Dear Friends,
A friend of mine sent me an oped from “The Globe and Mail”, Canada’s most widely read newspaper by Thomas Homer-Dixon entitled: “The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare”, and the subtitle: “The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?”. I read it not to find out what Canada should do to prepare for the collapse of the United States, but to see what might happen to the country that I love. I have read numerous commentators who have spoken about the possibility of a civil war in the United States and those who say that such talk is crazy. I found this oped well researched and very logical. I now believe that there is a real and rather imminent possibility that the United States will see not just an increase in the already existing political violence but widespread armed clashes particularly surrounding the 2022 and 2024 elections.
This crisis has been a long time coming. As Mr. Homer-Dixon points out many of the causes of dysfunction and problems can be traced to our founding. While the founding documents purport to reflect a democracy, they do not. They enshrined slavery; they gave the vote only to landowning, white men; they set up the electoral college to ensure that the votes of the masses could be overturned by the elite; they established the senate with two senators for each state without regard to population thereby favoring the rural states.
During my adult lifetime, the United States has been moving inexorably to where we are today. Nixon shattered the myth of the legitimacy of the government, and Ford pardoned him which would ensure that future Presidents would do the same thing, and now they have. Carter tried to restore honor to the Presidency and was ridiculed for being a moral person. Reagan made it clear that government was the problem and solidified the Republican Party as the racist party out to maintain power at any cost. Bush 1 was portraited as a gentleman and thoughtful, compassionate conservative, but history has revealed that he just had a more gentile manner. Clinton moved the Democratic Party away from the working class that it was supposed to be working to protect and help to courting and doing the bidding of Wall Street. At this point why would any working person believe that the Democrats were on their side. Bush 2 demonstrated that the Republicans will elect anybody that they think can win and that they will do anything to win. Obama was seen as the last great hope for the Democrats. Unfortunately, since he was Black, a huge portion of the country would not accept him, and while he was smart and could give a great speech, he did not leave the impression that he was working for the working class. Then came Trump – the logical result of all that had come before.
Mr. Homer-Dixon points to Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s as an inflection point. Limbaugh was very proficient in driving wedges into American society. I would add that Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House from 1995-1999 added “legitimacy” to the Limbaugh approach to politics. The wedges driven by that approach led to Fox News and Newsmax. They and all the other social media platforms have amplified and broadened the wedges.
Mr. Homer-Dixon summarizes how we got to where we are today in three paragraphs.
What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind. Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979; meanwhile, between 1978 and 2016, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.
Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.
America’s economic, racial and social gaps have helped cause ideological polarization between the political right and left, and the worsening polarization has paralyzed government while aggravating the gaps. The political right and left are isolated from, and increasingly despise, each other. Both believe the stakes are existential – that the other is out to destroy the country they love. The moderate political centre is fast vanishing.
Mr. Homer-Dixon then adds, “And, oh yes, the population is armed to the teeth, with somewhere around 400 million firearms in the hands of civilians.”
I agree that both the right and the left believe they are engaged in an existential battle for the soul of our country and that the citizenry is armed to the teeth. Political violence in the United States is on the rise and a significant threat to the United States. The January 6th insurrection certainly verified that fact. So, it seems to me that we need to openly acknowledge that there is a real threat of civil war in the United States.
Mr. Homer-Dixon goes on to agree with Theda Skocpol that under Trump, the GOP became a radicalized “marriage of convenience between anti-government free-market plutocrats and racially anxious ethno-nationalist activists and voters.” GOP politicians are now controlled by Trump and Fox News personalities. There are now only three kinds of GOP politicians: those who truly believe in the fascism that Trump is pushing, those who are too cowardly to speak against the move to fascism within the GOP and those who are choosing to not run for re-election. Liz Cheney is the sole exception.
The GOP no longer holds the beliefs and ideals of our democracy. As Mr. Homer-Dixon points out, if a significant number of the members of a democracy no longer hold the beliefs and values of that democracy, it cannot survive.
Probably the most important is recognition of the equality of the polity’s citizens in deciding its future; a close runner up is willingness to concede power to one’s political opponents, should those equal citizens decide that’s what they want. At the heart of the ideological narrative of U.S. right-wing demagogues, from Mr. Trump on down, is the implication that large segments of the country’s population – mainly the non-white, non-Christian, and educated urban ones – aren’t really equal citizens. They aren’t quite full Americans, or even real Americans.
This oped was written before all hope of any significant federal voter protection legislation died. I think that we are very likely to undertake both the 2022 and 2024 elections without any federal protection for the right to vote or for an equal weight per vote. There is no question that if the Democrats win, the Republicans will claim fraud even if there is none, and we already know they are willing to use and/or condone violence to overturn that result. If the Republicans win, it may well be that the Democrats can demonstrate that the result was greatly impacted by the voter suppression laws being passed by the states as well as the changes in who determines what a valid vote count is. The United States Supreme Court has demonstrated that 6 of the 9 justices have no integrity and will support the Republican agenda. Consequently, either way political violence is certainly a foreseeable result.
Mr. Homer-Dixon goes on to consider a variety of futures for the United States. In the end, he seems to focus on a future based on the Weimar Republic. He sees five “unnerving parallels” to our current situation.
First, in both cases, a charismatic leader was able to unify right-wing extremists around a political program to seize the state. Second, a bald falsehood about how enemies inside the polity had betrayed the country – for the Nazis, the “stab in the back,” and for Trumpists, the Big Lie – was a vital psychological tool for radicalizing and mobilizing followers. Third, conventional conservatives believed they could control and channel the charismatic leader and rising extremism but were ultimately routed by the forces they helped unleash. Fourth, ideological opponents of this rising extremism squabbled among themselves; they didn’t take the threat seriously enough, even though it was growing in plain sight; and they focused on marginal issues that were too often red meat for the extremists. (Today, think toppling statues.)
To my mind, though, the fifth parallel is the most disconcerting: the propagation of a “hardline security doctrine.” Here I’ve been influenced by the research of Jonathan Leader Maynard, a young English scholar who is emerging as one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers on the links between ideology, extremism and violence. In a forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, Dr. Leader Maynard argues that extremist right-wing ideologies generally don’t arise from explicit efforts to forge an authoritarian society, but from the radicalization of a society’s existing understandings of how it can stay safe and secure in the face of alleged threats.
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Dr. Leader Maynard then makes a complementary argument: Once a hardline doctrine is widely accepted within a political movement, it becomes an “infrastructure” of ideas and incentives that can pressure even those who don’t really accept the doctrine into following its dictates. Fear of “true believers” shifts the behaviour of the movement’s moderates toward extremism. Sure enough, the experts I recently consulted all spoke about how fear of crossing Mr. Trump’s base – including fear for their families’ physical safety – was forcing otherwise sensible Republicans to fall into line.
There are certainly many other paths that the United States can take, but to ignore what has happened and what is happening and the parallel with historical events is to increase the chances of disaster. Americans have long held the arrogant belief of "American Exceptionalism", and that fact has kept us from making the progress toward our ideals that we should/could have made. It has also led us to make many terrible mistakes. Our failure to believe that America could lose its democracy is completely in line with our view of American Exceptionalism, but it is also what will be the underlying cause of the demise of our democracy.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
