Riots, Arson, Assassinations: Inside the Rise of Political Violence in the U.S.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Professor Barbara Walter, thanks so much for joining us. You have studied so many different types of societies who have been on the brink of, who’ve been in the middle of a civil war, who’ve been after, who’ve been survived after one. How is America on that timeline? How far along that timeline toward a civil war is the United States?

BARBARA WALTER: Yeah, yeah. So we have so much good research from really almost the last hundred years of countries around the world. I actually served on a US government task force that was run through the CIA that was designed to help our government predict where around the world, civil wars and political instability, and political unrest was likely to break out. The CIA is not allowed to look at the United States.

It is absolutely not a politicized organization. And we knew, we know very clearly that the two big risk factors are whether a country has a weak and partial democracy, and whether in those countries its political parties had divided along racial, religious, and or ethnic lines. So it really didn’t take a lot to know those facts and then look to see what was happening here in the United States. We also know who tends to start civil wars. Most people think it’s gonna be the poorest members of society, and, and they have the motive, they have the grievances, they have a reason to rebel, or they think it’s the most heavily discriminated, or it’s the immigrants. All these groups who who are, are in some ways downtrodden, but again, they don’t start civil wars.

The groups that tend to start civil wars, especially ethnically based civil wars, are the groups that had once been dominant and are in decline. So they used to dominate politically, economically, and oftentimes socially. And they’re losing that position oftentimes because demographics are changing again. You know, this is not, these are not studies that were done in the United States. These were studies that were done on over 200 different civil wars that we’ve seen around the world. And if you apply that to the United States, you also see similarities. The, we’ve, we’ve seen a significant rise in violent extremism since 2008. Some of it’s been on the left, but the vast majority of it has been on the far right, and it’s been perpetrated almost exclusively by white men. And again, if you look at the history of the United States, the group that had been dominant since the very inception of our country were white men. They also tended to be Christian, and they are losing that position. It’s no longer guaranteed that you’re gonna get into the best schools or get the best jobs or, or have you know, economic security your whole life. Suddenly there’s a lot of competition out there, and you see a subset of this population becoming increasingly resentful, angry, and they truly feel that this is their country, and that they’re being patriots by, by saving what they believe is the true identity of this country, and they’re willing to use violence to do it.

SREENIVASAN: just just last week, the FBI, the Capitol Police, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter-Terrorism Center sent out this statement that said, “following the 2022 midterm election, perceptions of election related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets such as ideological opponents and election workers”. Are elections trigger events?

WALTER: Yeah. The two big triggers are when a group, especially this group that’s in decline, loses a series of elections. That’s especially true in a democracy. And especially true in a democracy based on majoritarian rule. So here in this country, you know, just how much political power you have based on the results of an election, if you gain a majority of the votes you get to be in power. And if you don’t, you’re out of power. And what the Republican party has been seeing, geez, over the last few decades, is that their numbers are declining, and they are increasingly unable to win the presidency with the popular vote. And so this can be triggering because it’s a loss of hope for those people who, who believe in the system and who otherwise would work within the system if it actually guaranteed or, or it gave them a good shot of power. But what the Republican Party is increasingly seeing and how it’s being interpreted by extremists within their party is that they can’t, democracy no longer works for them. They can’t work within the system and still emerge victorious. And so the radicals are beginning to create this narrative that you know, this is our country. We need to take it back. We will not be replaced, and we are justified, We are justified to take it back in any way that we can. And so elections can be very, very triggering,

SREENIVASAN: So what is that tipping point where enough of those people feel like I’m losing a grasp. My numbers might not be reflected in my power, and I need to take control by any means necessary.

WALTER: The midterm elections don’t worry me, but the big election in 2024, that worries me, and it worries me no matter who wins. If the Republicans win that, that election of which they may well do; their incentive to to hold onto power is to use legal means. And legal means can be to increase gerrymandering. Legal means can mean to stack the courts. They can use a whole series of measures that are allowed to, in some ways, cement in minority rule to ensure that when elections are held in the future, that, that the opposition never comes to power. This is sort of classic Viktor Orban in Hungary moves. And, and we know that that’s what Trump intended to do. After he lost the, after he lost the election, when he was trying to overturn it, he came out and said you know, once I’m back in power, we’re gonna ensure that I never lose it again.

The strategy that makes sense for Republicans, given that they’re heavily based on white Christians and white Christians are declining as a demographic here in the United States, is to do everything possible to make it hard for the opposition to win. I also worry if, of course, if the Democrats get elected, the Republican party and its leadership is gonna double down on this narrative that the election was once again stolen.  And if, if they become convinced that they can go to vote, they can do everything that they’re told is correct in a democratic system, and they can never win this gives sort of fuel to the fire of extremists who are saying, See, we told you So we’re gonna have to think of another method to to take back control.

SREENIVASAN: So as you’ve studied all these different countries, and you’ve seen these preconditions exist and you’ve seen events that have triggered civil wars, what are the things going back over the last few years where you’re more concerned that this is possible here?

WALTER: If you go on, on the internet and you Google 2012 guide to insurgency, Guide to the Analysis of insurgency, that’s a CIA declassified report, and it’s their report on what should we be looking for in countries around the world? And, and it’s just shocking to read because of course, none of it was written with the United States in mind. But as an American citizen, when you read it, you see so many parallels. There are three stages according to the manual. There’s the pre insurgency stage, the incipient insurgency stage, and the open insurgency stage.

The pre insurgency stage is when you have these groups they’re, they’re, they’re coming together. They’re figuring out that they have, like, they’re angry at the same thing. They’re starting to craft a narrative about what they stand for and what they’re angry about. Oftentimes this includes myths and lies. In the incipient insurgency stage the CIA says, This is kind of the most dangerous phase. This is when those groups are beginning to get an armed wing. They’re starting to train. You start to see isolated acts of violence. The violence is actually pretty specific. It tends to be terrorist violence directed at civilians. You’ll see assassination, assassination attempts of opposition leaders. You’ll see bombs of federal buildings or government buildings. You’ll see the targeting of minority groups or groups that the, the terrorist organization is angry with.

And the reason why this is the most dangerous phase is that oftentimes the government of the country where that’s experiencing this, it’s not putting, it’s, it’s not connecting the dots. It sees these as isolated incidents. It often claims that they’re results of criminals or terrorists or or people who are crazy. They’re not seeing the larger pattern. And then the open insurgency stage is when you start to see a sustained series of attacks, they tend to use more sophisticated equipment. The attacks are larger in scope. They’ll attack infrastructure. And, and that’s when people suddenly realize, Wow, we really have a big problem. But oftentimes that’s, you know, pretty far down the road before people realize what’s been happening.

SREENIVASAN: You know, this comes from kind of different ends of the political spectrum, but we had an individual who was making threats to a sitting Supreme Court justice. And recently we had an individual in the home of the Speaker of the House and who attacked the husband of the speaker. And I wonder if these things, you know, how you place them on that that incipient insurgency level. Are we there? 

WALTER: Yeah. We are absolutely there. So this would, this would be a perfect example. The man who broke into the Pelosi home looking for Nancy, and eventually attacked her husband. He had clearly been radicalized online. He believed that he was a a patriot that Nancy Pelosi was trying to steal this country. And if you looked at his internet footprint, he was on the far right sites. He was a believer in Q Anon conspiracies. He was a believer in the big lie. He did believe that the Democrats had stole in the last election. He is a perfect example of this movement of disaffected men, mostly, almost exclusively men who are really angry at the direction of the country, who are active online and are getting information that continuously feeds them these lies. And they’re beginning to act out.

SREENIVASAN: You know, last week we had a judge refuse to bar a group of people, armed activists from monitoring a ballot Dropbox in Arizona and in Maricopa County said that doing so would violate the First Amendment rights of those individuals standing on that sidewalk, heavily armed, watching people add their votes into this ballot box. When there are these forces that can intimidate how an election is carried out, and whether people feel comfortable coming to a polling location or to  a, a place that they can cast their vote, what does that do?

WALTER: Yeah. Well, we know how terrorism is designed to work, and one of the strategies that terrorists pursue, and this is all around the world is called an intimidation strategy. And it’s designed to sort of put out into the community or put out towards the group that you’re targeting this, this sense of threat. If you don’t do what we want you to do then your life is at risk, or your family’s life is at risk, and it’s designed to essentially intimidate them into submission. And so people will stop to go, or some people will stop to go vote because voting is already harder than it should be in this country. And if, if you’re now facing you know, a possible threat and you know, this person can identify you and maybe he even knows where you live you know, voting just for, for some people will no longer be worth it. So it’s a very, very effective strategy to control the pe, the behavior of people who you wanna suppress. You see this all over the place, and this is a classic case of that.

SREENIVASAN: What does a Civil War look like in the 21st century? Because I wonder if we’re limited by our historical understanding. And we assume that people are gonna stand across a field from one another dressed in blue coats and red coats. 

WALTER: Yeah. That is the old schooly type of civil war. That doesn’t really happen anymore. And it certainly does not happen in a country with as powerful a military as we have. If you are a militia operating in Nevada, and you wanna, you know, you’re unhappy with the direction of this country, you’re not gonna try to change it by directly confronting the American military. That is a recipe for disaster. You’re gonna do it much more clandestinely. You’re gonna do it in a very decentralized way. And so the 21st century civil wars that we see are, tend to be very decentralized. So they will target here in this country because it’s likely to be an ethnically based war.

They’re gonna target African American churches. They’re gonna target synagogues. They’re gonna target urban centers where lots of liberals live. They’re gonna target federal judges who are making judgements that they feel are left of center and they don’t agree with. They’re gonna be attempting to assassinate democratic leaders. This is the type of 21st century civil war that we see. And it can actually be quite effective because it’s hard to stop. They the far right has a term for it. It’s it’s called leaderless resistance. It’s a type of cell terrorist warfare, guerrilla warfare. That’s what a 21st century war is likely to look like. Not not these two big armies facing each other on a battlefield.

SREENIVASAN: Is there, this is sort of a dark question, I guess, but is a civil war in America if or when?

WALTER: What we’re lucky with is that we have this information. We know that weak democracies are at risk. We know that when we begin to organize ourselves, not along political ideas, but along race and religion, that’s when you get in trouble. We also know that full healthy democracies do not experience civil war. We know what it takes to turn this around. And, and there’s time. 

But if instead we go in the opposite direction, if we continue to attempt to suppress the vote, if we continue to try to make it harder to vote, to give certain advantages to some parts of the country, over other parts of the country then again, we’re going in the wrong direction that’s making our democracy weaker. And if our political parties continue to sort of double down to serve their increasingly, you know, passionate is probably a nice word, passionate bases. This is deeply divisive. And, and, and this is what we know tends to lead countries down the path towards more violence, not less. So we know what to do. We just have to have the political will and our leaders have to have to have the courage to do something about it.

SREENIVASAN: Professor Barbara Walter from the University of California, San Diego, the book is called How Civil Wars Start. Thank you so much for your time.

WALTER: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.