How Civil Wars Start
Hello, I hope that you and yours are great.
If you know me, you know that I’ve been concerned about potential conflict breaking out in the United States for several years. You know I also like data.
A study came out last week that documented a relationship between extremism and automation – that is, if people lose their jobs to automation they become more subject to extreme political ideologies, particularly on the right. Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the last 20 years, most of them in the Midwest and the South.
Barbara Walter is a political scientist who has been studying what causes civil wars for years – “I didn’t think I’d be applying my learnings to the United States.” Barbara wrote the new NYTimes bestseller “How Civil Wars Start: and How to Stop Them.” It is chock full of data and international references.
For example, there is an international scale for rating polities that ranges from -10 to +10, with +10 being a stable democracy (e.g., Canada) and -10 being an authoritarian state (e.g., North Korea). It turns out that neither democracies nor autocracies are particularly subject to Civil Wars. What are?
Anocracies – that is, states that lie somewhere in-between democracy and authoritarianism.
The United States has been a 10 on this polity scale for most of the last century. But recently, in the wake of Trump’s questioning of the last election and declining faith in our democratic institutions, we slumped down to a 5. The danger zone on this scale where a civil war – defined as a conflict that kills 1,000 people a year – is more common lies between a 5 and a -5.
Another scale is factionalism – when a society breaks into groups that are fixed politically. Factions are particularly dangerous when they overlap with an ethnic group or a region. Barbara describes Trump as a classic “ethnic entrepreneur,” which is apparently a common phenomenon in political science. Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia is an example of an ethnic entrepreneur.
An ethnic faction that also overlaps with the same religion, class and/or geographic location can become a superfaction, which is 12 times more likely to lead to war.
A third ingredient that leads to conflict is if an ethnic group feels that it is losing its status relative to other groups. A group that has held the majority of political or economic power that feels its dominance slipping away is much more likely to instigate a conflict.
Unfortunately, there are clearly ingredients of both of these elements here in the United States. Indeed, Barbara states that the United States is at a 3 on the factionalism scale, with 5 being the most divided. And as America becomes a majority- minority society the changes are making some feel more aggrieved and insecure.
Barbara believes that social media is negatively associated with democracy – both here and abroad. “Social media is every ethnic entrepreneur’s dream . . . It’s this business model of engagement that makes [it] so terrifying to those of us who study civil wars . . . ultimately, it’s the algorithms of social media that serve as accelerants for violence. By promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, these algorithms give rise to a growing sense of despair.” Barbara, in our interview, cited higher social media adoption rates with a lower propensity toward democratization and vice versa.
In the U.S., Barbara is increasingly concerned. There are now over 400 militia groups in the U.S. “Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized 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.” She cites people in other countries who register disbelief even as conflict erupts.
What can be done? Barbara suggests improving the country’s governance to be more responsive, reforming our democracy and outbidding extremists by providing tangible benefits, like healthcare. She also, like Jonathan Greenblatt and many others, wants to rein in social media.
I found Barbara and her thinking very compelling – she had spent years studying conflicts in other countries only to apply those lessons here in the United States. We have long felt ourselves to be exceptional. But it’s only by investing in things that many of us have taken for granted – like our democracy itself - can we remain immune from the conflicts that have overtaken so many other societies.
