Is the US careening toward civil war?

Also: It's not "lunatic fringe" to believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK.

The prospect of civil war in the US is not anything that would have crossed most people’s radar screens a decade ago. But in the more recent period when “MAGA” became a thing, it is certainly something a lot of us have begun worrying about. In January 2021, I really wasn’t sure if Trump was going to give up power, and I felt willing to hit the streets to resist that kind of coup. On the right, they fear Biden is going to grab their guns, give Blacks free rein to engage in wanton destruction, and maybe even hand over their kids to transgender “groomers”. (Some on the far right are not even so much worrying about civil war as licking their chops and impatiently spoiling for it, which is even scarier.)

But despite that extant concern, this WaPo interview with civil war expert Barbara F. Walter (which was published in March but which I only more recently discovered) gave me a whole new framework that recast our predicament as decidedly more precarious than I had realized:

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy.

Right off the bat, I love this. What a great approach to studying the phenomenon, and how cool that they learned they could throw out most factors and zero in on two that were common across cultures and regions.

There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.

Yikes. I'm sure our period of being 5 was during the Trump administration. But even now we have unfortunately not rebounded all the way back to 10. Presumably what they are seeing is how election boards and individual states’ secretaries of state (yeesh, what an awkward turn of phrase--couldn’t think of how else to say it) are getting taken over by MAGA “stop the steal” types. If those placed in charge of the solemn duty of fairly administering elections take partisanship to the level where they won’t certify an election for a candidate not on their “team”, we're in deep trouble. Down that path lies madness. (Thinking through the game theory on this, you could almost imagine that ultimately you would need an AI to run elections completely impartially, or absent that leap in technology maybe some disinterested group like a class of foreign-born bureaucrats who are not citizens and cannot vote or run for office.)

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

Fascinating. It’s not so surprising that the most robust democracies don't have civil wars. But it's actually a bit depressing to learn that the most hardcore autocracies don’t generally have to worry about them. You want to imagine that the most repressive regimes would be at least moderately likely to inspire a backlash that could lead to revolution. The fact that they don’t is not only sad for those countries, it actually serves as a lesson to those governments to stay maximally repressive, and for others that are a little less repressive to dial it up all the way. Makes me think of poor Winston Smith in George Orwell's novel 1984: the revolution he desperately hoped for (spoiler alert) never had a fighting chance.

I did think it was interesting that as the Cold War ended, the only repressive Communist regime that underwent a full scale violent revolution, down to its dictator (and his equally hated wife) fleeing and being caught and executed, was Romania. I wonder what the difference was there?

And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity. The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

Okay, phew: fortunately nothing like that is happening here!

I keed, I keed. This is of course happening, and (here’s where many would lament that I’m descending into “bothsidesism”) it's not just white nationalists on the right. The left is increasingly orienting itself around ethnic identity. What may be unique in our case is that it's not just whites against nonwhites (that would not be much of a contest) but conservative whites against nonwhites along with their white allies, who are themselves anti-white despite being of the race they despise. Will that unique dynamic make the left wing coalition ultimately unstable if push comes to shove and things get really hairy? Stay tuned.

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For years, decades really, bien-pensant elites in the mainstream media have made a point of deriding a belief that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in assassinating President Kennedy. Not just disagreeing with that viewpoint, which is fair enough (although, I believe, intellectually incurious at best). But sneering at the very idea, as though anyone who believes there was a conspiracy to kill the president belongs in the fringe-lunatic category along with flat-earthers and those who believe the moon landing was a hoax. In reality, for most of the past half century it was those who believed the Warren Commission report was accurate who could more reasonably be called the fringe:

You can see that the numbers in that “one man” group have gone up substantially in recent years—mostly, I suspect, because an increasing proportion of the adult population was born after any of these events happened and just swallowed whole what their high school history books spoonfed them. But they are still outnumbered two to one by those of us who call BS on the Warren whitewashing.

Obviously I’ve made no bones about the fact that I am in the “conspiracy” camp on this one. But I want to stress that this means only that I believe there was more than one person involved in the assassination—not necessarily that there was some deep conspiracy inside the government or anything like that. I mean, I wouldn’t rule that possibility out completely, but I consider it extremely unlikely and would need to see very good evidence before I would go that far. I just think it was multiple people who planned it: which people, I couldn’t say although the mob would be one likely candidate. Which actually aligns me with the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), whose 1978 report “concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” Why do these supercilious journalistic elites put all their faith in the Warren Commission and none in the HSCA?

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the Warren Commission, not least because they essentially admitted that their remit was not to dig deep on a fact-finding mission, but to reassure the public and wrap everything up in a tidy bow as quickly as possible. But the biggest red flag of all is Jack Ruby. If Oswald actually was a lone gunman, Ruby is some kind of cosmic joke, almost like he was a prankster who wanted to make sure everyone would think the whole thing was extremely fishy. I mean, if this were all a work of fiction rather than reality, an editor would tell the author to go back to the drawing board with the Ruby shooting and come up with something less ludicrous.