As a war expert on a CIA panel, UC San Diego political scientist Barbara Walter helped forecast civil wars in other countries. Along the way, she discovered some of those predictors apply to the United States. KPBS spoke recently with Walter, who wrote the book "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them."
What are the conditions that could lead to civil war?
Walter: The two big factors are, first and foremost, something we call anocracy. It's just a fancy word for partial democracy. It's countries that have elements of democracy. They have elections, people vote, but they also have elements of authoritarianism. They have a very, very powerful president, often who has very few constraints on his power. The second factor is whether the political parties in these partial democracies form mainly around race, religion or ethnicity rather than ideology.
So how does the United States stack up against those measurements?
Walter: The United States today is definitely in this anocracy zone, this dangerous partial democracy zone. We were a healthy democracy up until 2016. Between 2016 and 2020, our democracy declined quite rapidly. We hit a low point until recently. In December of 2020, when we officially entered this anocracy zone that's so dangerous, we got a little bit of a bump. In 2021, when there was a peaceful transfer of power, Trump left the White House. The Biden administration came in. American democracy seemed like it was on better footing for a while. But since Donald Trump has come back to the White House, our democracy has declined faster than it ever has in America's history.
You write in your book "How Civil Wars Start" that people might put up with poverty, they might put up with unemployment, bad schools and more, but they will not tolerate losing their status. How is that playing out in the country right now?
Walter: If you look at the Republican Party, up until this last election in 2024, it was over 80% white. If you were to walk down the street and you were to see somebody like me, and you would try to guess if I was a Republican or Democrat, you should guess that I'm a Republican simply because I'm white. And that is in a country that's multiethnic, multi-religious, multiracial. So our parties are more ethnically, religiously, racially based than would make sense if you look strictly based on ideology. On the other side of the ledger, if you look at the Democratic Party, the overwhelming majority of African Americans, a majority of Latinos, the majority of Asians, a majority of Muslims and Jews vote for the Democratic Party.
So, Professor Walter, you also say that those who can make people believe absurdities can also make them commit atrocities. Relate that to the current moment in the country.
Walter: The people who tend to initiate violence are the people who once had a lot of status and privilege, who had once been dominant in that country politically and economically, but who understand or they see themselves in decline. They are losing status. And what happens in those situations is they create this myth, this myth that they are the founders of the country, that they deserve to rule, that the identity of the country is based on their identity. And those myths are then spread through society to get more support. So the people who seem to feel most justified in turning to violence, the people who think probably that they're most likely to get away with it or be supported in this mission, are the people who are in power and see that power slowly declining.
Given what you've just outlined, do you really think civil war could break out in the United States?
Walter: So I don't think it could break out in the near future. I don't think we're on a precipice. I'm not building a bunker in my backyard. I served on this task force run by the U.S. government, where we used this model — this anocracy plus identity parties model — to predict where we were likely to see war. But it means that every year that you continue to have those two features, every year that a government doesn't reform and make its democracy stronger, every year that its political parties don't reach across racial, ethnic and religious lines to have more inclusive parties, that risk goes up.
Describe what civil unrest in the United States might look like.
Walter: Most people, when they think about another American civil war, they think about an 1860s version of a civil war, and they immediately think that will never happen again. And they're right. And the way to think about that is really to think about it more like an insurgency, more like guerrilla warfare, where you have militias that are operating in different parts of the country. Sometimes they're coordinating with each other, and sometimes they're operating independently, and they're not interested in engaging in government. If these militias were to try to attack the US Military, they'd be destroyed. And so they're smarter than that.
So part of the title of your book, "How Civil Wars Get Started," is also, how can they be prevented? How can they be stopped?
Walter: Well, if you go back to first principles — if having a weak democracy and having your population be sort of fixated on identity rather than unity are the key drivers — then if you fix those two things, you're going to be in the Denmark category. Nobody worries about a civil war in Denmark. So reforming our political system would be the very first and most important thing to do. Then the question is, what are the other ways that we can prevent the rise of political violence? I think the single easiest and most immediate thing that we could do, and also the cheapest — for everybody except maybe a few tech moguls — is to regulate social media. The five biggest tech companies in the world are all American companies, and they are essentially unregulated. When I say regulation, I do not mean regulating content. I am all for Facebook or Google allowing anybody to put whatever content they want on social media. I mean regulating the algorithms that these tech companies have produced that disproportionately spread particular types of messages. And they're spreading messages that we know tap into people's deepest, darkest emotions. Their fear, their anger, their sense of threat. So let people put whatever content they want on the Internet, but don't allow tech companies to take the most incendiary types of information and spread it to the widest possible audience.
It is absolutely unfathomable for people to believe that civil war can happen here. Why is that?
Walter: It's because we love our country. I love my country. I love my neighbors. I'm so proud of living here. And I think it's human nature. To deny, to try to ignore, to gloss over our worst tendencies until it's too late, until there's no possible way that we can deny it anymore. So I think, you know, we've lived in a time since the end of World War II that has been the most peaceful, the most prosperous, the most democratic time in American history. And everybody has a status quo bias. We all think that the way we're living, the way things are today, are the way they're going to be tomorrow. And life has been really good. And so it's really very, very hard to think that anything different can occur. But America has had a civil war. We have had one of the most destructive civil wars that any country in the world has ever had. So it is absolutely possible here, and Americans are capable of that. It's just that we don't like to think about it, because who wants to think that way?
What keeps you up at night and what gives you hope?
Walter: Actually, what keeps me up at night is the thought of Donald Trump or Donald Trump 2.0 actually succeeding and the United States becoming a dictatorship. And that keeps me up at night not only for my country, my family, but also for the rest of the world.
