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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.
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