The New Yorker Radio Hour - A New Civil War in America?

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Since the F.B.I. raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, Mar-A-Lago, the phrases “civil war” and “lock and load” have trended on right-wing social media. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are taking the threats seriously, and issued an internal warning that detailed specific calls for assassinating the judge and the agents involved in authorizing and carrying out the search. Where could this all be headed? David Remnick talks with Barbara F. Walter, the author of the new book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Walter is a political scientist and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-director of the online magazine Political Violence at a Glance. She has studied countries that slide into civil war for the C.I.A., and she says that the United States meets many of the criteria her group identified. In particular, anti-democratic trends such as increased voting restrictions point to a nation on the brink. “Full democracies rarely have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars,” she says. “It’s the ones that are in between that are particularly at risk.” This segment was originally aired January 7, 2022. The segment also features an excerpt from “The Muddle,” a short story by Sana Krasikov. The full story is available on newyorker.com. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. From the moment Donald Trump was elected, threats of violence from the extreme right from white nationalists, anti-Semites, all kinds of groups, ramped up considerably. Law enforcement experts cited Trump's inflammatory rhetoric, even his celebration of tough guy violence at his rallies as inspirations. Trump, of course, was defecutive. defeated in 2020, but he is still very much with us. January 6 was an attempt at an open insurrection, and the threats have hardly faded with his retreat to Florida.

And when FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago recently to secure highly sensitive documents, the threats came again fast and furious. Some on the far right compare the FBI to the Gestapo, and they're invoking the term civil war. An armed assailant attacked an FBI office in support of Trump, and he's not. was killed trying to escape. At the same time, much of the leadership of the Republican Party is afraid to denounce Trump with a fever that he's inspired.

More and more Americans now are beginning to acknowledge that democracy itself is in peril. So today I'd like to revisit a conversation I had earlier this year with Barbara F. Walter. It seems even more relevant today than it was then, which is really saying something. Walter is a political scientist whose recent book is called How Civil War's Start and How to Stop them. She studied political violence for the CIA, and she says that the possibility of real civil unrest, even civil war, is on some level very real. Now, there have been a lot of books about how democracies die, the twilight of democracy, and I think that readers who want to get it, get it, and the audience that wants to get it, gets it. Now you're telling us something even

worse, that there's a possibility of a civil war in this country. What does that mean? It means that the U.S. has the risk factors that we know tend to lead to civil war. Let me explain that. So I've been studying civil wars for the last 30 years outside the United States in places like Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan, Mozambique, Northern Ireland. I haven't looked at the United States because until recently there's been no reason to do that. And one of the things that we've learned is that, even though these countries are different, the same factors tend to emerge again and again in the lead up to civil war. And then over the last five years, I started looking at my own country,

and I started to see these factors emerge not only here, but emerge at a surprisingly rapid rate. Well, what are the crucial factors that make you believe that the United States, which has always thought of itself as exceptional and the oldest democracy on earth and many other cliches that we could list and examine, what has changed so that we are vulnerable to this? So back in 2017, I was invited to be on a task force run by the U.S. government, and it's called the political instance. Task Force. And it's been around since... This is a CIA effort? Yeah, it's a CIA effort. And so what the task force did is initially they sat around a table and they brainstormed about all the commonsensical things that these experts thought could potentially lead to

instability and violence. And the first and most important one was something that we call anocracy. Andocracy is a fancy term that a political scientists give to governments that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. There's something in between. You can think about these as partial democracies. And that was surprising. It turns out that full democracies rarely have civil wars.

Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. It's the ones that are into between that are particularly at risk. The second factor is in these anocracies, if their populations begin to organize along racial, ethnic or religious lines and form parties which then seek to gain political power in order to exclude everyone else. We call those ethnic factions. And so when we looked around the world and we saw countries that had these two factors, they were put on a watch list. just to see what, you know, these are countries that we have to look out for because they're unlikely to remain stable in the next few years. Just to be clear, the CIA was interested in models of foreign countries that fall into civil

war. No, the CIA is legally not allowed to look at the United States. We never, ever talked about the United States. That was absolutely foreboughton. So this was my own personal decision that here I am. I've studied civil wars for 30 years. I'm on this task force. I know about this model.

And this is information that I thought the American public should have. Now, you map out in historical terms and in political science terms, a kind of map of the course of American democracy since 1776. and beginning mainly with the election of Andrew Jackson, the United States becomes solidly a democracy. And it obviously falls back in the period that leads up to the civil war and carries us through the civil war and then recovers in, I believe, 1877, if I remember right, and has some bad moments in the mid-60s.

But it has never been as bad in two weeks. hundred years as it was on January 6th and is today. Explain that. Yeah, so the United States until January 6th, 2021 was considered the world's longest standing democracy. It was downgraded to an inocracy after the January 6th insurrection, and Switzerland is now considered the longest standing democracy. America's democratic decline began. Forgive me for interrupting, but who's doing the downgrading? Is there a rating service? How is that done? It's a big data set called the polity data set. It's run out of the center for systemic peace. It's a nonprofit that studies not just democracies around the world. It analyzes all countries around the world, whether autocratic or

democratic, and it gives them a rating between negative 10, most autocratic, to positive 10, most democratic. So that rating system, that moody's of democracy, if you will, is telling us that the United States is no longer a democracy? The way to really think about it is it's a partial democracy. So if we were to continue to become less democratic, if, for example, voting rights were suppressed even more. If we did have a situation where one party tried to overturn the results of election, we would certainly be downgraded even further, and we would become at even greater risk of political violence. Your book begins with a very dramatic moment, which was a group of right-wing radicals, white supremacists, who were furious with many things, but they were hatching a plot

to kidnap the governor of Michigan. And this was a plot that was thankfully overturned, and there were arrests and all the rest. But you clearly begin your book with that incident as a kind of harbinger of many such incidents that could be in the offing. We saw on the Capitol, the three percenters, we saw all kinds of groups,

proud boys and the rest. what is coalescing out in the country that gives you the feeling that civil war is possible, and what would that civil war look like? Obviously, it's not going to be a matter of Gettysburg and Antietam in 1862 in battlefields, but what does civil war mean and what gives you the sense that will happen? Yeah, what I see happening is what we've seen happening, in other countries.

And here in the United States, we're in the midst of a massive transformation of our country, from being a country that's a white majority to being a country that's non-white majority. By about 2045, the United States will be a minority white country. That's a fact. And what we are witnessing is a subset

of the white population, which is unwilling to accept this. And that also fits what we've seen historically. We know that the groups that tend to start civil wars are not the poorest groups. They're not the immigrant groups. They are the groups that were once dominant but are in decline. They either had power or they know they're losing power. And they believe that the country is rightfully theirs.

and they are willing to use violence to stop it. And so what we're going to see is a different type of civil war. And you've seen this in other countries as well, something that's more decentralized. It's fought by a large number of smaller militias, paramilitary groups. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes they don't work together. And they're using unconventional tactics, the tactics of the weak against the strong, guerrilla warfare, terrorism. So a bomb here, you know, a mass killing there, targeting infrastructure, targeting

crowded spaces, targeting civilians. That's the type of civil war we're more likely to see here. And in fact, it will look more similar to what the IRA was doing in Northern Ireland or even what Hamas has done in Israel. I think you're suggesting those analogies as analogies of tactics, not one of analogous, analogous types of struggles. But, It seems to me, though, that kind of violence is not foreign to American history. And we don't have to just go back to Timothy McVeigh or Waco or the rest. We can go back much farther of other kinds of terror. You could even say that Tulsa, in the early part of the century,

was a white supremacist act of massive terrorism in Oklahoma. Or the Ku Klux Klan. They pursued terror as a. method. But we didn't frame that as civil war. Why are we framing this as potential civil war? So one way to think about this is to think about it as an insurgency. The CIA actually has made publicly available a manual that they put together. The last version was the 2012 version. It's called a guide to insurgency, and people can get it online. And it's really, interesting to read. It outlines what the CIA sees as three stages of insurgency. So stage

one is the organizational phase. When you start to see extremists get together and start to organize, stage two is when they start to form militias. They start to form military arms. There might be, you know, a very isolated, but government officials view that attack as isolated and they don't, they don't see it yet as part of a broader movement. And they open an insurgency stage is when you start to see a consistent set of attacks. We are at the second stage where militias have formed, they've exploded since the Obama era. And, they are arming themselves, they are training, and we have had a few violent incidences. And the question every, all the experts on insurgency were asking about January 6th was,

is this the start of the third stage, the open insurgency stage, or is this really still, this very sporadic, still isolated violence of stage two? And I think we haven't hit that third stage yet. But again, the militias are still there. They are still organizing. And I think most troubling, they are increasingly coming to believe that violence is their only option. Political scientist Barbara F. Walter. She's the author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.

Our conversation was recorded early this year and will continue in a moment. New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In January, a year after the violent failed coup of January 6th, I spoke with the political scientist Barbara F. Walter, who has studied insurgency and political violence for the CIA. There was one moment, there was one moment when it seemed that the Republican Party leadership was going to stand up after looking into the abyss and stand up for democracy, and that was the moment when Mitch McConnell in the well of the Senate, denounced Donald Trump.

And if you were naive, perhaps, you thought for one fleeting second that this might have an effect or at least create a kind of serious conflict within the Republican Party. It disappeared within a day. or two. McCarthy as well. And in the end, McConnell didn't vote to convict. Sixty-six percent of the House caucus voted to reject Biden's presidency. It seems that the Republican Party leadership is responsible for a civil war scenario as much as the radicalized basis, no? Well, it's It's kind of a chicken or egg situation.

What comes first? Politicians, number one priority is to win office and stay in office, and they need the support of their voters, their constituents to do that. So they're going to reflect the desire of their constituents. And, you know, much of the Republican Party, the voters are still enthralled with Trump. And politicians are going to reflect this. On the other hand, they are taking measures to play to an increasingly radical base. If you're gerrymandering your districts, what you're doing is you're creating heavily Republican districts and you're forcing Republican candidates to fight out in the primaries with another Republican,

and it's usually the more extreme Republican who wins. And the reason for that is that more passionate members of parties tend to turn out in the primaries. So there's a whole, you know, they're both responsible. Let's talk about the nature of potential violence in such a second civil war. You write, whether or not the United States will find itself in a security dilemma depends on whether those on the left, liberals, minorities, city dwellers, decide that they should also arm themselves. Yeah. Why is that the case? Okay, so here's the strategic dilemma. If you want to, if you're an accelerationist on the right, you want civil war.

By definition, you're extreme. Most people on the right are not as extreme as you are. You have to convince average citizens to support your cause. Otherwise, you're not going to succeed, right? So what you often see happening are these ethnic entrepreneurs or violent entrepreneurs. Those are the ones who want to instigate. They want to start a fight. If you're Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia, right?

And you want to gain control of Yugoslavia. But in order to do that, you have to defeat the Croats so that they don't become independent. You've got to convince average Serbs to support your cause. But most average citizens don't want war. So what these violence entrepreneurs often do is they provoke some sort of violent attack from the other side because they need hard evidence to show their own population that what they're saying is in fact true. And so they'll prod or they'll provoke until there is some response. And then they use that to say, you know, look, everything we've been telling you is true.

You better arm now or you're going to be in trouble. We also know that the United States has incredibly powerful and sophisticated law enforcement and the world's largest military. And isn't it stand to reason that once the FBI or law enforcement put its mind, collective mind, to both surveilling and dealing with this problem, that, yes, there would be incidents, and it would be awful. There's no underestimating that. But it wouldn't be a matter of civil war. It would be this type of insurgency, which for people who study conflict, we would consider that a civil war. But to get to your question, those groups in the United States who are

preparing for civil war, have thought about your question. And they understand how powerful the U.S. military is, and they've seen what the FBI is able to do. After the Timothy McFaigh bombing in Oklahoma City, the FBI was incredibly effective in infiltrating militias and basically neutralizing them. And so they've learned from that. And they talk a lot about a strategy called leaderless resistance. And in fact, there's a book. It's considered the Bible of the far right in terms of how to fight this 21st century civil war here in the United States. It's called the Turner Diaries.

She's been around for a while. It's been around for a while. I used to be able to buy it on Amazon until January of 2021. In fact, I bought a copy in December of 2020. And when I bought it on Amazon, Amazon recommended a whole series of other white supremac. chemist books that I might want to read as well. That's great news. Yeah, it was great news.

So the algorithm clearly identified that I would want to go deeper down this subject. But leaderless resistance is this, it's like cell warfare, this notion that if you can create a thousand little fighting cells in the United States, that's very, very hard for even a powerful government to put down. You know, because we don't want to close with absolute gloom and foreboding, or even self-fulfilling prophecy about a potential second civil war, you look to the experience of South Africa of all places as a prime example of how a country avoided a civil war,

despite all the complications of the transfer from apartheid to something else. Now, it's always hard to analyze a thing that hasn't happened. But what do you think kept South Africa from? slipping into civil war. And what's the analogy with the United States? Yeah. You know, South Africa is a fantastic case. So back in the 80s, if you were to ask civil war experts, what country was most likely to experience a civil war? Every single one of them would have said South Africa. And it would have been hard to argue with them. This was the time when the apartheid government was doubling down. you saw increasing protests by the black majority,

and the government was responding with more and more violence. And of course, the Soweto killings where the government went in and just killed 100 plus children was just a culmination of that. So people thought, wow, you know, here you have the apartheid regime. Not only are they refusing to reform in any way, but they are just double. doubling down with violence and repression. And then the government shifted. And Botha was replaced by DeClerc.

And DeClerc very quickly agreed to let Mandela out of prison and negotiate with him about a peaceful transfer of political power. So the white minority peacefully handed over majority control to the black majority. And so the question is, okay, why would you ever do? do this. And that's a puzzle because usually the group that's in power, especially if it's a minority, holds on to power for dear life because they know if they reform, they know if they compromise. They're going to be shut out of power forever. And yet that didn't happen in South Africa. And one of the reasons, a big reason it didn't happen is because the white business community,

business elites finally broke away from the apartheid regime. And they said, we are not going to support this anymore. But carry that out to a U.S. example. Who's Declan in this in this, analogy, who's Mandela? And how does this apply to the United States in any way? That's a, okay, that's a great question. In the American, in the American map, in the American situation, what moves have to be made on all sides so that we are not staring once more into the abyss and then leaping in? Yeah. So the DeClerc in the United States case is Republican leadership. It would be people like McConnell. McConnell is a key player here because he keeps the Senate in lockstep. So it would be Republican leadership that is from the federal level to the state

level that currently is doing everything possible to cement minority rule at, you know, at various levels. The logic here is you're asking the Republican Party leadership to sign its own suicide pact in terms of power. In other words, it's the nature of politicians to hold on to grasp and enhance power. You're asking them to do the opposite. It's not a suicide pact at all. Right? The United States, our system is based, is a two-party system. And, you know, if the Republican Party continues to cater only to white voters, that's their own suicide pact of they're making with themselves. They don't have to do that. In fact, in many ways, and Republican leadership back in the, in the 2012 elections, they came out and they said, we must expand. our tent. We must begin to woo Latinos. Latinos in some respects are a natural constituency for the Republican Party. They tend to be socially conservative. They were there for the picking for the Republican Party. It's the Republican Party that chose not to try to attract that growing subset of

the American population. And of course, they didn't do that because it's very hard to, to cater to the far right, which includes many whites who are racist and include Latinos. And so they're in this bind where at some point they're going to have to let the far right go if they want to continue to operate as a healthy party here in the United States. Barbara Walter, thank you so much. It's my pleasure. Thank you very much, David. Barbara F. Walter's new book is called How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. She's a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-director of the website,

Political Violence at a glance. The war in Ukraine has been raging for six long months, and that's longer than almost anyone expected when Russian tanks first rolled toward Kiev in February. Those early days of the war are the setting for the story, The Muddle, which was featured on the New Yorkers fiction podcast this month. Here's author Sana Krasikov, reading the opening passages. Shura was trying to reach Alona and Oleg. First over Skype and WhatsApp, then Facebook,

on which Alona kept an account she barely used. It should not have been so hard to get hold of them. Alona had not posted recently, but she checked her messages. Schuera could see that. Maybe she thought Shura was being dramatic. Hadn't she always thought so? With her digital silence, Alona was making a big show of her own calm, doubling down on her refusal to treat anything as a catastrophe. Well, goody for her, Shura thought, and shut her laptop. If Alona wasn't panicked, why should she be?

It was day three, and there were still no Russian boots in central Kiev. There was the battle for the Hamasil airport, and a rocket had crashed into a building in a ballon. but that was not near where Alona and Aleeg lived in the Shivchenkovsky district. From the security of her own house in Croton-Hudson, Shura tried not to think about the last conversation she'd had with Alona. It had been a rather unpleasant chat, but now there was a war on and it seemed unnecessary to be holding a grudge, one of the very few they'd had in their 60-odd-year friendship. On day five, a reply came over Skype.

We're alive. Two words in a pale blue bubble. It should have taken the tension out of her lungs, but it only agitated Schurrah more. She'd expected a bit more motiveness. Did they have groceries, were they spending nights in their building's basement or in the metro? We're alive, the bare minimum. She would write back, Shura decided, but not yet. She dialed Pavel's number in Winnipeg instead. All right, Pavel, she said briskly. What is going on with your parents? They're waiting it out in the apartment. She gathered from his voice that he'd understood her meaning.

Not, are they okay, but what is wrong with those two? Why aren't they on their way to Winnipeg? Schur could hear Pavel exhale. He'd likely been asked this a dozen times by now. Have they become patriots all of a sudden? She said, unable to resist. But he wasn't hurt, having some of his own bitterness to shed. Last time she was here, Mama said she didn't find Winnipeg cozy.

Meaning what? It's too Canadian? To Ukrainian. Oh, for heaven's sake. Oleg, to be sure, was Russian, the son of a colonel. But Alona was Ukrainian, on both sides, as she'd proudly told Shura when they were girls. Her father's family was from the Vinica area, her mother's from Dumbas. Pavel said, Mama, I understand better than I do him. She's always been under his thumb.

But I think he'd rather spend his old age living on can'tushunka than accept help from me. Pavel had been more of a joker when he'd arrived in Winnipeg, 20 years ago. The long shift into a Canadian had turned him, sure a thought, more earnest, and a touch more righteous. Oh, Pavel, she sensed that he would tell her more if she egged him on a little. But she hesitated, not wanting to give the impression that she was disparaging his mother. So what's their situation with groceries? No worries about that. Last time we spoke, she was making Veil the French way.

Sana Karasikov reading her story, The Muddle. You can hear the rest on the New Yorker podcast, The Writer's Voice, or read it in the August 15th issue of the magazine. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tunei,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Breda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putabuele. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. and we had assistance from Harrison Keith Line and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.