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I'm starting this discussion here with the hope of a serious discussion and a minimum of hyperbolic rhetoric. There are two words in the title that are apt to engender exactly that, "Civil" and "War". Of course, I'm discussing it because I am worried.
The genesis of the thread, and the title of it, is from a scholarly book by Barbara F. Walter (not Walters), How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them . Walter is "an American political scientist who is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Walter’s main areas of study are civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terrorism.[1] Walter has written multiple books including How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (2022)[2] which examined whether the US was heading toward a second civil war." (Wikipedia)
My hope is to focus on the latter half of the title: "How to Stop Them". But, to get there, we'll have to diagnose the issues and determine if the effort is possible. To broaden the discussion, I'm including gifted links to two articles on the subject, one a review of Walter's book.
www.nytimes.com
www.theatlantic.com
Interestingly, Walter penned the eponymous book before the events of January 6, 2021. In an interview, today, she explained that the resolution of that event actually pushed us away from the brink it presaged. The guardrails of democracy held. She is less sanguine today.
"When Barbara F. Walter began writing “How Civil Wars Start” in 2018, the few people who heard that it was “about a possible second civil war in America” thought it was “an exercise in fear-mongering,” she writes in her acknowledgments, “perhaps even irresponsible.” That “even” gives you a sense of Walter’s cautious inclinations. As a political scientist who has spent her career studying conflicts in other countries, she approaches her work methodically, patiently gathering her evidence before laying out her case. She spends the first half of the book explaining how civil wars have started in a number of places around the world, including the former Yugoslavia, the Philippines and Iraq." It's by studying how civil wars came to other countries that we can - dispassionately - examine the possibility in our own.
"She suggests that we have gotten to this point because of a “failure of the imagination”; our realm of possibility has been hemmed in by the historical example of the American Civil War, with its muddy embankments and men on horseback. The range of her case studies implies that another damper on the American imagination has been an insistent exceptionalism — the belief that political collapse is something that happens elsewhere." Or, as Sinclair Lewis asserted (warningly) nearly a century ago, "It Can't Happen Here".
But times have changed.
(More to follow)
The genesis of the thread, and the title of it, is from a scholarly book by Barbara F. Walter (not Walters), How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them . Walter is "an American political scientist who is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Walter’s main areas of study are civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terrorism.[1] Walter has written multiple books including How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (2022)[2] which examined whether the US was heading toward a second civil war." (Wikipedia)
My hope is to focus on the latter half of the title: "How to Stop Them". But, to get there, we'll have to diagnose the issues and determine if the effort is possible. To broaden the discussion, I'm including gifted links to two articles on the subject, one a review of Walter's book.
‘How Civil Wars Start,’ a Warning About the State of the Union (Published 2022)
In her new book, Barbara F. Walter makes the case that the United States is firmly within the “danger zone” for more political violence.
Beware Prophecies of Civil War
The idea that such a catastrophe is unavoidable in America is inflammatory and corrosive.
www.theatlantic.com
Interestingly, Walter penned the eponymous book before the events of January 6, 2021. In an interview, today, she explained that the resolution of that event actually pushed us away from the brink it presaged. The guardrails of democracy held. She is less sanguine today.
"When Barbara F. Walter began writing “How Civil Wars Start” in 2018, the few people who heard that it was “about a possible second civil war in America” thought it was “an exercise in fear-mongering,” she writes in her acknowledgments, “perhaps even irresponsible.” That “even” gives you a sense of Walter’s cautious inclinations. As a political scientist who has spent her career studying conflicts in other countries, she approaches her work methodically, patiently gathering her evidence before laying out her case. She spends the first half of the book explaining how civil wars have started in a number of places around the world, including the former Yugoslavia, the Philippines and Iraq." It's by studying how civil wars came to other countries that we can - dispassionately - examine the possibility in our own.
"She suggests that we have gotten to this point because of a “failure of the imagination”; our realm of possibility has been hemmed in by the historical example of the American Civil War, with its muddy embankments and men on horseback. The range of her case studies implies that another damper on the American imagination has been an insistent exceptionalism — the belief that political collapse is something that happens elsewhere." Or, as Sinclair Lewis asserted (warningly) nearly a century ago, "It Can't Happen Here".
But times have changed.
(More to follow)
