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next_migrationThere’s no question that America’s political system is falling apart. Members of both major parties often loathe or outright dehumanize members of the opposite party. Extreme partisanship prevents much of anything from getting done, as even the tiniest or least controversial issue can be swallowed up by rabid partisan politics. The Republican Party undermines faith in the electoral process and encourages violence more openly every year. The public thinks the situation is terrible. However, it could, and probably will, get much, much worse.
Barbara F. Walter, an expert on the development of civil wars globally, recently published a book, How Civil Wars Start (2022), in which the factors associated with civil wars are statistically analyzed—and compared to modern America. Contrary to popular belief, Walter has determined, neither poverty nor inequality are strongly associated with civil wars. Rather, a country that is in transition between autocracy and democracy—in either direction—is at by far the highest risk. Semi-democracies are often not very good at responding to public needs, but also weak enough to have trouble suppressing violence by insurgent groups.
The second major risk factor is factionalization, the creation of parties based not on political ideologies but on tribal identities (race, religion, region, class). The risk of war is greatest when a faction qualifies as a “superfaction,” united by multiple forms of identity. For example, the Serbian faction that committed the most genocidal violence in the Yugoslavian civil war was united by its ethnicity, religion (Orthodox Christianity, whereas Croats were Catholic), region, and generally rural, less educated and well-to-do population base. Furthermore, a faction that is historically oppressed is less likely to spawn serious violence than a faction that has historically had disproportionate power and sees itself losing that power. Does that description sound familiar?
Other major contributors that Walter identifies are a loss of hope—people are more likely to become violent when they stop believing that they may be able to get what they want through a nonviolent political process—and the presence of an active propaganda machine to dehumanize other factions. Regarding the latter, she emphasizes the malign influence of social media. Facebook bears significant responsibility for Myanmar’s genocide of the Rohingya people, which gained support among the Buddhist majority in part because of dehumanizing and violence-promoting propaganda distributed on Facebook. Facebook and other Big Tech sites use algorithms designed to increase use by feeding users more of whatever seems to keep them logged in. People who read and like one piece of hateful content are shown more, and increasingly more extreme, hateful content. Facebook was warned about this use of its network at the time and did virtually nothing.
Civil wars among “tribal” groups that are geographically interspersed with one another often begin as, or turn into, efforts by one to commit genocide or “ethnic cleansing” against another. Walter cites a classic analysis by genocide expert Gregory Stanton (“The Ten Stages of Genocide,” 1996) that enumerates eight steps typically seen before mass murder ensues. These steps are overlapping rather than linear, but generally begin in a particular order. They begin with “classification” and “symbolization”: demagogues split up the population into groups labeled as different. “Discrimination” and “dehumanization” follow: the dominant group profits by treating weaker groups like dirt, and is encouraged to believe that they deserve it. These steps do not always or rapidly lead to genocide; as Walter notes, they are characteristic of white America’s historic treatment of Black Americans, among others.
Later stages escalate these trends. “Organization” involves making plans and training for mass violence, which is followed by the sixth stage of “polarization.” In that stage, dehumanizing propaganda is further stepped up. Laws are passed to strip the target group of means of defending themselves, and both target-group leaders and dominant-group moderates are targeted for violence.
In the “preparation” stage, armies or militias are further built and armed and there is an escalation of fear-mongering rhetoric claiming that the target group must be killed in “self-defense.” “Political processes such as peace accords that threaten the dominance of the ruling group ... may actually trigger genocide,” Stanton warns.
In stage eight, “persecution,” acts of genocide begin: killings, torture, deprivation of property, forced displacement or confinement to ghettos or regions with inadequate food and water, sporadic massacres. If the international community does not rapidly intervene, this will proceed to stage nine, “extermination.” (The tenth stage is “denial.”)
By the criteria that flag other countries as being high-risk for civil war, Walter concludes, the United States is now at high risk. The full title of Walter’s book is How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. She offers a few proposals that, in an ideal world, might be able to do just that. Unfortunately, the archaic structure of our government combined with the cesspool that is the Internet may make the hope that our degradation can be reversed little more than a fantasy. Let’s briefly consider the ways in which America appears to be approaching the brink of civil war, starting with the criterion of exaggerated factionalism.
Factionalism: Red Tribe vs. Blue Tribe
The increase in political tribalism over the past decades, and particularly in the past ten years, is obvious to every American who is paying attention. With the active assistance of the Republican Party in particular, we have developed a gigantic urban-rural political divide. Political scientist David Hopkins (2021) noted from census and political figures that this divide has widened drastically in the past decade. In the 1980s to mid-1990s, the gap in presidential voting preferences between the nation’s largest metro areas and its rural counties was about the same as that between the Northeastern and Southeastern states. The urban-rural gap thereafter began to widen, and in the past two elections, while the North-South gap had narrowed to 9%, the urban-rural gap was three times larger. Hopkins explained that southern urban areas and northern rural areas had been “shedding some of their sectional distinctiveness,” becoming more like northern urban areas and southern rural areas respectively.
Slate reported that, of the 1636 non-Alaskan counties that shrank in the 2010s (which means, largely rural counties), 90% voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election (Weissmann 2021). This leads to the phenomenon of maps throughout the country showing “blue dots ... surrounded by a sea of red rural hinterlands.”
Will Wilkinson (2021) has interpreted the widespread rural embrace of the GOP, and in particular of Trumpism, as the “Southernification of rural America.” The influence pushing rapid cultural change in rural areas is clearly from the south to the north. Southern ruralites are not seen adopting the beliefs, culture, or speech of New England farmers, only the reverse. Wilkinson gives the example of a self-described “Yankee Mainer” who shows his support for Donald Trump by display of the Confederate battle flag, which is now seen in rural areas throughout the country. As he sees the situation, “residential self-selection on ethnicity, personality and education” (i.e., non-white, liberally-inclined, and educated people moving away) have made rural areas “progressively more homogenously ethnocentric and socially conservative.” (As Elie Mystal [2021] observes, “So long as white people continue to make their states unwelcoming to newcomers of color, they can be assured of an outsize voice in the nation’s politics.”)
Wilkinson’s key suggestion about Southernification is that before those increasingly homogenous areas could be organized into a political movement of a size and strength to allow Trump to win the presidency with an ethnonationalist campaign, they “needed to be consolidated first through the adoption of a relatively uniform ethnocentric white culture.” As long as rural white Mainers, Alabamans, Arizonans, and Oregonians see themselves as four different groups, none has the numbers needed to dominate the national government. If they could be persuaded that their common rurality and whiteness makes them all part of the same group—and there are powerful interests working to persuade them of that—that group’s numbers would be very large and its political power even greater. For Northern ruralites who feel excluded from the culture of nearby cities or simply dislike it, adopting Southern behavior, culture, and symbols is a way of joining a large and powerful tribe.
In Barbara Walter’s terms, this makes the parties superfactions, like the Serbs vs. the Croats and Bosnians in Yugoslavia. America’s Red and Blue tribes are separated by ruralism vs. urbanism and still to an extent by region, but also by their racial and religious composition. The Republican Party, despite recent inroads among religious Hispanic voters, is largely a white and Christian party, as many Republican politicians try to win white votes by whipping up fear of menacing or conniving non-whites and non-Christians (or bad Christians, such as sexual minorities and overeducated urbanites).
The Democratic Party, concentrating on winning votes in diverse cities, at least claims to support equal rights for citizens of all races and religions, and sometimes places what white voters consider too much emphasis on ethnic diversity. Non-white voters are a critical voting bloc, with a supermajority supporting Democrats. Thus, the “average Red” and “average Blue” see themselves as differing not just in who they vote for, but in several meaningful aspects of their identities.
Recall also that violence is especially likely when a dominant group sees itself losing power. While it remains ridiculous to claim that white men are an oppressed class, their still-above-average shares of economic and political power are not as great as they used to be, at least at the national level. America has gone from being a totally white-dominated nation to a nation in which non-whites, in some areas, have the numbers and access to voting to have a real voice in the political process. They also have a significant influence on mainstream culture. For several decades, Christian conservatives were restricted in their ability to make and enforce laws reflecting their beliefs. These facts have created—or been deliberately used to create—fear, resentment, and hostility in the groups whose power has declined.
Rural areas, as I will describe in a future post, have greatly and increasingly disproportionate political power, yet it has not translated into economic power (in part because sharing of wealth is anathema to the politicians for whom they are persuaded to vote). Rather, their economic and social conditions continue to decline. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2021 that many rural regions have lost population in every county, sometimes by 10% to 20% or more in the last decade alone. Rural young people who cannot find good jobs, or any jobs, move to cities where they can get education and work. No community can thrive when its children move away, and America’s rural areas are genuinely suffering. Average, working-class rural whites are not wrong to feel disempowered, though those who wish to blame urban minorities for the fact have been tragically misled.
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Date: 2022-07-31 10:32 pm (UTC)In case of a new civil war in the United States I can only imagine that hostile foreign powers would fund the non white ethnic militias. The reason for this belief concerns the brass tacks of the Civil Rights push. Not many people remember that there were black nationalists agitating for "New Africa" in the black majority parts of the South. Also, Cuba still harbors as political asylum seekers black radicals who murdered police officers. The writing there was on the wall --- unless the US Government gave blacks what they wanted, the commies could have made things very interesting in the lowland South, at least interesting enough to keep the United States too preoccupied with an internal rebellion to mess around with the contested regions of the Third World.
My point here is that many nations have historic interests in different regions in the United States: Mexico has a historical interest in Aztlan, of course. Likewise, Ireland has a historic interest in New England given the huge amount of Irish ancestry. I wonder if Russia might intervene in the case of Alaska, or if Asian powers might intervene in the regions of the PNW with large Asian populations. In case of civil war, I can only imagine that there would be far, far more hands in the resulting mess than rural whites and everyone else, given the granularity of tribalism and the granularity of demography in which vast regions of the United States have majority nonwhite populations.
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Date: 2022-08-01 01:50 pm (UTC)I saw that post of yours and found it largely very much to the point. I'm not sure that the "largest ancestry by county" analysis means much when broken down so finely, though, except as a hint of the American racial categories that matter much more these days. I was born in the Midwest and, like many many people from that region it seems, have some German ancestry - though it can't be much more than 1/8, the rest being other types of northwestern European. A white nationalist type would not categorize me as outside his ingroup by looking at me (well, except by my hairstyle), or even see a need to ask exactly where my ancestors came from.
I don't perceive my ancestors' origins as affecting my cultural practices, though they probably do, in subtle ways I don't recognize as such. This map does in places hint at the settlement patterns giving rise to Joel Garreau's and Colin Woodard's proposed breakdowns of the cultural various "nations" of North America. Still, I don't consider, e.g., a Scandinavian-American neighbor or colleague to be any more "like me" than an Italian-American one, so the detailed ethnic backgrounds of white Americans don't seem to me to affect politics directly.
I am getting more and more doomerish (as you will see in the next few installments) and thinking that breaking up the Union might be the best reasonably probable future. The Southeast or Confederate states would be in an "interesting" position. Their governments would certainly be Christian nationalist in character if freed from any remaining Constitutional restrictions, and the Christian right wing is often overtly or covertly racist (e.g., looking for reasons why Black people's votes shouldn't count). However, as this map suggests, the Southeast has larger Black minorities than any other region, in most states one-fifth to one-third of the population. That's a lot of potential voters whose interests won't entirely coincide with those of the dominant group, even should they be socially conservative Christians. If the ruling faction decided to double down on disenfranchisement, that's a lot of people to keep down forever.
[Edit: You say "vast areas" have nonwhite majorities. I think this is not correct. As best I can figure out, six states and DC have less than 50% non-Hispanic white populations. One of these is Hawaii; Texas, New Mexico, and Nevada have large Hispanic populations, which include many ruralites, descendants of pre-annexation residents. Maryland is just about 50/50 and California is majority-minority, but the nonwhite residents are disproportionately packed into small urban areas. Elsewhere in majority white states, there may be large nonwhite populations but they are not distributed like the white populations; they are mostly crammed into cities with small geographic footprints, while rural areas are increasingly white. This is already undermining their political interests in many states and could become a real danger in future.]
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Date: 2022-08-01 04:49 pm (UTC)Part of the reason that I emphasize the large nonwhite population in the United States is that I has shocked to travel through and live in places which were majority or near majority nonwhite. As I remember it, hitchhiking through rural Georgia and North Carolina, there was huge black populations. Also I remember there being enormous Hispanic populations in largely rural areas: for instance, in western Massachusetts and also all throughout Oregon. I spent a night in a hidden migrant labor camp located in blackberry thicket east of Portland and filled with Latin Americans and I bought tamales from Lupita who made her living selling home cooked goods in the tiny hamlet of Wolf Creek.
From my travels I must disagree with your assessment of whiteness. To my mind the different European ethnicities create different sorts of white cultures. For instance, I come from a region of populated largely by ethnic Catholics, the Irish and Italians. Next in number are probably those of British descent, then those of Jewish descent, lastly those of various Asian descent. I'm olive skin and Semitic featured. In the Northeast no one gives me a second look, but when I travelled through the Midwest from about Chicago to the banks of the Missouri I feared for my life: people gave me these eerie death stares in which I could sense they projected race hatred on to me. Of course, they had no idea of my ancestry. That said, I wasn't "white" to them and I doubt an Italian or a Greek would have been "white" to them, either. I'm not sure how much this would translate into national politics, but my own experiences do emphasize the importance of a more granular understanding of whiteness, at least for someone who is off-white like myself.
As for the major point in the edit, fair enough! I found a better map from the census which looks at simple majorities with the counties and white ethnic identities are compressed into just white. I think that the map shows an interesting picture in which in addition to the Hispanic majorities of some regions, there are black majorities in some rural counties in crucially strategically important areas, especially the along the banks of the Mississippi from Memphis all the way down to New Roads, Louisiana.
Also we see in that same map Asian majorities in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Hispanic majorities in much of the southwest. Point being, along with simple demography there's also the possibility in case of serious strife of the intervention by hostile foreign nations, i.e. PLA peacekeeping forces in California; the Mexican Army in regions of Aztlan; and any number of nations might find it in their interest to help establish a new nation in the lower third of the Mississippi.
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Date: 2022-08-01 07:53 pm (UTC)When was your travel in the Midwest, if you don't mind my asking? My late husband was 99% European in ancestry, but for some reason had rather olive skin, combined with a "noble" French schnoz. Shortly after Sept. 11 he caught one or two strangers giving him hateful looks in the local grocery store. He thought it could be that they thought he looked Middle Eastern. (Both women, no self-defense needed.)
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Date: 2022-08-01 11:07 pm (UTC)