How civil wars arise: Science knows three minimum criteria - the USA fulfills all of them

Could civil war really break out in the proud United States?

Expert Monica Duffy Toft names three classic signs - all of which are met by the United States.

• The Capitol Tower has startled the USA - could the country really face another civil war after 150 years?

• That doesn't seem impossible.

  The United States has several classic features of a civil war country.

• In this analysis, the US political professor Monica Duffy Toft explains the background to the development - and names other opportunities and dangers.

• This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by

  Foreign Policy

  magazine on February 18, 2021 

  .

Until recently, civil war in the United States seemed next to impossible;

for most Americans, a scenario from the past, not the future.

But the Capitol uprising on January 6, 2021, and the rise of violent extremism domestically, have raised alarm bells in the United States about the potential for renewed descent into domestic war.

That may seem far-fetched, but there have been literally hundreds of domestic conflicts around the world - in countries from Afghanistan to Cyprus.

More depressing, in many ways, the American Civil War never really ended and could well flare up again.

Even with US President Joe Biden firmly in hand, recent events painfully highlight the danger of widespread political violence.

Is there a danger of civil war in the USA?

Three characteristics of the emergence of domestic wars:

Civil wars are each unique in their specific causes, the way in which they escalate from conflicting interests to violence and how they de-escalate.

But all civil wars have at least three features in common:

First

, most civil wars follow a previous conflict (often a previous civil war or, more precisely, the heavily distorted and politicized memory of a past civil war).

Neither the new warring parties nor the issues need to be exactly the same as before.

Most often, a charismatic leader spreads a narrative of past glory or humiliation that fits their ideology, political ambitions, or even results from simple historical ignorance.

Without naming the United States, most scholars in this discipline would say, "Hey, this country is on the brink of civil war."

Monica Duffy Toft

Second

, national identity is split along a critical axis, such as race, creed, or class.

Fault lines and cracks exist in every country, but some rifts are deeper than others.

Even initially minor cracks can be exploited by domestic or foreign actors who want to redistribute wealth or power.

For example, the Soviet Union (and now Russia) has successfully devoted massive resources to weakening the United States and its allied democracies by deepening existing rifts.

While necessary, these first two traits - previous war and deepening trenches - are not sufficient to cause civil war.

A

third element is

needed for this

: a shift from tribalism to sectarism.

In tribalism, people begin to seriously doubt whether other groups in their country are pursuing the interests of broader society.

In a sectarian environment, however, the economic, social, and political elites and those who represent them come to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is evil and is actively working to destroy society.

Public enemies crowd out the loyal opposition, with those who were in a different tribe considered the most disloyal.

There are parallels to the way some religions treat apostates and unbelievers: Often it is the “apostates”, the former followers of the faith, who are more targeted than “unbelievers” who have always been left out.

It's hard not to relate to this dynamic when you look at how Republicans condemn other Republicans for their loyalty, whether there or not, to former US President Donald Trump.

US in Deep Conflict: How the End of the Cold War and Republicans Affected Development

Indeed, these days the United States has all three core elements of impending social collapse.

To describe it - fragmented elites with competing narratives, deep-seated identity rifts, and a politically polarized society - without naming the United States, most scholars in the discipline would say, "Hey, this country is on the verge of civil war." How has the US got to this point?

The full story of the United States' long descent into the Civil War is too long to tell here - but a few major causes stand out.

First of all, following the failure of former President Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economy and the end of the Cold War (which undermined the Republican Party's national defense appeal), Republicans had to make a choice.

They could either compete with good ideas or resort to putting respect for authority over critical thinking, restricting the right to vote, and making it easier to convert wealth into votes.

The Republican Party chose the easier route.

It has been a minority party nationwide and in many so-called red states for more than two decades, but its representation in Congress and the White House has remained above 50 percent.

And once you start taking shortcuts to your goal, you can't really stop.

The Grand Old Party knows that they could lose everything in a fair fight (one person = one vote), so they have built a powerful infrastructure to distort local, state and federal competition in their favor.

Political culture change in the USA: Newt Gingrich brought the blanket “No” to the House of Representatives

To make matters worse, Newt Gingrich, as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, developed a brilliant and democracy-destroying strategy that allowed his party to continue to exert more influence than its share of the vote would allow: just say no.

While Reagan viewed someone who agreed 80 percent of the time as a friend (rather than a traitor), Gingrich's strategy forbade compromises, which are essential to any functioning democracy.

Either Gingrich got everything he wanted or he refused to play along.

As a former Senate majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell perfected the Gingrich rules of the game.

Over time, the tribalism that separated the two parties anyway began to escalate into sectarism.

The federal standstill became another argument in favor of shifting power to more conservative states.

He also convinced many Americans that the solution to the deadlock was a strong authoritarian leader.

The Democrats, too, were caught in this diabolical process - unable to maneuver and compromise.

Since the legislature was blocked, presidential decrees became a main instrument of political formation.

Trump issued 220 orders in just four years during his tenure;

former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton issued 276, 291 and 254 ordinances, respectively, in their eight years in office.

USA facing civil war?

Narrowcasting, Fox News and Foreign Influence

Neither the escalation to sectarism nor the rise of more authoritarian national leaders would have been possible without a badly damaged information space.

The 1990s brought news channels and the progressive shift from broadcasting to so-called narrowcasting.

In the ancient world, professional journalism supported a common notion of reality.

In the new world of broken links, there are multiple competing versions of reality ("alternative facts"), and journalists and journalism - important pillars of a functioning democratic process - are unfairly viewed as partisan to one side or the other.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News pioneered the support of a particular political agenda behind a journalistic facade and helped expand the power of conservative minorities.

Narrowcasting and Fox News, however, are not the end, they are just the beginning.

The information space has been further compromised by powerful foreign opponents and omnipresent tech companies.

Note that during the Cold War, the Russian KGB's greatest disinformation achievement was convincing US allies and opponents alike that the AIDS virus was engineered in the US to kill black people and LGBTQ + people.

(Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted this and apologized for it.) This lie and its devastating effects took six years to unfold.

Since the end of the Cold War, active action has helped facilitate the inauguration of an anti-NATO president in the US, Britain's exit from the European Union, and conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon.

But Russia's disinformation campaigns would never have been so successful so quickly without the Internet, and especially Google and Facebook.

Danger of war in the USA, even after Trump's departure: The country must agree on the facts

So is the United States on the brink of civil war?

A damaged and undemocratic information space makes all the difference, where elites juggle for airtime and media exposure to further divide the electorate - in the hope of gaining power over their rivals in the next elections.

In each sphere, knowledge is increasingly decoupled from reality or history.

Nobody can win in such a conflict.

Just think of the tragic case of the former Yugoslavia, which began its decline in the late 1980s and was drowned in massive political violence in the 1990s.

The real way to "Make America Great Again" is to clean up the information space and make it a common space for all (a return from narrowcasting to broadcasting).

Once everyone agrees on the facts again, political disagreement will not destroy the United States but make its democracy stronger.

But if sectarism continues, more violence is inevitable.

by Monica Duffy Toft

Monica Duffy Toft

is Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University's Fletcher School.

She is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

This article was first published in English on January 22nd, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also

 available to

Merkur.de

readers in translation 

.

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