How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

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.



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)

"In the year since the rampage at the Capitol, chatter about a 21st-century American civil war has seeped from the fringes into the mainstream. During the Trump presidency, there were of course any number of books about political fracture; still, they mostly discussed widening but (usually) peaceable differences (Lilliana Mason’s “Uncivil Agreement,” Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized”), or they focused mainly on the historical roots of political violence (Joanne B. Freeman’s “The Field of Blood,” Kathleen Belew’s “Bring the War Home”)." NYT
At the same time, others have warned that indulging in "predictions of an imminent conflagration" can become self-fulfilling, and in some cases urged, prophesies (noting they tend "to come from those quarters that also celebrated it, on MAGA Twitter and its companion talk shows, invoking the paranoid fever dreams of the far-right."). Thus, O'Toole's critique of a “The Next Civil War” by the Canadian novelist and cultural critic Stephen Marche, emulating Lewis' 1930s warning.

O'Toole warns:

the belief that there was going to be a civil war in Ireland made everything worse. Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing. That year, 1972, was one of the most murderous in Northern Ireland precisely because this doomsday mentality was shared by ordinary, rational people like my father. Premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage.

Could the same thing happen in the United States? Much of American culture is already primed for the final battle. There is a very deep strain of apocalyptic fantasy in fundamentalist Christianity. Armageddon may be horrible, but it is not to be feared, because it will be the harbinger of eternal bliss for the elect and eternal damnation for their foes. On what used to be referred to as the far right, but perhaps should now simply be called the armed wing of the Republican Party, the imminence of civil war is a given.

Indeed, the conflict can be imagined not as America’s future, but as its present. In an interview with The Atlantic published in November 2020, two months before the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, declared: “Let’s not **** around.” He added, “We’ve descended into civil war.” The following month, the FBI, warning of possible attacks on state capitols, said that members of the so-called boogaloo movement “believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, antigovernment actions leading to a civil war.”

After January 6, mainstream Republicans picked up the theme. Much of the American right is spoiling for a fight, in the most literal sense. Which is one good reason to be very cautious about echoing, as the Canadian journalist and novelist Stephen Marche does in The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, the claim that America “is already in a state of civil strife, on the threshold of civil war.” These prophecies have a way of being self-fulfilling.

Click to expand...

(still more)

As Walter dispassionately analyses the current situation, the United States has slipped from a solid "democracy" to a fractious "anocracy". "Walter has a political scientist’s fondness for data sets and numerical scales. She says that the United States is firmly within the “danger zone” of a “five-point scale” measuring factionalism and a “21-point scale” measuring a country’s “polity index,” where a full autocracy gets a -10 and a full democracy gets +10. (We’ve slid from +10 to +5 in a few years, occupying what Walter and her colleagues call the not-quite-democratic and not-quite-autocratic zone of an “anocracy.”) The numbers serve a function, corralling troubling observations into a cold system of measurement that presents itself as beyond dispute, seemingly nonpartisan and scientific. The numbers also allow her to offer empirical grounding for her work while she makes her way toward some blunt conclusions: “Today, the Republican Party is behaving like a predatory faction.” NYT
But here's the kicker: "America lucked out, Walter says, because “its first modern autocratic president was neither smart nor politically experienced.” She ticks off the risk factors that have already been met here — factionalism, democratic decay, lots of guns. There is also, crucially, a once-dominant group whose members are fearful that their status is slipping away. It isn’t the downtrodden masses that start a civil war, Walter says, but rather what she and her fellow scholars call “sons of the soil.” Their privileged position was once so unquestioned and pervasive that they simply assume it’s their due, and they will take to violence in order to cling to power." She wrote that before the 2024 election, and even before the January 6 insurrection.

Times have changed.

"Social media, for all its initial promises of interpersonal harmony, has become an efficient machine for stoking rage, tearing people apart when it isn’t bringing extremists together. An “ethnic entrepreneur” seeking to amass power by making bigoted appeals to a particular group doesn’t need an especially sophisticated disinformation campaign to get people to feel fearful and despairing, convincing them to turn against a democracy that includes people they hate. There’s comfort in assuming that autocracy has to arrive with a military coup: “Now it’s being ushered in by the voters themselves.”

That it has.

"Walter’s earnest advice about what to do comes across as well-meaning but insufficient — though I’m not sure how much of it is her fault, considering that the situation she has laid out looks too inflamed to be soothed by a few pointers in a book. “The U.S. government shouldn’t indulge extremists — the creation of a white ethno-state would be disastrous for the country.” Thank you, Professor Walter. She proposes that the government instead “renew its commitment to providing for its most vulnerable citizens, white, Black or brown.” This, too, seems unobjectionable — but she also makes clear that right-wing militias planning to kidnap and murder government officials are zero-sum thinkers; they experience any benefit that might be shared by people who don’t look like them as a grievous loss.

While the blithely unworried are hindered by too little imagination, the florid fantasies of QAnon show that some Americans are beset by too much of the same. Walter mostly sticks to citing the scholarship in her field, but at one point, discussing the sinister clowning of Alex Jones, she reaches for Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” The absurdities are by definition preposterous, but Walter’s book suggests that it would be preposterous to assume they’re irrelevant; it’s only by thinking about what was once unfathomable that we can see the country as it really is." NYT

I’ll have to go back through the links.

Thank you for something to read worthwhile this afternoon.