.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, extremists, most of them right-wing, killed 54 people in 2018 and 45 people in 2019. (They killed 17 people in 2020, a figure that was low due to the absence of extremist mass shootings, possibly because of the pandemic.)

Walter argues that civil wars have predictable patterns, and she spends more than half her book laying out how those patterns have played out in other countries. They are most common in what she and other scholars call “anocracies,” countries that are “neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between.” Warning signs include the rise of intense political polarization based on identity rather than ideology, especially polarization between two factions of roughly equal size, each of which fears being crushed by the other.

Instigators of civil violence, she writes, tend to be previously dominant groups who see their status slipping away. “The ethnic groups that start wars are those claiming that the country ‘is or ought to be theirs,’” she writes. This is one reason, although there are violent actors on the left, neither she nor Marche believe the left will start a civil war. As Marche writes, “Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization.”

It’s no secret that many on the right are both fantasizing about and planning civil war. Some of those who swarmed the Capitol a year ago wore black sweatshirts emblazoned with “MAGA Civil War.” The Boogaloo Bois, a surreal, violent, meme-obsessed anti-government movement, get their name from a joke about a Civil War sequel. Republicans increasingly throw around the idea of armed conflict.

To me, the threat of America calcifying into a Hungarian-style right-wing autocracy under a Republican president seems more imminent than mass civil violence. Her theory depends on an irredentist right-wing faction rebelling against its loss of power. But increasingly, the right is rigging our sclerotic system so that it can maintain power whether the voters want it to or not.

If outright civil war still isn’t likely, though, it seems to me more likely than a return to the sort of democratic stability many Americans grew up with. . . . Yet most of Marche’s narratives seem more imaginable than a future in which Jan. 6 turns out to be the peak of right-wing insurrection, and America ends up basically OK. “It’s so easy to pretend it’s all going to work out,” he writes. I don’t find it easy.

The piece in The Economist looks at some of the same sources and the factors that lead to civil war.  Perhaps somewhat disturbingly it tends to take a "it can't happen here" mindset which in itself can compound the risk of fascism and/or civil war.  In my view, it is bettter to prepare for the worse than be caught flat footed thinking no real risk exists.  Here are excerpts:

IT IS HARD to overstate the danger Donald Trump poses to America and the world, but Barbara Walter manages it. Mr Trump scorns democratic norms, stirs up racial division, propagates the big lie that he won re-election in 2020, encouraged a coup attempt on January 6th 2021—and might win the presidency again in 2024. Ms Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, rightly decries these sins. But she goes further. Thanks partly to Mr Trump, and partly to the underlying trends he has exploited, she claims America is at risk of civil war.

A second risk factor is factionalism. Since the end of the cold war, perhaps 75% of civil wars have been fought between ethnic and religious groups, rather than political ones. Here what matters is not how diverse a country is, but whether politics revolves around identity.

Political leaders who stir up fear of another group to win support from their own are often especially dangerous. Consider (as Ms Walter does) the former Yugoslavia. As the cold war ended, it cast off communism and began to move towards democracy. It promptly fell apart, goaded by “ethnic entrepreneurs” such as Slobodan Milosevic.

He was not a true believer. A former communist, he switched to Serbian nationalism because it was the easiest way to win support. . . . The most effective grievance-mongers are creative liars. Serbian television, for instance, once claimed that Serb children were being fed to lions in Sarajevo Zoo. They also recognise no statute of limitations. “For five centuries they violated our mothers and sisters,” said one Croat nationalist of Bosnian Muslims.

Complacent cosmopolitans did not see war coming. They lived in cities where Serbs, Croats, Muslims and others freely intermingled and intermarried. They did not imagine those groups would start killing each other. Even when they knew that Serb militias were forming in the hills, they dismissed them as yokels. One local writer recalls city folk joking about rustic Serbs “hating us because we knew about soap and water…and wearing clean socks”.

Another risk factor arises when a large group fears it is losing status. Ms Walter lists several that rebelled for this reason. Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein, were shut out of power after he was toppled; some went on to create Islamic State. After the revolution in Kyiv in 2014, some in Ukraine who considered themselves ethnically Russian revolted against the new government (with assistance from Vladimir Putin).

The most disgruntled members of an aggrieved group may take up arms. At first they are typically too small in number to pose a serious threat—but social media can accelerate the descent into bloodshed.

All this is persuasive, and a useful guide to what is happening today in, say, Ethiopia, or might happen in Lebanon. But America? Yes, there are some parallels. The country is polarised, and cynical race-baiting politicians have made matters worse. The most egregious culprits are on the right, but some on the left have exacerbated the split by alienating white Americans: urging minorities to think of themselves first and foremost as members of a racial group, as some activists do, ultimately encourages the majority to do likewise. Many working-class whites feel a loss of status, and their grievances have been stoked on social media. There is a rural-urban divide: some educated city-dwellers disdain their rustic compatriots, who keenly resent it. 

No country as sophisticated, modern, liberal and democratic as contemporary America has ever descended into civil war. It has exceptionally strong, professional and apolitical armed forces. Its police, though far from perfect, uphold the law, as do its courts.

A series of politically inspired terrorist attacks is sadly plausible. So is a better-organised revolt than the one staged a year ago. But it would have no chance of success—and, on past form, the terrorists would be caught and punished. The American state cannot be overthrown by seizing a building in Washington.