August 17th, 2022
I just finished reading “How Civil Wars Start”, by Barbara F. Walter. Ms. Walter has been studying post World War II civil wars for decades, and now of a sudden she finds the results of her research applicable to the US. Her analysis is scholarly, detailed, and terrifying: conditions in the US are ideal for triggering a civil war.
The first indicator is “anocracy”. This is a state of political uncertainty when a polity falls into the gray zone between democracy and tyranny. Either extreme is stable; neither North Korea nor Denmark have any chance of suffering civil war. It’s the gray area between them that is dangerous Political scientists have a scale for measuring where a country falls on this continuum; the Nordic countries all have scores around +10; the worst tyrannies on the planet come in around -9. The danger zone is between -5 and +5. The USA in the 1980s was measured to be at around +10, but then it began declining, and has now fallen so rapidly that we do not have a reliable estimate; it is somewhere below +8. There are a number of different systems for measuring the strength of a democracy, such as the Polity Data Series, the Democracy Index, the Democracy Ranking, and the Freedom In The World Index. All of these indeces show that the US has been slipping downward over the last few decades, and that it now ranks around 20th on the lists.
The second factor in the generation of civil wars is the rise of factions. We all have multiple categories that we can identify with to varying degrees: religious affiliation, level of education, profession, language, region of residence, political affiliation, and many more. The critical issue is not the existence of such factions but rather the degree to which we rely on then for our identities, especially in opposition to other factions. For example, in Bosnia during the 1980s, Muslims and Christians did not perceive religion to be a significant differentiating factor; their citizenship as Bosnians (a unifying factor) was the primary source of their identity. But the attacks of extremists on both sides engendered fears that drove people to place more of their identities in their religious affiliation, leading the massacres and civil war. Here in the US, factionalization is rapidly organizing along the closely related factors of the urban/rural divide and Republican/Democrat party lines. I remember when a person’s political affiliation was seldom something we even thought about; nowadays, it is difficult to form friendships across those lines and many families are breaking apart from such factionalization.
A third factor is the anticipated loss of status of a heretofore dominant group. Here in the US, the core dominant group has always been “WASPs”: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males. This group’s dominance has been declining for the last fifty years. First the women started getting uppity; 27% of the seats in Congress are now held by women. We now have the first female Vice President in American history, although the first female presidential candidate from a major party (Hillary Clinton) was defeated partly on sexist factors. We are seeing more female executives in large companies, and females penetrating many professions. The US is far behind most civilized nations in this regard, but progress continues — to the chagrin of the WASPs.
Ethnic minorities (blacks, hispanics, Asians, Muslims, etc) continue to advance, although they also have a long way to go before reaching equal status with WASPs. Blacks are making the least progress; witness the proclivity of police officers to shoot blacks, a proclivity that is at long last being challenged. The number of non-white Congresscritters is at last beginning to approach proportionality to their percentage of the population — although this shift is strongly concentrated in the Democratic Party. Again, the WASPs are losing their grip on control of our society.
When a dominant group feels threatened with the loss of its power, it usually strikes back with increasingly strong restraints on the growing power of the challengers. We are seeing this in Republican laws limiting voting and more extreme forms of gerrymandering to limit the power of the non-WASPs.
These restrictions generate resentment of the underclass. I am, quite frankly, amazed at how patient the non-WASPs have been with the many obstacles placed in their path to equality. I suspect that it’s because the non-WASPs know that the future belongs to them; it is only a matter of time before they overcome those obstacles and take their rightful place in our society.
The WASPs know this, too, and they have been resorting to increasingly desperate measures to retain power. They have trampled on time-honored protocols to retain power. A good example is Mitch McConnell’s grossly hypocritical approach to confirming appointments to the Supreme Court. When Mr. Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in March 2016, Mr. McConnell used his power as the majority leader of the Senate to block consideration of Mr. Garland, declaring that President should not have the right to nominate a Supreme Court justice in the final year of his presidency — a declaration in violation of all precedent. But then, on September 18th, 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died. Just eight days later, the Cheeto Fuhrer announced the nomination of Amy Comey Barrett. Just one month later, the Republican Senate confirmed the nomination of Ms. Barrett.
This is just one example of the extremes to which the Republican Party has gone in attempting to retain power. But the most extreme case, and the most alarming, was the attempted coup d’etat by Mr. Trump on January 6th, 2021. As the investigations of the Congressional Committee have shown, Mr. Trump violated numerous laws in attempting to hold onto his power. January 6th, 2021 was probably the closest the US came to a civil war since 1865. Had the Orange Slug succeeded, a civil war to defend the Constitution against his gross transgression would have immediately erupted. Fortunately, the republic was saved by the integrity of Vice President Pence, who refused to participate in the coup.
But the threat continues; Mr. Trump has established an iron grip on the Republican Party and will likely run for President in 2024. In the likely event that he loses, he will call upon his supporters to run amok and we will descend into a civil war.
There are two dynamics that are likely to save us. The first is the likelihood that Mr. Trump will be indicted for crimes before 2024. The Department of Justice has already begun formal investigations of some of his crimes. The Sociopathic 70-Year Old Toddler faces legal threats on four fronts (as well as many civil lawsuits):
1. New York State: Fraud. This is unlikely to produce a criminal conviction, but there may a settlement requiring payments.
2. Georgia State: interference in the election. The facts have already been established: Mr. Trump most certainly did attempt to alter the outcome of the Georgia election. He is probably guilty of a crime, and will probably be indicted, but his lawyers will manage to delay a trial until well after 2024.
3. Federal: attempted coup d’etat on January 6th, 2021. Again, sufficient facts have been unearthed to demonstrate that Mr. Trump violated a number of laws. My sense is that the most serious of his violations is his refusal to take action for three hours, while his subordinates pleaded with him to intervene to stop the assault on Congress. This comprises a clear violation of his explicit duty to insure that the laws are enforced. He might also be charged with attempting to interfere with the operation of Congress. Because of the political sensitivity of such an indictment, I suspect that any action by the Department of Justice will be narrowly focused, tightly circumscribed, and pretty much an open-and-shut case. However, we can be certain that the Orange Terror will use his army of lawyers to defer a trial until after 2024, in the hope that he can shut it down after winning the Presidency.
4. Federal: violation of the Espionage Act. This one is new. The Department of Justice served a subpoena in March 2022 demanding the return of all classified material that the Tangerine-Tinted Trash Can Fire had taken from the White House to Mar-A-Lago. Some of these were returned in June, but then the FBI learned that still more classified documents remained unreturned, so it obtained a search warrant and recovered the stolen documents in early August of 2022. This perfectly legal and proper action triggered a storm of condemnation from the Republican Party, which promulgated all manner of grotesque lies about the search. Death threats against the FBI leapt, and one armed man attempted to breach the FBI facility in Cincinnati; he was killed in the shoot-out. This is an open-and-shut case. The law is clear, the violation is blatant, and anybody else would have been immediately taken into custody and charged. Once again, however, the Big Cheeto was given white-gloves treatment. The Department of Justice will meticulously assemble an ironclad case and procure an indictment — then the Trump Legal Army will delay, delay, delay until long after the election.
Should any of these actions result in an indictment, the chances of re-election drop from low to minimal.
My predictions
There are many ways in which this situation could develop. The first is an electoral debacle for the Republican Party. If we’re lucky, that debacle will take place this November, but that seems unlikely. While it is generally considered likely that the Republicans would take control of both the Senate and the House, there remains a solid possibility that they will actually lose seats. It depends largely upon legal developments in the next few months.
The real crunch will come in 2024. By that time, indictments will have been made and we’ll see intense controversy over those. The Trumpists will jump up and down, foam at the mouth, and scream bloody murder that the indictments are all fabrications by the “deep state”. They will advance the most absurd lies and conspiracy theories. But the Trumpists amount to at most 30% of the electorate. Their electoral power comes from the loyalty of non-Trumpist Republican voters. That group, however, will lose the faith in the budding Hitler, and will not support him. Independents, of course, will vote for anybody who isn’t orange. A major factor will be the financial contributions of the wealthy, who will fear a catastrophe if the rabble-rouser is returned to power and pour money all over his opponents at every level.
A crucial uncertainty will be the likelihood of the most extreme Trumpists resorting to violence. We could see bombings of FBI facilities or courthouses, or assassinations of judges, Congresspeople, and other officials. Should such outrages occur, I think we’ll be able to write off Trumpism as dead. I retain some faith in the decency of the average American (not the Trumpists), and I am confident that extensive violence will be met with revulsion by most Americans, and the rejection of the Republican Party at the ballot box.
However, if such violence does not arise until after the election (a highly likely outcome), then we’ll be in a trickier place. On the one hand, the violence will induce most Americans to actively reject Trumpism. On the other hand, a goodly number of Trumpists will have been elected to Congress and many state posts. If we’re lucky, most of them will see which way the wind is blowing and suddenly discover that they have a spine. They’ll denounce the “worst elements” of Trumpism and sidle away from that movement.
The best possible outcome, which I consider unlikely, is an electoral disaster for the Republican Party in 2024, a rejection so strong that even the Trumpists will sullenly accept defeat — or the most dedicated of that group resorting to futile acts of violence that serve only to further discredit their movement. This will force the Republican Party to undergo a purge of Trumpists and a period of some years while the party rebuilds itself as a responsible mainstream political party. That’s what we need. I am not optimistic about this outcome.
Another possibility is that Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, wins the Republican nomination as a Trumpist who isn’t Trump. This would certainly complicate matters. He has certainly mastered the Hitlerian talents of populism and knows how to rouse the rabble. Moreover, he’s not as stupid as his predecessor — he could well be far more dangerous than the original.
In that case, much would depend upon the Democratic nominee. Mr. Biden will most certainly not be the nominee, and I doubt that he ever intended to be. His declarations that he would run were, I believe, deceptions to keep the heat off of Ms. Harris. Recall how viciously the Republicans attacked Ms. Clinton, anticipating that she would become the Democratic nominee. Mr. Biden is offering them a distracting target, clearing the path for Ms. Harris.
However, I am not confident in her strength as a candidate for the Presidency. Hence, I am uncertain as to how a contest between Ms. Harris and Mr. DeSantis would develop.