Expert on global political instability: United States ‘closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ ‘no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy’

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Yours truly recommends that one immediately blocks all nutjobs and obvious trolls on social media, before they are given the opportunity to bother one (or worse.) Never mind trying to set anybody straight, or taking pleasure in fighting with them, for civil war is coming and it is time to protect ourselves from the malevolent and stupid. That means the Trump supporters, the anti-vaxxers, the religious zealots, the conspiracy theorists, the far-left ‘woke’ mob, those overly obsessed with pop culture, and who else am I missing? Anybody spouting dangerous rhetoric – and pure stupidity is dangerous – must be avoided at all costs. We don’t have time to fool around anymore. Via Dana Milbank -  

If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. 

Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive techniques herself to this country. 

Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”  

Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6.  

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state. (Read more)

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