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A police flash-bang grenade is detonated during the attack on the US Capitol on
6 January 2021. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters
A police flash-bang grenade is detonated during the attack on the US Capitol on
6 January 2021. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters
The ObserverUS politics



‘THESE ARE CONDITIONS RIPE FOR POLITICAL VIOLENCE’: HOW CLOSE IS THE US TO CIVIL
WAR?

Nearly half of Americans fear their country will erupt within the next decade.
Ahead of the midterm elections this week, three experts analyse the depth of the
crisis


Sun 6 Nov 2022 04.00 ESTLast modified on Wed 23 Nov 2022 15.06 EST
 * 
 * 
 * 



Barbara F Walter. Photograph: Debora Cartwright


BARBARA F WALTER: ‘JUDGES WILL BE ASSASSINATED, DEMOCRATS WILL BE JAILED ON
BOGUS CHARGES, BLACK CHURCHES AND SYNAGOGUES BOMBED’



American political scientist and author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop
Them (Viking)

Americans are increasingly talking about civil war. In August, after the FBI
raided Donald Trump’s Florida home, Twitter references to “civil war” jumped
3,000%. Trump supporters immediately went online, tweeting threats that a civil
war would start if Trump was indicted. One account wrote: “Is it
Civil-War-O’clock yet?”; another said, “get ready for an uprising”. Lindsey
Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, said there would be “riots in
the streets” if Trump was indicted. Trump himself predicted that “terrible
things are going to happen” if the temperature wasn’t brought down in the
country. Perhaps most troubling, Americans on both sides of the political divide
increasingly state that violence is justified. In January 2022, 34% of Americans
surveyed said that it was sometimes OK to use violence against the government.
Seven months later, more than 40% said that they believed civil war was at least
somewhat likely in the next 10 years. Two years ago, no one was talking about a
second American civil war. Today it is common.



Are America’s fears overblown? The most frequent question I get asked following
my book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them is whether a civil war could
happen again in the US. Sceptics argue that America’s government is too powerful
for anyone to challenge. Others argue that secession will never happen because
our country is no longer cleanly divided along geographic lines. Still others
simply cannot believe that Americans would start killing one another. These
beliefs, however, are based on the mistaken idea that a second civil war would
look like the first. It will not.

If a second civil war breaks out in the US, it will be a guerrilla war fought by
multiple small militias spread around the country. Their targets will be
civilians – mainly minority groups, opposition leaders and federal employees.
Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed
on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off
by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they
enforce federal law. The goal will be to reduce the strength of the federal
government and those who support it, while also intimidating minority groups and
political opponents into submission.


A protester calling for Donald Trump’s arrest holds a sign in front of Trump
Tower the morning after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August. Photograph: David
Dee Delgado/Reuters


We know this because far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have told us how
they plan to execute a civil war. They call this type of war “leaderless
resistance” and are influenced by a plan in The Turner Diaries (1978), a
fictitious account of a future US civil war. Written by William Pierce, founder
of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, it offers a playbook for how a group of
fringe activists can use mass terror attacks to “awaken” other white people to
their cause, eventually destroying the federal government. The book advocates
attacking the Capitol building, setting up a gallows to hang politicians,
lawyers, newscasters and teachers who are so-called “race traitors”, and bombing
FBI headquarters.

Pages of The Turner Diaries were found in Timothy McVeigh’s truck after he
attacked a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Patrick Crusius, the
alleged El Paso Walmart gunman, and John Timothy Earnest, the accused shooter at
a synagogue in Poway, California, echoed the book’s ideas in their manifestos. A
member of the Proud Boys can be seen on video during the insurrection on 6
January 2021 telling a journalist to read The Turner Diaries.

> Election deniers are running for office in 48 of the 50 states



The US is not yet in a civil war. But a 2012 declassified report by the CIA on
insurgencies outlines the signs. According to the report, a country is
experiencing an open insurgency when sustained violence by increasingly active
extremists has become the norm. By this point, violent extremists are using
sophisticated weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, and begin to attack
vital infrastructure (such as hospitals, bridges and schools), rather than just
individuals. These attacks also involve a larger number of fighters, some of
whom have combat experience. There is often evidence, according to the report,
“of insurgent penetration and subversion of the military, police, and
intelligence services”.

In this early stage of civil war, extremists are trying to force the population
to choose sides, in part by demonstrating to citizens that the government cannot
keep them safe or provide basic necessities. The goal is to incite a broader
civil war by denigrating the state and growing support for violent measures.

Insurgency experts wondered whether 6 January would be the beginning of such a
sustained series of attacks. This has not yet happened, in part because of
aggressive counter-measures by the FBI. The FBI has arrested more than 700
individuals who participated in the riot, charging 225 of them with assaulting,
resisting or impeding officers or employees. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the
Oath Keepers, will almost certainly go to jail for his role in helping to
organise the insurrection, as will numerous other participants. But this setback
is likely to be temporary.


Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, giving evidence in June to the
House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack. Photograph: Brendan
Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images


Civil war experts know that two factors put countries at high risk of civil war.
The US has one of these risk factors and remains dangerously close to the
second. Neither risk factor has diminished since 6 January. The first is ethnic
factionalism. This happens when citizens in a country organise themselves into
political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than
ideology. The second is anocracy. This is when a government is neither fully
democratic nor fully autocratic; it’s something in between. Civil wars almost
never happen in full, healthy, strong democracies. They also seldom happen in
full autocracies. Violence almost always breaks out in countries in the middle –
those with weak and unstable pseudo-democracies. Anocracy plus factionalism is a
dangerous mix.

We also know who tends to start civil wars, especially those fought between
different ethnic, religious and racial groups. This also does not bode well for
the US. The groups that tend to resort to violence are not the poorest groups,
or the most downtrodden. It’s the group that had once been politically dominant
but is losing power. It’s the loss of political status – a sense of resentment
that they are being replaced and that the identity of their country is no longer
theirs – that tends to motivate these groups to organise. Today, the Republican
party and its base of white, Christian voters are losing their dominant position
in American politics and society as a result of demographic changes. Whites are
the slowest-growing demographic in the US and will no longer be a majority of
the population by around 2044. Their status will continue to decline as America
becomes more multi-ethnic, multiracial, and multireligious, and the result will
be increasing resentment and fear at what lies ahead. The people who stormed the
Capitol on 6 January believed they were saving America from this future and felt
fully justified in this fight.

America’s democracy declined rapidly between 2016 and 2020. Since 6 January
2021, the US has failed to strengthen its democracy in any way, leaving it
vulnerable to continued backsliding into the middle zone. In fact, the
Republican party has accelerated its plan to weaken our democracy further. Voter
suppression bills have been introduced in almost every state since 6 January.
Election deniers are running for office in 48 of the 50 states and now represent
a majority of all Republicans running for Congressional and state offices in the
US midterm elections this week. Trump loyalists are being elected secretaries of
state in key swing states, increasing the likelihood that Republican candidates
will be granted victory, even if they lose the vote. And America’s two big
political parties remain deeply divided by race and religion. If these
underlying conditions do not change, a leader like Stewart Rhodes of the Oath
Keepers can go to jail, but other disaffected white men will take his place.

> Regulate social media… the result would be a drop in everyone’s collective
> anger, distrust and feelings of threat



What is happening in the US is not unique. White supremacists have leapt on
projections that the US will be the first western democracy where white citizens
could lose their majority status. This is forecast to happen around 2044.
Far-right parties of wealthy western countries have issued ominous warnings
about the end of white dominance, seeking to stoke hatred by emphasising the
alleged costs – economic, social, moral – of such transformation. We are already
seeing elements of this in Europe, where rightwing anti-immigrant parties such
as the Sweden Democrats, the Brothers of Italy, Alternative für Deutschland in
Germany, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the National Rally in France and the
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria have all seen their support increase
in recent years.



What can we do about this? The obvious answers are for our political leaders to
invest heavily in strengthening our democracies and to have their political
parties reach across racial, religious and ethnic lines. But here in America,
the Democratic party does not have the votes to institute much-needed reforms of
our political system, and the Republicans have no interest; they are moving in
the opposite direction.

But there is a potentially easy fix. Regulate social media, and in particular
the algorithms that disproportionately push the more incendiary, extreme,
threatening and fear-inducing information into people’s feeds. Take away the
social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy
theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers and enemies of
democracy. The result would be a drop in everyone’s collective anger, distrust
and feelings of threat, giving us all time to rebuild.


Stephen Marche. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star/Getty Images


STEPHEN MARCHE: ‘AMERICA HAS PASSED THE POINT AT WHICH THE TRIUMPH OF ONE PARTY
OR ANOTHER CAN FIX WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT’

Canadian novelist and essayist and author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from
the American Future (Simon & Schuster)

The United States is a textbook example of a country headed towards civil war.
The trends increasingly point one way, and while nobody knows the future, little
– if anything – is being done, by anyone, to try to prevent the collapse of the
republic. Belief in democracy is ebbing. The legitimacy of institutions is
declining. America increasingly is entering a state where its citizens don’t
want to belong to the same country. These are conditions ripe for political
violence.

No civil war ever has a single cause. It’s always a multitude of factors that
lead to decline and collapse. The current US has several of what the CIA calls
“threat multipliers”: environmental crises continue to batter the country,
economic inequality is at its highest level since the founding of the country,
and demographic change means that the US will be a minority white country within
just over two decades. All of these factors tend to contribute to civil unrest
wherever they are found in the world.

But the US is more vulnerable to political violence than other countries because
of the decrepitude of its institutions. For 40 years, trust in institutions of
all kinds – the church, the police, journalism, academia – has been in freefall.
Trust in politicians can hardly fall any lower. And there is no reason for
trust. The constitution, while unquestionably a work of genius, was a work of
18th-century genius. It simply does not reflect, nor can it respond to, the
realities of the 21st century.


State flags (including Tennessee, front, and Kentucky behind) on the National
Mall, Washington DC, before Biden’s inauguration. Photograph: Stephanie
Keith/Getty Images


The divide between the American political system and any reflection of the
popular will is widening, and increasingly it cannot be ignored. The electoral
college system means that, in the near term, a Democrat will win the popular
mandate by many millions of votes and still lose the presidency. The crisis of
democracy will only grow. With around 345 election deniers on the ballot as
candidates in November, the Republicans appear to have evolved a new political
strategy, seemingly based on the gambling strategy of Joe Pesci’s character in
Casino: if they win, they collect. If they don’t, they tell the bookies to go
away. Unless there is a completely separate Republican leadership in place by
2024, they will simply ignore the results they don’t like.

The American electoral system is already hugely localised, outdated and held
together by good faith. Any failure to recognise electoral outcomes, even in a
few states, could result in a contested election in which nobody reaches the
threshold of 270 electoral college votes. In that case, the constitution
stipulates a “contingent election” – acclimatise yourself to this phrase now –
in which each state gets a single vote. That’s right: if no candidate in an
American presidential election reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college
votes, the House delegations from individual states, overwhelmingly dominated by
Republicans, pick the president, with each state having one vote

> The confusion of legal status of a separate group of persons is a classic
> prelude to civil war



In 1824, the candidate who won the popular vote and the most electoral college
votes, Andrew Jackson, did not become president. John Quincy Adams fudged his
way through. A contingent election is one mechanism, just one, by which an
American government could be perfectly constitutional and completely
undemocratic at the same time. The right has been preparing for exactly such a
reality for a while, with a phrase they repeat as if in hope that it will mean
something if they say it enough: “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”

Quasi-legitimacy is what leads to violence. And America’s political institutions
are destined to become more and more quasi-legitimate from now on. One of the
surest markers of incipient civil war in other countries is the legal system
devolving from a non-partisan, truly national institution to a spoil of partisan
war. That has already happened in the US.


Women in in Lansing, Michigan, protest the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe
v Wade. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images


The overturning of Roe v Wade, in June, was both a symptom of the new American
divisiveness and a cause of its spread. The Dobbs decision (in which the supreme
court held that the US constitution does not confer the right to abortion) took
the status of women in the US and dropped it like a plate-glass window from a
great height. It will take a generation or more to sweep up the shards. What
women are or are not allowed to do with their bodies – abortions, IVF
procedures, birth control, maintaining the privacy of their menstrual cycles,
crossing state lines – now depends on the state and county lines in which their
bodies happen to reside. The legal reality of American women is no longer
national in nature. When a woman travels from Illinois to Ohio, she becomes a
different entity, with different rights and duties.

The court itself is well aware of the legal carnage it has caused. “If, over
time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment,
that is a dangerous thing for democracy,” associate justice Elena Kagan said
shortly afterwards. Her conservative colleague Samuel A Alito responded: “It
goes without saying that everyone is free to express disagreement with our
decisions and to criticise our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying
that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our
integrity crosses an important line.” But what anyone says or implies is of
little to no importance at this point. The percentage of the American public
having almost no confidence in the supreme court reached 43% in July, up from
27% in April. The confusion of legal status of a separate group of persons is a
classic prelude to civil war.

The justices of the court, and the American public, are just catching up with
the inevitable consequences of the refusal of Congressional Republicans to allow
President Obama to select Merrick Garland for the court and then going on to
confirm three Trump nominees, resulting in a court skewed six: three to the
right. The supreme court feels illegitimate because it is illegitimate. The
Dobbs decision does not reflect the will of the American people because the
supreme court does not reflect the will of the American people.

Elections have consequences, right up until the point when they don’t. On a
superficial level, the 2022 midterms couldn’t matter more; American democracy
itself is at stake. On a deeper level, the 2022 midterms don’t matter all that
much; they will inform us, if anything, of the schedule and the manner of the
fall of the republic. The results might delay the decline, or accelerate it, but
at this point, no merely political outcome can prevent the downfall. America has
passed the point at which the triumph of one party or another can fix what’s
wrong with it, and the kind of structural change that’s necessary isn’t on the
table. This is a moment between two American politics. The wind has been sown.
The whirlwind is yet to be reaped.


Christopher Sebastian Parker. Photograph: University of British Columbia Arts


CHRISTOPHER SEBASTIAN PARKER: ‘MANY WHITE PEOPLE FEEL THE NEED TO TAKE DRASTIC
MEASURES TO MAINTAIN WHITE SUPREMACY’



Professor of political science at University of California, Santa Barbara and
author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics
in America (Princeton)

America is rushing headlong into another civil war, and it’s a matter of when,
not if. As political scientist Prof Barbara F Walter argues, civil wars are
likely in the presence of two factors: anocracy and ethnic factionalism. When
one considers the centrality of race to American politics, it is clear that
ethno-nationalism is hastening the movement towards anocracy.

Think about the role of race in the first civil war and the one we’re headed
towards. It’s well documented that the repulsive nature of the institution of
slavery was the principal cause of the civil war, driven by moral as well as
economic and political concerns. In 19th-century America, the Democratic party
was a relatively reactionary institution in the south, whereas the Republican
party was a relatively progressive institution located in the north. Republicans
supported the abolition of slavery, whereas 19th-century Democrats were all for
it. Regardless of the outcome of the war – driven as it was by the prospect of
material gain or loss, moral redemption or amorality – the war came to rest on
the fulcrum of race and racism.


Members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marching with anti-abortion
activists in Washington DC in January. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles
Times/Getty Images

Throughout history, political identity in the US has ultimately been driven by
the parties’ respective positions on race, with divisions sorting primarily by
way of racial identity and racial attitudes. Contemporary Republicans, for
instance, tend to be white and relatively racist. Democrats are more likely to
draw from a more diverse pool and, as such, are, typically, less racist. To
illustrate this point, Republicans are far more alarmed by a diversifying
country.



Likewise, white people were and are more likely to support Trump, driven by the
anxiety associated with the rapid racial diversification of “their” country.
What, you may ask, do white people and the Republican party have in common?
Well, 80% of Republican voters are white.

The consequences of the centrality of race and racism to American politics and
the threat of internal war are dire. It was racism that was ultimately
responsible for the rise of the Tea Party, a reaction to Obama’s (racialised)
presidency. The Tea Party (now the Maga movement), in turn, moved the GOP to the
right, eventually setting the stage for Trump.

With Trump pushing the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, and many
Republicans buying into it, the stage is set for another American war of all
against all. We’ve seen this before. The civil war, as it happens, was set in
motion by the refusal of the Democrats to accept Abraham Lincoln as the
legitimate winner of the 1860 contest given his views on slavery: he thought it
morally wrong.

But it wasn’t the economics of slavery that motivated the south’s insistence on
maintaining what was known as the “peculiar institution”. Only 3.24.75 % of the
white southern population owned slaves. Clearly, then, the maintenance of
slavery as an economic institution carried no value for almost all white
southerners. With economic reasons absent, why were white southerners willing to
fight a war over slavery? The southern way of life: white supremacy. As part of
southern culture, these people were not ready to forfeit their social dominance,
relative to the Black community.

These conditions remain in place. As many white people (Republicans) confront
the fear that by 2044 they’ll no longer be in the ethnic majority, they feel the
need to take drastic measures to maintain white supremacy. It’s all they’ve ever
known. It happened in the 1860s; what’s to prevent it from happening now?

Look for the next civil war to take place after the 2024 election cycle, when
the next wave of violence is likely to emerge. Similar to the original civil
war, there’s too much at stake for both sides. Then, as now, the threats are
existential. In the 19th century, Democrats viewed the newly established
Republican party as a threat to their way of life. Republicans, for their part,
saw southern intransigence on the issue of slavery as a threat to the union.


A supporter’s T-shirt at a Donald Trump rally in Delaware, Ohio, in April.
Photograph: Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images


Today, Republicans, driven by the existential threat of losing “their” (white)
country, will continue their attack on democracy as a means towards preserving
America for “real” Americans. Democrats, on the other hand, see the
“Magafication” of the GOP as an existential threat to liberal democracy.

Election-related violence generally takes place when the following four factors
are present: a highly competitive election that can shift power; partisan
division based on identity; winner-takes-all two-party election systems in which
political identities are polarised; and an unwillingness to punish violence on
the part of the dominant group. All four are present in America now, and will be
more amplified in 2024.

We’re almost there. White angst over increasing racial diversity makes another
Trump candidacy (and presidency) likely, pushing us into anocracy. Democrats are
having none of that. They’ll resist going down the slippery slope to autocracy
the same way that their 19th-century counterparts, the party of Lincoln, refused
to let the Confederacy bust up the union. Likewise, should Democrats prevail in
2024, Republicans will revolt – the 6 January Capitol attack is a forewarning.

Either way, I’ll wager that a civil war featuring terrorism, guerrilla war and
ethnic cleansing will be waged from sea to shining sea. In the end, race and
racism will lead to another very American conflagration.

This article was amended on 7 November 2022. An earlier version erred in saying
that “state legislatures” pick the president if no candidate reaches the
threshold of 270 electoral college votes; it is the House delegations from
individual states that choose. It was further amended on 23 November 2022; the
earlier version said “3.2% of white southern families owned slaves”; the linked
paper calculates the figure at 4.75% of the population.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would
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And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a
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Editor, Guardian US





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   7 May 2023


 * JOE BIDEN FORMALLY ANNOUNCES 2024 WHITE HOUSE RUN
   
   25 Apr 2023


 * BIDEN IS TOO OLD AND NOT ESPECIALLY POPULAR, BUT HE IS THE TRUMP-SLAYER.
   THAT’S WHY HE IS RIGHT TO RUN IN 2024
   
   
   14 Apr 2023
   615
   615


 * JOE BIDEN SAYS HE WILL ANNOUNCE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL RUN ‘RELATIVELY SOON’
   
   15 Apr 2023


 * JOE BIDEN ENDS IRELAND TOUR WITH PASSIONATE ADDRESS TO THOUSANDS
   
   14 Apr 2023


 * JOE BIDEN’S IRELAND TRIP REINFORCES NARRATIVE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
   
   14 Apr 2023


 * ARLENE FOSTER ‘WRONG’ TO SAY JOE BIDEN HATES UK, SAYS IRISH DEPUTY PM
   
   14 Apr 2023


 * BIDEN CASTS US AND IRELAND AS ALLIES IN QUEST FOR SHARED VALUES
   
   13 Apr 2023


 * BIDEN BRINGS FORWARD BELFAST VISIT, PUTTING MEETING WITH KING IN DOUBT
   
   28 Mar 2023




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