Can America Avoid Another Civil War?

...and instead make the transition from a white-controlled economic and political system to a truly multiracial, multi-religious pluralistic democracy with a stable middle class?

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” —Voltaire

There’s little doubt that if Donald Trump thought starting a civil war to seize and hold power in America would work, he’d do it. As would the majority of his cult members.

But could they pull it off? Could America be on the edge of a possible second Civil War? And, if so, why and how did it get this far?

Most people would argue, “Aren’t civil wars usually started by the downtrodden? By the poor and disenfranchised? Rich and powerful people don’t start civil wars, do they?”

Amazingly, that widespread belief is almost 100 percent wrong. (Of course we believe this wrongly: rich and powerful people typically write history.)

It turns out that the vast majority of the hundreds of civil wars fought throughout history were started by those in power or wealthy elites very close to power. Facing economic, political, or demographic change, they’re the ones who see their wealth and power slipping away from them; that’s why they start civil wars, to hang onto that power and the wealth associated with it.

Serbs in power started the terrible civil war in the Balkans. Wealthy plantation owners in the American south started our Civil War. Wealthy Sunnis in majority Shiite Iraq started the Iraq Civil War. Other examples of recent civil wars started by in-power elites (I’ve done relief work in the midst of three, in Colombia, South Sudan, and Uganda) are listed at the end of this article.

And today a few dozen morbidly rich members of America’s elite, including the world’s richest man, using input occasionally provided by Vladimir Putin, could very well help start a 21st century American civil war.

Barbara F. Walter is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego and one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism, and domestic terror. She’s also the author of five books including, in 2022, How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them.

Walter identifies several major factors that predictably create the conditions for a civil war, and today the US meets them all.

The first is that the country is an anocracy rather than a democracy.

In an anocracy, there are all the trappings of a democracy — elections, political debates, peaceful transitions of power — but the government has ceased to serve its people, devoting virtually all its energy instead to supporting the elites that have captured it.

Typically it is one political party that flips a nation into being an anocaracy, and they are able to do it because they have formed an alliance with the country’s wealthiest people. This form of government might be described as, “Of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.” That’s what happened in over a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America over the past century.

Russia and Hungary today, for example, are anocracies. And, over the past few decades, America has largely become one, too.

Consider how much of “what average people want” actually got done in the era from the 1930s to the 1980s: We got from our democratic government the right to unionize, Social Security, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, high-quality public schools and nearly free colleges, food and housing support for the poor, Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, low-cost healthcare, and reasonably priced insurance (among other things). Housing was affordable.

As I note in my new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream:

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s, the median price of a single-family house was around 2.2 times the median American family income. Today the St. Louis Fed says the median house sells for $417,700 while the median American income is $40,480—a ratio of more than 10 to 1 between housing costs and annual income.

Wealthy elites were held in check by high taxation, and anti-trust laws were enforced to prevent the formation of monopolies. “Good government” laws set rigid limits on dark money in politics. More than half of the members of Congress during most of that era came from the middle class.

As a result, Congress helped out average Americans and kept the power of the morbidly rich in check. CEOs only took home 30 times what the average worker earned.

Since the Reagan Revolution, however, that system was flipped upside down and America has slid into anocracy.

Newt Gingrich convinced Republicans in the 1990s that they should never compromise with Democrats, and in 2010 five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that billionaires and corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to aid political campaigns.

Billionaires and giant corporations essentially took over our government. Today, they buy elections in ways that would’ve earned a prison sentence 50 years ago.

As a result, average Americans no longer get what they want from their government. We’ve seen the middle class collapse over the past 43 years, going from around two-thirds of us when Reagan came into office to well below half of us today. Rubbing salt into that wound, today it takes two incomes to maintain a similar lifestyle to what a single paycheck could provide in 1980, and college, housing, and health insurance have all become unaffordable.

Since Reagan suspended enforcement of the anti-trust laws and cut taxes on the wealthy in the 1980s, the morbidly rich have seized fully $50 trillion that used to be in the homes and retirement accounts of working class people and moved it into their own money bins.

They’re using it to buy super-yachts, build giant penis-shaped rockets to blast themselves into outer space, and to purchase politicians. Three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America.

And they want to hang onto it.

The result is that we’re seeing the most visible symptom of an anocracy: The elite get whatever they want while the average person sees almost no help or support from a government that now seems remote and disinterested.

That, says Walter, is the first characteristic of a country on the brink of a civil war.

The second is that in-power elites suddenly begin to face the possibility of losing some or even all of their power, and the wealth associated with it, which provokes them to encourage strife.

Often this is caused by demographic change, which is exactly what’s happening in today’s America.

Within a single generation the non-white population will be larger than the white population (it already is in Texas, for example), and non-white politicians and business people are gaining wealth and power.

To provoke civil strife, white workers are told by Republicans like Trump that non-whites “want your jobs” (and want to “rape your women”), and that America is becoming a “hellish” “shithole country” as it gets browner and browner.

Thus, civil war occurs when the elites themselves pit factions within a nation against each other, mainly to keep the focus away from their own pillaging of the country while preserving their own wealth and power.

That, of course, is at the core of the Republican Party’s current electoral strategy.

Even Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were willing to collaborate and work with Democrats to get things done. Now that the GOP has become primarily the party of white grievance, Republican politicians view their role (beyond more tax cuts for white elites) as blocking any forward progress that may help the country’s non-white near-majority.

Exacerbating this divide, social media now uses secret algorithms that reward outrage and hate, inflaming the white majority and certifying their fear of a loss of wealth and status at the hands of non-white people and their allies in the Democratic Party.

That elevated profile of grievance on social media also causes the haters — being algorithmically amplified — to believe their numbers are much larger than they actually are, which makes them even more dangerous.

A final factor that inflames the chance of a civil war here is the presence of over 400 million guns, many of them weapons designed specifically for the battlefield. Most are in the possession of the same white now-majority that fears their place in society is slipping because of the growing population of non-white people.

Having read Walter’s work (and others) and worked in the middle of three civil wars myself, I believe if Trump can manage to seize power this fall and again become president, he will try to start a civil war.

His language is a near mirror image of that coming out of the old South in the 1850s; he’s already threatening to unleash the military on America’s people (the definition of a civil war); and he’s supported by several billionaires whose formative years were spent in apartheid South Africa.

Those same billionaires, in fact, funded the rise of JD Vance to the Senate.

On the other hand, if Trump decisively loses this fall and is unable to seize power via the Supreme Court or other means, I believe he’ll still try to start a second American civil war. The odds of his success are much lower without full access to the levers of power, but that hasn’t stopped many others in his same position throughout history.

Walter points this all out in her book and an amazing Ted Talk that’s well worth fifteen minutes of your time.

So, what can we do?

Walter argues that one of the top ways America could calm tensions and step back from the possibility of civil war is to regulate social media so they can no longer use their secret algorithms to prioritize messages — many originating from Russia — that are intentionally designed to tear the country apart.

The other step, of course, is to return America from anocracy back to democracy. That will require re-outlawing dark money in politics by reversing Citizens United, re-regulating corporate and individual contributions to candidates and causes, and returning our government to functions that give average people what they want rather than simply catering to elites.

Can we do it?

There’s little doubt in my mind that both President Biden and Vice President Harris are well aware of these circumstances that threaten actual nationwide violence; both have repeatedly referenced them, albeit tangentially or vaguely.

That increases the chances that if Democrats can take both houses of Congress and hold the White House this fall we can step back from the abyss while making life much, much better for the majority of Americans of all races and religions.

And that might even bring many of these Trump cult followers back to their rational senses, as America puts itself back together like we did after the Republican Great Depression. Dissent diminishes, after all, as society becomes more prosperous and egalitarian.

Can America avoid that worst civil war outcome and instead make the transition from a white-controlled economic and political system to a truly multiracial, multireligious, pluralistic democracy with a diverse middle class that’s again stable and prospering?

The answer, if enough of us vote this fall, is most likely an emphatic “Yes.”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.

1. The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990): Political and economic elites from different sectarian groups vied for power and resources, contributing to the outbreak and persistence of the conflict.

2. The Colombian Civil War (1964-2016 — I was there several times; a building just down the street from the seminary where we stayed was blown up and a friend’s wife was kidnapped): While it had roots in social inequality, political elites and wealthy landowners played a key role in perpetuating the conflict, including through the use of paramilitary groups.

3. The South Sudanese Civil War (2013-2020 — I was in South Sudan during this war providing food, tents, and medicine to refugees on the Darfur border, and met with and interviewed Salva Kiir Mayardit): Political elites and military leaders fought for control of oil resources and state power after the country gained independence.

4. The Ugandan Civil War (1981-1986 — I was in Uganda during this time, helping organize food assistance to refugees and war orphans): The war originated from power struggles between political and military elites following the overthrow of Idi Amin by Tanzania in 1979. Milton Obote, who became president again in 1980 after disputed elections, faced opposition from other political factions who claimed electoral fraud. Several elite-led armed rebellions formed against Obote's government, including Yoweri Museveni's Popular Resistance Army.

5. The Syrian Civil War (2011-present): While it began with popular protests, the Assad regime and other elites quickly mobilized to protect their interests and power.

6. The Russian Civil War (1917-1922): Following the Bolshevik Revolution, former elites and military leaders of the Tsarist regime fought to regain power.

7. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): Conservative elites, including landowners and the Catholic Church, supported Franco's rebellion against the Republican government.

8. The Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970): Regional elites in the oil-rich Biafra region attempted to secede, leading to conflict.

9. The Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996): Wealthy landowners and military elites resisted reforms and fought to maintain their privileged positions.

10. The Liberian Civil Wars (1989-1997, 1999-2003): Various factions led by political and military elites fought for control of the state and resources.

11. The Yemeni Civil War (2014-present): While complex, the conflict involved competition between various elite factions for political control.

12. The Angolan Civil War (1975-2002): Elites from different political movements fought for control of the state and resources after independence.

13. The First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972): Northern Sudanese elites sought to maintain their dominance over the south, leading to conflict.

The fellows from the UN who escorted us around South Sudan/Darfur (photo credit Joe Madison)