Daily
Comment
Is a Civil War Ahead?
A year after
the attack on the Capitol, America is suspended between democracy and
autocracy.
By David Remnick
January 5,
2022
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-a-civil-war-ahead
The edifice of American exceptionalism has
always wobbled on a shoddy foundation of self-delusion, and yet most Americans
have readily accepted the commonplace that the United States is the world’s
oldest continuous democracy. That serene assertion has now collapsed.
On January 6, 2021, when white supremacists,
militia members, and maga faithful took inspiration from the President and
stormed the Capitol in order to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential
election, leaving legislators and the Vice-President essentially held hostage,
we ceased to be a full democracy. Instead, we now inhabit a liminal status that
scholars call “anocracy.” That is, for the first time in two hundred years, we
are suspended between democracy and autocracy. And that sense of uncertainty
radically heightens the likelihood of episodic bloodletting in America, and
even the risk of civil war.
This is the compelling argument of “How Civil
Wars Start,” a new book by Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the
University of California San Diego. Walter served on an advisory committee to
the C.I.A. called the Political Instability Task Force, which studies the roots
of political violence in nations from Sri Lanka to the former Yugoslavia.
Citing data compiled by the Center for Systemic Peace, which the task force
uses to analyze political dynamics in foreign countries, Walter explains that
the “honor” of being the oldest continuous democracy is now held by
Switzerland, followed by New Zealand. In the U.S., encroaching instability and
illiberal currents present a sad picture. As Walter writes, “We are no longer a
peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan.”
In her book and in a conversation for this
week’s New Yorker Radio Hour, Walter made it clear that she wanted to avoid “an
exercise in fear-mongering”; she is wary of coming off as sensationalist. In
fact, she takes pains to avoid overheated speculation and relays her warning
about the potential for civil war in clinical terms. Yet, like those who spoke
up clearly about the dangers of global warming decades ago, Walter delivers a
grave message that we ignore at our peril. So much remains in flux. She is
careful to say that a twenty-first-century American civil war would bear no
resemblance to the consuming and symmetrical conflict that was played out on
the battlefields of the eighteen-sixties. Instead she foresees, if the worst
comes about, an era of scattered yet persistent acts of violence: bombings,
political assassinations, destabilizing acts of asymmetric warfare carried out
by extremist groups that have coalesced via social media. These are relatively
small, loosely aligned collections of self-aggrandizing warriors who sometimes
call themselves “accelerationists.” They have convinced themselves that the only
way to hasten the toppling of an irredeemable, non-white, socialist republic is
through violence and other extra-political means.
Walter makes the case that, as long as the
country fails to fortify its democratic institutions, it will endure threats such
as the one that opens her book: the attempt, in 2020, by a militia group in
Michigan known as the Wolverine Watchmen to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The Watchmen despised Whitmer for having instituted anti-covid measures in the
state—restrictions that they saw not as attempts to protect the public health
but as intolerable violations of their liberty. Trump’s publicly stated disdain
for Whitmer could not have discouraged these maniacs. The F.B.I., fortunately,
foiled the Wolverines, but, inevitably, if there are enough such plots—enough
shots fired—some will find their target.
America has always suffered acts of political
violence—the terrorism of the Klan; the 1921 massacre of the Black community in
Tulsa; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Democracy has never been a
settled, fully stable condition for all Americans, and yet the Trump era is
distinguished by the consuming resentment of many right-wing, rural whites who
fear being “replaced” by immigrants and people of color, as well as a
Republican Party leadership that bows to its most autocratic demagogue and no
longer seems willing to defend democratic values and institutions. Like other
scholars, Walter points out that there have been early signs of the current
insurgency, including the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, in 1995, which killed a hundred and sixty-eight people. But it
was the election of Barack Obama that most vividly underlined the rise of a
multiracial democracy and was taken as a threat by many white Americans who
feared losing their majority status. Walter writes that there were roughly
forty-three militia groups operating in the U.S. when Obama was elected, in
2008; three years later there were more than three hundred.
Walter has studied the preconditions of civil
strife all over the world. And she says that, if we strip away our
self-satisfaction and July 4th mythologies and review a realistic checklist,
“assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely,” we have to conclude
that the United States “has entered very dangerous territory.” She is hardly
alone in that conclusion. The International Institute for Democracy and
Electoral Assistance in Stockholm recently listed the U.S. as a “backsliding”
democracy.
The backsliding was never more depressingly
evident than in the weeks after January 6th, when Mitch McConnell, after
initially criticizing Donald Trump’s role in the insurrection, said that he
would support him if he were the Party’s nominee in 2024. Having stared into
the abyss, he pursued the darkness.
Not so long ago, Walter might have been
considered an alarmist. In 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published
their Trump-era study, “How Democracies Die,” one of many books that sought to
awaken American readers to the reality that the rule of law was under assault
just as it was in much of the world. But, as Levitsky told me, “Even we
couldn’t have imagined January 6th.” Levitsky said that until he read Walter
and other well-respected scholars on the subject, he would have thought that
warnings of civil war were overwrought.
Unlike Russia or Turkey, the United States is
blessed with a deep experience of democratic rule, no matter how flawed. The
courts, the Democratic Party, local election officials in both parties, the
military, the media—no matter how deeply flawed—proved in 2020 that it was
possible to resist the darkest ambitions of an autocratic President. The
guardrails of democracy and stability are hardly unassailable, but they are stronger
than anything that Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan has to contend with.
In fact, in his attempt to be reëlected, Trump did draw the largest Republican
vote ever—and he still lost by seven million votes. That, too, stands in the
way of fatalism.
“We’re not headed to fascism or Putinism,”
Levitsky told me, “but I do think we could be headed to recurring
constitutional crises, periods of competitive authoritarian and minority rule,
and episodes of pretty significant violence that could include bombings,
assassinations, and rallies where people are killed. In 2020, we saw people
being killed on the streets for political reasons. This isn’t apocalypse, but
it is a horrendous place to be.”
The battle to preserve American democracy is
not symmetrical. One party, the G.O.P., now poses itself as anti-majoritarian
and anti-democratic. And it has become a Party less focussed on traditional
policy values and more on tribal affiliation and resentments. A few figures,
including Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, know that this is a recipe for an
authoritarian Party, but there is no sign of what is required to reverse the
most worrying trends: a broad-based effort among Republican leaders to stand up
and join Democrats and Independents in a coalition based on a reassertion of
democratic values.
As the anniversary of the insurrection is
observed, the greater drama is not obscure. We are a country capable of
electing Barack Obama and, eight years later, Donald Trump. We are capable of
January 5th, when the state of Georgia elected two senators, an African
American and a Jew, and January 6th, when thousands stormed the Capitol in the
name of a preposterous conspiracy theory.
“There are two very different movements at
once in the same country,” Levitsky said. “This country is moving towards
multiracial democracy for the first time. In the twenty-first century we have a
multiracial democratic majority supportive of a diverse society and of having
the laws to insure equal rights. That multiracial democratic majority is out
there, and it can win popular elections.” And then there is the Republican
minority, which too often looks the other way as dangerous extremists act on
its behalf. Let’s hope the warnings about a new kind of civil war come to
nothing, and we can look back on books like Walter’s as alarmist. But, as we
have learned with the imperilled state of our climate, wishing does not make it
so.
.jpg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário