Increasing American factionalism and the road to civil war

[next_migration]

There’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.

 

 

Comments

[violetcabra]

Thanks for this! On my blog I've written on similar themes. Something that I think is also important in thinking about the possibility of a new civil war in the USA is foreign relationships. After all, we can thank French intervention for the fact that the Colonies beat the British. Likewise we can thank the lack of European intervention for the reason that Grant could finally crush Lee's army at Appomattox.

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.