2024-03-25 09:37:00
A police officer outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C./Julia Nikhinson/Bloomberg/Getty Images
2024.03.25 Mon posted at 18:37 JST
(CNN) Three months into 2024, it appears that dire prophecies regarding political violence are now as common from the radical fringe as from our country’s mainstream. Former President Trump is perhaps the loudest prophet ever. He has warned that if the criminal charges against him lead to his defeat in the 2024 presidential election, there will be “chaos in the country.” These days, even seemingly mundane political proceedings can end up being a sign of violence. When the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in January and allowed federal border agents to remove concertina barbed wire installed by the state of Texas, some elected officials Some people pointed out that this was a harbinger of civil war. In a threat statement for 2024, the Department of Homeland Security predicts that year’s election, among other threats, will be a “key event of potential violence.”
Bruce Hoffman/Michael Lionstar
In her 2022 book “Is America Heading for Civil War?” renowned political scientist Barbara F. Walter argues that the United States is closer to civil war than anyone expected. The cause is a combination of events such as political extremism and polarization, social and cultural tribalism, popular acceptance of conspiracy theories, proliferation of firearms and heavily armed militias, and declining trust in governments and liberal-minded Western democracies. It’s a toxic mix. Among the important factors, Walter mentioned accelerationism. It refers to the eschatological belief that modern society is beyond saving and must be brought to an end sooner, or the idea that the end must be brought forward in order to realize a new order.
Jacob Ware
Accelerationism is supported by white supremacists, white nationalists, racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, and anti-government militias, and is seen as an ideology that loudly calls for revolution. They fervently believe in the statement that modern Western liberal states are so corrupt, incompetent, and irredeemable. They think they must destroy it and create a new society and style of government.
With the West supposedly on the precipice of collapse, proponents of accelerationism argue that a violent uprising is needed to corner democracies into oblivion. Only by bringing forward the destruction will the emergence of a white-dominated society and new order become possible. That’s their thinking. Launching violent attacks against racial minorities, Jews, liberals, foreign infiltrators, and power elites in order to incite conflict and polarization. The usual method of accelerationism is to cause a seismic collapse of the existing order and provoke a second civil war.
But this terrorist strategy is actually part of a long tradition. Radical and destabilizing far-right violence has created this tradition. To understand why, and to put these events into a broader context, we need to view the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as another milestone in a trajectory. This trajectory began in the late 1970s and gained momentum throughout the 1980s. Evolution stalled following the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing and a nationwide crackdown by law enforcement, but Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the financial recession hit the United States that same year. With a shock, a new target was injected. Then, in the 2010s, it was weaponized by social media. Fueled by heated rhetoric and political polarization, the United States continued to divide.
Former members of the National Security Council (NSC), Stephen Simon and Jonathan Stephenson, have deep knowledge of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. They similarly describe a situation in which the United States could easily descend into civil war. In their article they wrote: The United States “now appears to be in a state of “unstable equilibrium,” a term originally used in physics to describe a phenomenon in which an object that moves slightly causes another force to move it further away from its original position.” This situation increases the risk that violence could push the United States into chaos and anarchy. This is a situation that accelerationists are eagerly awaiting.
The most gloomy assessment, however, was made by Canadian journalist Stephen Marsh in his 2022 book, “The Next Civil War: The Dispatches from the American Future.” He argues that a new US civil war is inevitable. “America is ending, and the question is how,” Marsh said. In his view, “the United States is descending into a kind of sectarian conflict, usually in poor countries with histories of violence, the world’s longest-lasting democracies, and the world’s best. It is not a country that boasts of economic power.”
These may be overblown and alarmist claims, but there is more than a grain of truth behind these fears. A 2021 survey by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland and the Washington Post found that nearly a quarter of Democrats and 40% of Republicans said they were “somewhat likely to use violence against the government.” It turns out that he thinks that it can be justified in some way.
This is the highest percentage of responses to this question in over 20 years. These concerns have done little to alleviate these concerns, as a new survey conducted in 2024 by The Post and the University of Maryland’s center shows. “Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the Capitol than they were in 2021, and they are also more likely to believe that Trump was not responsible for the attack,” the Post reported.
But neither polls nor forecasts predict what will actually happen. We believe the likelihood of civil war is relatively low, in large part because America’s political divisions can no longer be reduced to clear geographic categories such as North versus South. Nor is the division centered around a single issue like slavery. Yet the United States now faces a different kind of threat. Rather than following the simple distinction between red states (strongly Republican states) and blue states (strongly Democratic states) or urban versus rural structures, different forms of violence can be called organized separatism. There is a greater possibility that this will manifest as a sustained nationwide terrorist act.
Remember, the United States leads the world in the number of firearms in civilian hands. Moreover, it is far ahead of other countries. Although the United States only accounts for 4% of the world’s population, it is home to roughly 40% of the world’s firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project based in Switzerland. An estimated 393 million firearms are owned by civilians in the United States. This means that each person in the country owns at least one gun. In fact, there are more civilian-owned firearms in the United States than in the top 25 other countries combined. Nearly 23 million firearms were purchased in the United States in 2020, more than in any year on record. According to Simon and Stevenson, this proliferation of civilian weapons in the United States “makes leaderless resistance even more viable.” That resistance was supported by militia theorists in the late 20th century. Currently, it is typically advocated by the far-right and anti-authoritarian Boogaloo movement (those wearing Hawaiian shirts).
In fact, some of the most ardent defenders of the Second Amendment, which gives individuals the right to own guns, have expressed their desire for a new civil war. Gun rights inspired the militia movement in the early 1990s and played a key role in inspiring Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. This incident was the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States until the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Even if the United States avoids an actual civil war, it is not difficult to imagine a variety of dark scenarios that could spark a wave of widespread political violence. If this happens, the country will lose its stability and existing divisions will become even more entrenched. There will also be serious challenges to the government’s ability to protect its citizens. In his 2023 book about the collapse of democratic norms in the United States, Richard Haas, then president of the Council on Foreign Relations, raised the possibility that the United States had a long-standing hold on Northern Ireland. We are faced with the pattern of the bloody sectarian conflict known as the Troubles.
Haas warns: “If there is a model we should fear, it comes from Northern Ireland and the Troubles. A 30-year conflict that began in the late 1960s involved numerous paramilitary groups, police and soldiers. As a result, approximately 3,600 people died, and local economic production plummeted.” Leading white supremacists in the United States, some of the biggest advocates of civil war and insurrection, have cited Northern Ireland as a model. And it views the leading local terrorist organization, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), as worthy of emulation. “Soon we will have our own ‘troubles’.” Robert Miles, one of the early leaders of America’s far-right violent underground, wrote in an online forum in the 1980s, using the ancient Scandinavian code name “Fafnir.” “You’re going to see a pattern of IRA activity in many parts of the country…soon the United States will be a replica of Ireland,” Miles said.
It ultimately succeeded in certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, and more than 1,000 rioters who took part in storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6 of the following year were arrested. At least half of these have either pleaded guilty at trial or been convicted. Furthermore, most of the events surrounding the 2022 midterm elections were peaceful. Nevertheless, the threat of far-right terrorism in the United States continues.
A long historical trajectory culminated in the attack on the Capitol, and the spread and rampant spread of conspiracy theories continues. Racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia are also on the rise and have already entered political and social discourse in the United States. Combined with easy access to firearms, the possibility of renewed domestic violence, including mass shootings, attacks on critical infrastructure, and bombings, cannot be dismissed or ignored. The reality is that
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Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a professor at Georgetown University. Jacob Ware is a research fellow at CFR and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University. This article is partially based on their recent book, “God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.” The contents of the article are the personal opinions of both individuals.
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