Is a Second U.S. Civil War Imminent?

I have learned many lessons in my studies of authoritarian takeovers of once thriving democratic nations throughout the ages leading often to genocides. Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing stereotyping and scapegoating of entire groups, while other citizens or entire nations often refuse to intervene or even contribute to authoritarianism.

On a micro level, this is also apparent, for example, in episodes of schoolyard, community-based, as well as electronic forms of bullying. Many others, not only the direct perpetrators of oppression, play a key role in the demise of democracy and bullying, sometimes leading to genocide.

Dan Olweus, international researcher and bullying prevention specialist, enumerates the distinctive and often overlapping roles enacted in these episodes:

• the person or persons who perpetrate bullying
• the active followers
• those who passively support, condone, or collude in the aggression
• the onlookers (sometimes referred to as “bystanders”)
• the possible defenders of the targets of aggression
• those who actually defend the targets of aggression
• those who are exposed, attacked, targeted, victimized.

We can also relate these roles in the case of national politics.

A plurality of 49.8% of the U.S. electorate voted for the twice impeached, 34 criminal count indicted, with a verified and documented by The Washington Post of 30,573 false or misleading statements, or an average of 21 per day in his first term.

Many political forecasters predicted members of the wealthy or upper classes, who expected Trump to continue or enhance the corporate and income/wealth tax breaks from his first term, to vote for the former president.

Many who voted for Trump, however, were also blue-collar working-class people who might have fared better voting for Kamela Harris and the Democrats whose policies during the past four years made the U.S. one of the strongest and most resilient economies of the world.

So why did people presumably vote against their own economic self-interests to elect a billionaire and his plutocratic enablers to the highest and more powerful office in the land? Did they “buy” the propaganda and lies of the Republicans and the Right-wing media factory? Should we hold the uninformed voter, the politically disengaged, at least partially accountable for the current state of affairs?

During Trump’s first time in office, he conspicuously moved the extremists on the political right from the margins to the center of his MAGA movement. At a Democratic fundraiser in advance of the 2022 midterm elections, President Joe Biden blasted the so-called “Make America Great Again” philosophy arguing that it is “like semi-fascism.”

Though many top Republicans pushed back against Biden’s representation of a significant extremist segment of their Party, in August 2022, “Threats to Democracy” rose to the number one position as the most important issue facing the country in a plurality of registered voters in an NBC News poll.

This came on the heels of a survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center with Tulchin Research indicating that 53% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats believe that the U.S. “seems headed” toward another civil war.

 The Southern Poverty Law Center survey also found support for the “Great Replacement Theory” referenced by the mass shooter who opened fire in a Buffalo supermarket this summer of 2022. The theory, called the “Great Replacement,” has its origins in Europe. The reiteration is a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants and the rise of nonwhite citizens to take power from white Christian people of European stock.

When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, they changed, “Jews will not replace us!”

A Second Civil War?

Most historians agree that the nearly 20 years and two trillion dollars spent, which resulted in 2,401 United States military deaths and another 20,752 wounded U.S. service members in Afghanistan embodied our country’s “longest war.”

While this may be true, arguably the War Between the States, also referred to as the “American Civil War,” which began on April 12, 1861, could be considered as our “longest war.”

While a treaty of surrender to Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant was signed by Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, which was meant to suspend combat, no such secession of hostilities or retreat from overt and covert combat have transpired.

“This is democracy’s most challenging hour since Fort Sumter,” argued Historian John Meacham.

Meacham’s words may be true, but not that a second American Civil War may be imminent. I would agree, instead, that we are seeing the ramping up of the continuing hot war that did not actually end in 1865.

A War between Liberal Democracy and Fascist Autocracy

Benjamin Franklin was one of the nation’s “founders” who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to draft our now-famous founding document. At the age of 81, though a perennial optimist, he had no illusions and thought it impossible to expect any group of people, no matter how wise or brilliant, to create a “perfect production.”

Even “with all its faults,” however, Franklin believed that this Constitution was far superior to any alternative that could possibly emerge. He had a warning, though. As the story is told, when departing the Constitutional Convention, a group of citizens approached Franklin and asked him what kind of government had the delegates created?

His response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

International security and defense analyst, Monica Duffy Toft, found that all civil wars share at least three common features.

First, they come about after a prior conflict, for example, a previous civil war. Neither the issues, though, nor the direct fighters need not be the same as the old. Very often, a charismatic leader arises and articulates a narrative about past glory or grievance that aligns with “their ideology, political ambitions, or even flows from simple historical ignorance.”

Second, according to Toft, is a severe rupture in national identity:

“National identity is divided along some critical axis, such as race, faith, or class. All countries have fracture lines and cleavages,” wrote Toft, “but some divides are deeper than others. Even initially minor cleavages may be exploited by domestic or foreign actors committed to redistributing wealth or power.”

Third is a shift from tribalism to sectarianism. In tribalism, groups question whether other groups adhere to or project the best interests of the larger general community.

In sectarian environments, though, the elites (economic, social, and political) and those they represent determine that anyone who disagrees with them are unpatriotic, evil, and that they are actively attempting to undermine communities and the larger society.

The rise to sectarianism and authoritarianism develops by what Toft calls “a severely damaged information space.” With the rise of cable news programming and entire networks from the 1990s, there has been an “ongoing shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting,” from professional journalism with a shared agreement of what are facts from fiction and propaganda to a “new disconnected world” with “multiple competing versions of reality (‘alternative facts’).”

Barbara F. Walter, in her book How Civil Wars Start, regrets that

“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe…,” she warns. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline or headed toward war,” but, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America…you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United State, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency: 1. The “pre-insurgency” phase, and 2. The “incipient conflict” phase, and only time will tell whether the final phase is fully activated: The “open insurgency” phase, began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set – the one the CIA task force has found to be most reliable in predicting instability and violence – Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the first five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone.

By the end of Trump’s first term as President, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.

“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”

Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war. “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter states.

“A country standing on this threshold – as America is now, at +5 – can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”

Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance puts the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report in November 2021.

“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said.

We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, as the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare including assassinations and ambushes.”

I wonder whether the United States would be experiencing an overt form of civil war if Trump had lost to Kamala Harris last November. And I wonder where assessment agencies like the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance will place the U.S. on its list of backsliding democracies at the conclusion of Trump’s second term.

Returning to Dan Olweus’ overlapping roles enacted in episodes of bullying and connections with autocratic systems and genocides, there are no such things as “passive” or “innocent bystanders.”

As the title of both Howard Zinn’s autobiographical book and song by Vinnie Paz suggest, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” because which way we move depends on us all.