More likely a Northern Ireland insurgency could emerge if the right-wing has its ‘perfect storm’ improvement on January 6, 2021 and makes 2024 the last election, since it was at least one 2020 insurrection option still insisted-on by trumpists.
What the RWNJ may foment is a conflict more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland or the guerrilla war in Colombia — a normalization of political violence that endangers basic security. And has it started already, especially if there is a need for a third Reconstruction, it could be argued that the second Civil War, one of Jim Crow repression and insurgency with dixiecrats and the KKK, has existed with the third only making itself more inevitable with the rise of trumpism.
The Daughters of the Confederacy keeps renaming themselves. But be assured "Moms for Liberty" is the same old civil war holdout revisionist garbage as every other John Birch Society front organization.
(2022)
A slew of recent opinion polls shows a significant minority of Americans at ease with the idea of violence against the government. Even talk of a second American civil war has gone from fringe fantasy to media mainstream.
“Is a Civil War ahead?” was the blunt headline of a New Yorker magazine article this week. “Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?” posed the headline of a column in Friday’s New York Times. Three retired US generals wrote a recent Washington Post column warning that another coup attempt “could lead to civil war”.
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.
www.theguardian.com/...
(2022)
The generals are likely familiar with the Political Instability Task Force (P.I.T.F.), a group of analysts that has been crunching enormous amounts of data in order to predict where conflict might erupt. Barbara F. Walter is a member of the task force who has spent 30 years studying civil wars around the world. Her new book, “How Civil Wars Start,” explains that studies have identified three factors that predict which countries are most likely to descend into civil conflict.
The first is whether a country is in transition toward or away from democracy. A data set known as the “polity score” rates every country on a scale from +10 (most democratic) to -10 (most authoritarian). Those countries in the middle — between +5 and -5 and therefore neither full democracies nor full autocracies, or what the experts call “anocracies” — are twice as likely as autocracies to experience political instability or civil war and three times as likely as democracies.
The second factor is what the P.I.T.F. calls “factionalism,” which in Walter’s definition arises when a political party is based on ethnicity, religion or race instead of ideology. According to a study of hundreds of countries over 70 years, the presence of anocracy and factionalism was the best predictor of where civil wars were likely to erupt. It’s in this zone, Walter writes, that “politics goes from being a system in which citizens care about the good of the country as a whole, to one in which they care only about members of their group.” These factions tend not to harden on their own. Frequently, what the researchers call an “ethnic entrepreneur” — for example, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia or Omar al-Bashir in Sudan — stirs up fears within one group that they are under threat from another group and must band together.
Finally, Walter details a third factor: a dominant group’s loss of status. Called “downgrading,” this predicts which groups are most likely to initiate conflict: those experiencing not just political defeat, but “status reversal.”
www.nytimes.com/...
(2021)
Private militias: Rachael Levy of The Wall Street Journal writes that “several-hundred private-militia groups now exist around the country, and they have proliferated in recent years.” Current militias generally are made up of right-wing white men who worry about changing demographics, stagnating wages, and how the shift to a multi-racial and multi-ethnic America will affect them. These groups create the potential for violence because they tend to attract radicalized individuals, train members for violent encounters, and use social media to reinforce people’s existing beliefs. They openly talk about armed rebellion, and some members of these organizations already have engaged in violence and are helping others plan their own assaults and shootings.
Still, civil war is not inevitable
Take a deep breath. Despite the factors above, civil war is not inevitable. Indeed, that scenario faces several limiting factors that hopefully will stop the escalation of conflict. Historically, other than during the 1860s and the Reconstruction period, these kinds of forces have limited mass violence and kept the country together.
Most of the organizations talking about civil war are private, not public entities: When Southern states seceded in 1860, they had police forces, military organizations, and state-sponsored militias. That varies considerably from today, where the forces who have organized for internal violence are mostly private in nature. They are not sponsored by state or local governments and do not have the powers of government agencies. They are voluntary in nature and cannot compel others to join their causes.
There is no clear regional split: We do not have a North/South schism similar to what existed in the 19th century. There are urban/rural differences within specific states, with progressives dominating the cities while conservatives reside in rural communities. But that is a far different geographic divide than when one region could wage war on another. The lack of a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to confront other areas, organize supply chains, and mobilize the population. There can be local skirmishes between different forces, but not a situation where one state or region attacks another.
www.brookings.edu/...
(2022)
The rising neofascist tide is global: Some white supremacists and other right-wing extremists see the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to gain combat experience they can later use in their battle against multiracial democracy and pluralistic society in the U.S. and other Western nations. Experts on political violence, fascism and other forms of political extremism continue to sound the alarm about the perilous moment now facing the United States, where democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Their warnings have been largely ignored by the country's political elites and the public more generally.
[...]
Donald Trump continues to threaten political violence against his "enemies" if he is punished for his crimes. Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and other right-wing propagandists are also threatening political violence on a near-daily basis across the right-wing media echo chamber. The FBI and law enforcement continue to uncover potential right-wing terrorist plots. Why are so few people taking these dangers of right-wing violence seriously?
In societies at risk for widespread political violence, is it common for the public and its leaders to be in a state of denial? For people to just ignore the obvious threats or say it is all just hyperbole?
What we tend to see frequently in countries with powerful militaries are insurgencies. These tend to be more decentralized and usually fought by multiple militias and paramilitary groups. These militias have political goals, but their methods are very different. They don't want to engage the military directly for the most part, don't want to target soldiers, because if they engage the U.S. military, for example, they're going to lose. They instead use unconventional methods, like guerrilla warfare, hit-and-run attacks, domestic terrorism, where they're targeting the soft underbelly of a society, such as civilian infrastructure. In the United States we are not going to see a civil war like we saw in the 1860s.
www.alternet.org/...