Could Civil War Erupt in America?

Whenever the United States encounters a tragedy, politicians and commentators find themselves reaching for a lazy platitude: “This is not America.” In other words, bad things don’t happen here—they happen there. 

Barbara F. Walter wants Americans to know awful things can happen in the United States, too. After a career examining conflicts across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, the University of California, San Diego professor has studied the underlying factors that contribute to political violence—and even civil war. Her finding is that the United States now ticks off many of the boxes of preconditions for public violence.

The good news is that, just like the preconditions for a human disease, better outcomes can be found. I spoke with Walter on FP Live for more. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript. 

Ravi Agrawal: You’ve spent your career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Angola. That’s a long list of global hot spots. And you found yourself on a CIA task force trying to predict why and when countries would experience violence. What did you learn?

Barbara F. Walter: The task force is called the Political Instability Task Force. When I joined in 2017, one of the goals was to come up with a predictive model that would help the U.S. government predict what countries around the world were likely to experience political instability and violence within the next two years. The data analysts asked the experts who were on the task force—people who study civil war and violence around the world—to tell them every factor that could possibly matter. It was things like whether a country was poor or not, what its GDP per capita was, whether there were high levels of income inequality, whether there was a group that was heavily discriminated against, how ethnically and religiously diverse the country was. The experts gave the data analysts 38 different factors, and the data analysts began working with the model.

And when they came back, they said that essentially only two factors mattered. And it wasn’t the two factors that the experts had expected.

The first factor was something called anocracy. Anocracy is just a fancy political science term for a partial democracy. It’s a country that has elements of democracy, so elections are held and people vote. But it also has elements of autocracy. It could be that only one party ever competes in those elections. Or it could be like in Hungary today, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has such a hold on the media that he is effectively able to harass the opposition so he wins every single election, no matter what. That’s an anocracy. It’s somewhere in between democracy and autocracy.

The second factor that mattered was whether political parties in those partial democracies were mainly organized around race, religion, or ethnicity and not around ideology. So these would be countries where, instead of joining a political party because you were conservative or liberal or communist or capitalist, you joined a party because it was the party of Serbs or Croats or Muslims or Hutus or Tutsis. When a country had these two features—a partial democracy with these identity-based parties—it was at high risk of political instability and political violence.

RA: Since this was a CIA task force, it was not measuring the United States. At what point did you look at this checklist and wonder where the United States falls on that spectrum?

BW: So I really started paying attention in 2016. I’m a child of immigrants. My dad came over from Germany. He lived through World War II there. He was a lifelong Republican here in the United States. And starting in 2016, I would go home, and my dad was just in a panic. All he wanted to talk about was what was happening in the United States. And I thought he was exaggerating the threat. But he kept saying, I saw this happening in the ’30s. I lived through it. I never thought this would happen here.

I started to pay closer attention when I got on the task force, and I saw it was these two features, partial democracy and these identity-based parties. The United States’ democracy was downgraded for the first time in 2016. The measure the task force used went from a negative 10 for the most authoritarian regimes to a positive ten 10 the most democratic regimes. The United States had been a positive 10 for quite a long time. In 2016, it was downgraded to a positive nine. And that was because international election monitors who were here in 2016 deemed the election free but not entirely fair because our own intelligence agencies had discovered that the Russians had, in fact, meddled in that election.

In 2019, the United States was downgraded a second time. And the reason for that was different. In 2019, the United States had another event that revealed the weakness of our democracy. The executive branch was refusing to comply with subpoenas and requests for information from the legislative branch. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is the main check on executive power.

The United States was downgraded a third time at the end of 2020. And by December 2020, the United States was classified at positive five. Positive five is in the anocracy zone. Anything between negative five and positive five is an anocracy. And for the first time since 1800, the United States was classified as an anocracy. That’s because for the first time in U.S. history, we had a sitting president who was unwilling to accept the results of an election and was actively seeking to overturn those results. So we got dinged quite aggressively in December 2020.  

RA: Barbara, I want to push back a little bit on the idea that a country like America could have a civil war. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat thinks fears of an American civil war are completely overblown. “America’s ideological divisions don’t follow the kind of geographical or regional lines that lend themselves to secessionist movements or armed conflict. America’s political coalitions have become less polarized by race and ethnicity of late, not more. America is getting older and richer with every passing year, both of which strongly disincentivize transforming political differences into military ones. And such disincentives are especially strong for the elites. … Above all, a civil war needs people eager for the fight.” How do you respond to that?

BW: My main response when people make that argument is they’re often thinking about an 1860s version of a civil war. They’re thinking about these big armies meeting each other on a battlefield where most of the male civilians of one side have been mobilized to fight the other. It’s this mobilization of society.

And the reality is, that is not how civil wars happen in the 21st century. And in fact, the U.S. Civil War was highly, highly unusual. Most civil wars look like insurgencies and guerrilla warfare and tend not to be fought by large armies. They are fought by small militias or paramilitary groups. And sometimes those groups are working together, and sometimes they’re actually competing against each other. And the reality is they don’t want to engage the government soldiers. They’re trying to avoid battles and avoid direct fights with the government because in most cases, governments are much, much more powerful than these ragtag groups of insurgents or militias. And so they tend to take the violence to civilians.

Terrorism is one of the main tools of 21st-century civil wars. Think about the IRA in Northern Ireland. By the definition of civil war, that was a civil war. But most Irish Catholics were not fighting. They called it the Troubles. This fight was by a minority of citizens on the ideological extreme.

One of the reasons why skeptics have said this can’t happen here again is because the model they’re using is the first Civil War. And that is true. That is never going to happen again here. Something different, however, could easily happen here.

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RA: You wrote an essay about this recently in the New Yorker, and the title was “Democracy Needs the Loser.” Obviously, the last election in this country did not have a gracious handover of power. How are you thinking about this next election and where that factors into the potential for violence?

BW: When I wrote the New Yorker article, I went back to the data. Postelection violence in democracies tends to happen under a specific set of conditions: winner-takes-all democracies with strong presidents where the population is divided, whether ethnically, religiously, or racially. And elections are contested, so at least one of the sides believes that the elections weren’t entirely free and fair.

Of course, the United States has all of those characteristics. If you look at parliamentary democracies such as Canada’s or Great Britain’s, parliamentary democracies are much more immune from this type of violence because if you lose the election, you are not essentially shut out of power. If your party gets X percent of the votes, you get representation. That’s not the case here in the United States.

RA: The subtitle of your book is “And How to Stop Them,” so how to stop civil wars if and when they start. So, aside from converting to parliamentary-style democracy, what can countries and societies do?

BW: We know that healthy, mature, strong democracies do not experience civil war. If you’re on the plus 10 side of this measure, your countries are peaceful. The violence is mostly in the middle. So the single best long-term solution is to reform and improve America’s democracy. We all can point to very undemocratic features that places such as Switzerland and Australia and Sweden don’t have. Other healthy democracies do not have gerrymandering to the degree that we have here. They don’t have the Electoral College. They don’t have big corporate money in elections. They don’t have judges with lifetime appointments. America has these unfortunate features. It’s a result of the compromises that were made to keep the Union together, in particular to keep the slave-holding states in the Union. Now, we’re stuck with them. It’s made our modern life much more vulnerable to democratic backsliding.

The problem is, it’s really hard to do. And even when the Democrats controlled all three branches of government between 2020 and 2022, and President Joe Biden attempted to institute some basic democratic reforms, the Democratic Party itself did not have enough votes to pass those reforms. There’s a large portion of America that likes the system the way it is because it benefits them.

Then the second factor, which is our identity-based parties. Boy, it would be great if both parties reached across racial, religious, and ethnic lines. It would be great if more African Americans and more Latinos and more Asians gravitated to the Republican side. And it would be great if more white Americans gravitated toward the Democratic side, if both parties started to go after the median voter, the moderate American voter. That also isn’t happening quickly. So it’s not a solution we can bank on, at least in the near term.

RA: I’m curious about the role of social media. It strikes me that part of the problem, globally, not just in the United States, is a growing inability to agree on facts. And once you can’t agree on facts and the truth, coming back to what you said earlier about democracy needing a loser, if you can’t agree on who’s lost and who’s won, you have a problem.

BW: Because it’s going to be so hard to make any meaningful reforms of our current system, I think the single easiest and quickest solution to our weakening democracy, to societal division around ethnicity and race, is to regulate social media. The five biggest tech companies in the world are all U.S. companies. Social media has gotten a free ride. And so we’re seeing a whole host of really negative societal outcomes from this unregulated environment.

When I say we should regulate social media, I do not mean that we should regulate content. Let people put whatever they want on social media. But what we should be regulating are the algorithms. The algorithms are producing a scenario that is injecting more extremism into our society and into our politics because the algorithms are designed to do one thing: keep people on their phones as long as possible. That’s the business model. If you look at psychological studies, what captures and holds people’s attention is information that triggers very strong emotions of hate, of fear, of anger. And so that is disproportionately the information that is being pushed out to people. And once people like particular content, the algorithm just feeds them more of that in more and more extreme versions.

So people on the right and people on the left are getting entirely different types of information, even if they ask the same question. There’s no longer any common bases of knowledge in which they can understand each other and come to some sort of consensus. So these algorithms are injecting extremism into our system in a backdoor way that most of us did not anticipate and are only now starting to see.

RA: Who are we worried about here in the United States?

BW: That is a really great question. So we know who some of the big groups are. And interestingly, they were all engaged in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In the months leading up to that, they began to form a pseudo-alliance for the very first time.

Now, one of the gifts of Jan. 6 is that it was a wake-up call to America, and it was a wake-up call to the FBI, which prior to that had been focusing disproportionately on the threat of Islamist terrorism here in the United States, to the detriment of focusing more heavily on domestic terrorism, which by 2020 was a much bigger threat. Since Jan. 6, though, a number of leaders of those groups have been indicted and imprisoned, and those groups have weakened as a result.

We have great data on domestic terrorism here in the United States. If you look to the 1960s and the ’70s, the terrorism in the United States was predominantly left-wing terrorism. It was anarchists. It was radical environmentalists. That started to change in the 2000s. Today, the vast majority of terrorist attacks are being perpetrated by far-right groups. About 70 percent of those far-right violent extremist groups are white supremacist groups. But the second-largest groups are anti-federal government groups. These are people who are just like, “Leave me alone. Keep your laws out of my state, out of my family.” But most of the attacks are coming from white supremacist groups, and the data are really clear about that.

RA: How do you go from political violence to civil war? And does the United States have enough institutional antibodies, the police and military infrastructure that could step in quickly enough?

BW: So you go from political violence to civil war with a disproportionately harsh government response. So if you look at Northern Ireland, Irish Catholics were peacefully protesting for decades. That changed after Bloody Sunday, when British troops came into neighborhoods in Northern Ireland and began clubbing innocent civilians. Just being brutal in the face of peaceful protesters. That’s when things began to explode. That’s when your average citizen suddenly said, “Maybe what these extremists have been saying is right.” Syria would not have a civil war today if Bashar al-Assad had not responded to peaceful Sunni protests with brutal, violent repression. That’s what radicalized the population.

So here in the United States, you have violent extremist groups. Every country has them, and they’re going to be really unhappy if their preferred candidate loses. Some of them will turn to violence. But they’re not going to mobilize, and they’re not going to gain the support of most moderate Americans who don’t want violence unless the government goes in and reveals that, in fact, it is as terrible and as brutal as these extremists claim it is. So a measured response is important.