Walter told the Observer: “By the 2020 elections, 90% of the Republican party was now white. The other is a landscape devolving into identity politics where parties no longer organise around ideology or specific policies but along racial, ethnic or religious lines. One was the emergence of a government that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic – an “anocracy”. Yet with the rise of Trump’s racist demagoguery, Walter, who has studied civil wars for 30 years, recognized telltale signs on her own doorstep. Walter previously served on the political instability taskforce, an advisory panel to the CIA, which had a model to predict political violence in countries all over the world – except the US itself.
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Among those raising the alarm is Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and author of a new book, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. With the cult of Trump more dominant in the Republican party than ever, and radical rightwing groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys on the march, some regard the threat to democracy as greater now than it was a year ago. Tucker Carlson, the most watched host on the conservative Fox News network, refused to play any clips of Biden’s speech, arguing that 6 January 2021 “barely rates as a footnote” historically because “really not a lot happened that day”. Illustrating the point, almost no Republicans attended the commemorations as the party seeks to rewrite history, recasting the mob who tried to overturn Trump’s election defeat as martyrs fighting for democracy. History looms large as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Statuary Hall to address the threat to American democracy. The president’s remarks on Thursday – “I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy” – appeared to acknowledge that there can be no business as usual when one of America’s major parties has embraced authoritarianism. The anxiety is fed by rancour in Washington, where Biden’s desire for bipartisanship has crashed into radicalized Republican opposition. The mere fact that such notions are entering the public domain shows the once unthinkable has become thinkable, even though some would argue it remains firmly improbable. Three retired US generals wrote a recent Washington Post column warning that another coup attempt “could lead to civil war”. “Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?” posed the headline of a column in Friday’s New York Times. “Is a Civil War ahead?” was the blunt headline of a New Yorker magazine article this week.
Even talk of a second American civil war has gone from fringe fantasy to media mainstream.
In a deeply divided society, where even a national tragedy such as 6 January only pushed people further apart, there is fear that that day was the just the beginning of a wave of unrest, conflict and domestic terrorism.Ī slew of recent opinion polls shows a significant minority of Americans at ease with the idea of violence against the government. It is a question that many inside America and beyond are now asking.
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