How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

The way social media is structured is Darwinian—it is the survival of the fittest, where the most aggressive and most brazen voices drown out everyone else. And in the contest between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, social media is inadvertently helping the autocrats win.

SOCIAL MEDIA DOESN’T just drive countries down the democratic ladder. It also heightens the ethnic, social, religious, and geographic divisions that can be the first step in the creation of factions.

Social media algorithms encourage this divisive content. They segregate people by design, driving those whose values or opinions differ into ever-diverging realities, tearing societies apart.

On its websites, you will find stories about Muslim immigrants committing crimes, Muslim immigrants brutalizing animals, and Muslim immigrants refusing to conform to Western laws. You will read that “foreign burglars were arrested following tips from an attentive neighbor,” accompanied by a clearly staged photograph. The party emphasizes the need to return Sweden to a simpler and happier time. The goal is to restore “the national home.”

It used to be that far-right parties were unelectable in liberal democracies. But the story of fear and grievance told by ethnic entrepreneurs—the myths and losses of sons of the soil—prove irresistible to an audience made captive by social media. “Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” one Facebook executive has noted. According to the same executive, populism triggers reactions that are “incredibly strong” and “primitive” by appealing to emotionally charged subjects like “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.”

If these websites were your main sources of news—surfaced and reinforced by algorithms—you would quickly come to believe that Sweden was falling apart and that immigrants and the far left were to blame. It would be nearly impossible for anyone to persuade you otherwise.

But this is where political science, with its structured approach to analyzing history as it unfolds, can be so helpful. No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it. If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America—the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela—you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered dangerous territory.

There are four major factors that the Polity Project uses to assess democracy: how free elections are from government control, how constrained the executive branch is, how open and institutionalized political participation is, and how competitive the recruitment for the presidency is.

On June 1, Trump had police officers use an irritant (likely tear gas) to clear out hundreds of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square for a photo op.

This led to America’s polity score dropping from a +7 to a +5, the lowest score since 1800.

The United States became an anocracy for the first time in more than two hundred years. Let that sink in. We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the polity index.

It is thanks to the peaceful transfer of power and the new administration’s subsequent respect for the rule of law that America’s polity score rose to +8.

Two-thirds or more of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans consistently vote for Democrats, while roughly 60 percent of white Americans vote for Republicans.

Today, 90 percent of the Republican Party is white.

It didn’t take long, however, for Nixon to change his mind. Running for president in 1968, Nixon decided to capitalize on racial resentment himself, leveraging white fear with calls for “law and order” and a pledge to fight the “war on drugs.” This so-called Southern Strategy helped the GOP win the presidency and later retake the Senate after being out of power for almost thirty years. Future Republican candidates would rely on similar appeals to win the presidency, though always with coded language, whether it was Ronald Reagan shaming “welfare queens” or George H. W. Bush disparaging Willie Horton. George W. Bush’s campaign was accused of spreading rumors of John McCain fathering an illegitimate Black child.

Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers’ economic interest.

By contrast, non-Christians—including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims—represent half of the Democratic Party.

Today, the rural-urban divide is really a divide between citizens whose orientation is national and citizens whose orientation is global.

Keith Olbermann,

Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump. And in his bid for power, he quickly realized that appeals to identity could galvanize his political base. He had already, in the past, made a racist crusade of questioning Obama’s birthplace. Now he embraced identity politics explicitly and with gusto. He painted Black Americans as poor and violent. He referred to Mexicans as criminals. He spoke of Christian values, despite numerous accusations of sexual assault. He called women “horseface,” “fat,” and “ugly.” Once sworn into office, he quickly instituted a travel ban on Muslims, and called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries. His policies were nativist policies: He started building a “big, beautiful wall” along the border with Mexico, pulled out of international agreements, and started a trade war against China. Trump retweeted a video of a retiree in Florida chanting “white power.” And he threatened to veto a defense spending bill in order to protect the legacy of Confederate generals on U.S. Army bases. In all of these ways, Trump was encouraging ethnic factionalism. It’s exactly what Tudjman did when, as part of his plan to become president of an independent Croatia, he began to consolidate Croatians into an ethnic faction in 1989. It is what Hutu extremists did when they characterized Tutsis as cockroaches and Hutus as the chosen people. It’s what President Henri Konan Bédié did in the Ivory Coast in the ...

As you’ll recall, the level of factionalism in a country is based on a five-point scale, with 5 being the least factional and 1 being the most (a 3 puts a country firmly in the danger zone). In 2016, the United States dropped to a 3—factionalized—and it remains there today, alongside Ukraine and Iraq. (The United Kingdom also fell to a 3 in 2016.)

We’ve seen this level of political factionalism only twice before: In the years before the Civil War, which were marked by the intransigence of Southern Democrats and their willingness to exclude non-whites from equal protection under the law; and in the mid-1960s, when the country was roiled by civil rights demonstrations, the Vietnam War, and a corrupt government intent on crushing the anti-establishment movement. Both times, the country’s political parties had radically different visions of America’s future: What could the country be? What should the country be?

The election of Barack Obama, a dark-skinned president with a Muslim middle name, shattered that myth. His victory was clear evidence that America’s demographics and balance of political power were changing. Americans not only had their first Black president, but the majority of Obama’s cabinet was non-white as well.

Increasingly open global trade had hollowed out U.S. manufacturing. Citizens of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, saw union jobs at the local steel mills disappear, then the steel mills shut down entirely. They saw their children go off to foreign wars and come back to minimum wage jobs with no benefits. They were losing friends to opioid addiction or suicide.

Trump intuitively understood that this deep feeling of alienation could carry him to power. And so he didn’t just focus on division, denigrating Muslims or Black Americans as the “other.” He also emphasized the downgrading of the former white majority—America’s own sons of the soil. Like other ethnic entrepreneurs before him, he put the grievances of white, male, Christian, rural Americans into a simplified framework that painted them as victims whose rightful legacy had been stolen.

Movements that are geographically concentrated and predominantly rural are more likely to mobilize violent resistance because it’s easier to recruit soldiers, collect funding, and evade police in areas far from the capital. This was true of the Sunnis in Syria, the Moro people in Mindanao, and Papuans in West Papua. Extremists exist in American cities, but they are more often located in rural areas—areas that also contain a higher percentage of military veterans and where gun culture has strong roots.

A 2016 study by researchers at Princeton and New York University found that self-identified conservatives and Republicans were more likely to share false news than Democrats and liberals.

Almost everyone who scored highest on a widely respected racial resentment measure voted for Trump in 2016, while almost everyone on the opposite end of the scale supported Hillary Clinton.

In the 2016 American National Election Study, about 40 percent of Americans (and almost 50 percent of white Americans) could be categorized as racially resentful—figures that suggest this new, more subtle form of prejudice is widely held. Remember, it’s not the desperately poor who start civil wars, but those who once had privilege and feel they are losing status they feel is rightfully theirs.

Prior to 2008, only about 43 militias existed; by 2011, there were 334.

In the 1970s, most violent extremist groups in the United States were left leaning.

In 2012, the number of right-wing terrorist attacks and plots was fourteen; by August 2020, it was sixty-one, a historic high.

The open insurgency stage, the final phase, according to the CIA’s report, is characterized by sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes, as well as hit-and-run raids on police and military units.

Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized country on the edge of anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.

For now, one thing is clear: America’s extremists are becoming more organized, more dangerous, and more determined, and they are not going away.

Kamala Harris

Instead, they choose the strategy of the weak: guerrilla warfare and terrorism. And, increasingly, domestic terror campaigns are aimed at democratic governments.

It describes bombing FBI headquarters, attacking the Capitol building, and instituting “the Day of the Rope,” in which “race traitors”—including politicians, lawyers, TV newscasters, judges, teachers, and preachers—are strung up on a gallows.

As reported by ProPublica, Mason encouraged his disciples to launch a clandestine guerrilla war to bring down “the System.”

In 2017, a new 563-page edition of Siege was released, and in June 2020, The Turner Diaries was number 46 on Amazon’s “Bestselling Literature” list. You could purchase both books on Amazon, where the site’s recommendation engine would suggest you also purchase White Power, Hunter (an action novel about race), Mein Kampf, Revolt Against the Modern World, and International Jew. (Amazon is the biggest distributor of self-published books and as such has become a popular site to sell and distribute far-right material.) This changed only after the attack on the Capitol in January 2021, after which Amazon removed Siege and The Turner Diaries from its site.

They would also try to persuade regular Americans that they’d be safer if certain people—minorities, liberals, anyone deemed a “socialist”—left their cities and their states, creating a set of white ethno-states in the rural heartland.

“The Ten Stages of Genocide,” argues that countries go through eight steps before they reach genocide, and forcibly moving minorities out of a region is one of them.

This is when an identity group in power begins to highlight differences among a country’s citizens, categorizing them by groups—as Belgian colonizers in Rwanda did when they created identity cards for the previously indistinguishable Tutsis and Hutus—and then adopting certain markers for themselves or others (as the Nazis did when they appropriated swastikas and forced Jews to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing).

This is where the United States is today: solidly in stage five, perhaps entering stage six.

AMERICA’S EXTREMISTS TODAY subscribe to an idea known as accelerationism: the apocalyptic belief that modern society is irredeemable and that its end must be hastened, so that a new order can be brought into being.

electrical grids.

It would also target citizens who are likely to vote for liberal candidates, such as immigrants or those who live in cities or swing states. Violent extremists would continue to target these sites and individuals until those in power offered the terrorists the concessions they wanted, or voters replaced existing politicians with ones who were more sympathetic to the extremists’ cause.

In a country flush with guns, legal militias, and open-carry laws, politicians and citizens have good reason to be afraid. This is even more true in rural areas, where the reach of the federal government is weaker, and where overlapping jurisdictions between the federal, state, and local governments leave citizens uncertain about who is really in charge.

Rebel groups that embrace an extreme ideology and methods often do better in war than more moderate groups. This is because they often attract a more dedicated fighting force and more determined supporters. Extremist groups also tend to wield greater psychological power by offering greater recompense:

If this was to occur in the United States, you would see one extreme group, such as Atomwaffen, escalating to ever-more brutal acts of violence, to prove that it was stronger, more capable, and more dedicated to the cause than other groups.