South Africa had all the risk factors associated with civil war: The country was an anocracy in 1988 and had been for decades, scoring just +4 on the polity scale. There was a minority government that excluded people from power based on race, and white citizens saw themselves as the country’s rightful heirs. They understood that any move to majority rule would mean a loss in their political status. Similar conditions had existed in Rhodesia, a country just north of South Africa, and a brutal civil war had occurred there.
But then something happened that brought South Africa back from the brink. In 1986, in response to the escalating oppression by the apartheid government, South Africa’s most important trading partners—the United States, the European Community, and Japan—imposed economic sanctions. South Africa was already suffering a recession, and in 1989, when F. W. de Klerk became president, replacing the inflexible P. W. Botha, he made an important calculus: to focus on his country’s survival. Though a member of the ruling National Party, de Klerk was also a pragmatist. If the economy collapsed, so would white wealth. Three out of four South Africans were Black; if he continued to insist on white rule, the ensuing civil war would be, for whites, unwinnable. Instead, de Klerk lifted the twenty-nine-year ban on the African National Congress and other Black liberation parties, restored freedom of the press, and released political prisoners, including ANC leader Nelson Mandela.
South Africa was closer to civil war in 1989 than the United States is today. The apartheid state that white South Africans created to suppress Blacks was far more repressive than the pseudo-apartheid state the United States had until 1965. It was illegal for Black South Africans to marry white people, to establish their own businesses in white parts of town, or to access beaches, hospitals, and parks that were marked “white only.” Also, South Africa’s history as an anocracy was much deeper than that of contemporary America, having lasted for decades. The United States has only just entered the middle zone. South Africa also had two major groups that considered themselves sons of the soil: both Blacks and whites claimed a historical stake to the land. In the United States, only one group (besides the marginalized and relatively small population of Indigenous peoples) makes that claim. The threat of bloody conflict in late-1980s South Africa dwarfs the danger in America today, and yet South Africa avoided war.
South Africa reminds us of the power of leaders—business leaders, political leaders, opposition leaders. Leaders can compromise in the face of danger, or they can choose to fight. Botha chose to fight. De Klerk and Mandela chose to work together. Mandela and other Black leaders could have rejected terms that allowed whites to retain significant political and economic power. De Klerk could have refused to give Blacks full civil rights and majority control of the government. Botha hadn’t been willing to do what de Klerk did. The same is true of President Assad in Syria. He chose not to compromise with the majority Sunnis despite the enormous costs of remaining firm. Ulster Protestants didn’t compromise with Irish Catholics. Maliki didn’t compromise with Iraq’s Sunnis. Mandela, who had originally been in favor of violent resistance, could have advocated ethnic violence—he could have been an ethnic entrepreneur, tapping the anger and resentment of his Black countrymen to seek full control of South Africa through civil war. But instead he preached healing, unity, and peace. It was the leaders in charge who spared South Africa more conflict and bloodshed.
In 1993, both de Klerk and Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize. Critics have argued that de Klerk did not deserve the award; he had been part of the system that had oppressed Black South Africans for decades and had compromised only to survive. It was Mandela, they argue, who saved the country. This is only partly true. Mandela certainly had the moral high ground; most leaders who had spent twenty-seven years in a prison cell would have wanted to exact revenge, especially with such an overwhelming demographic advantage. But de Klerk’s actions were no less critical. Had South Africa’s new leader refused to negotiate in 1990, had he not agreed to significant political reforms, Black South Africans would have eventually rebelled with or without Mandela. This is what we saw in Syria in 2011, when Assad chose to start bombing his people. This is what we saw in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the British government sent troops rather than mediators. De Klerk made a different decision.
Violence often springs from a sense of injustice, inequality, and insecurity—and a sense that those grievances and fears will not be addressed by the current system. But systems can change. No one thought that white South Africans would reform a system designed specifically to cement their dominance. But when the costs of maintaining that dominance became too high, and business leaders who were hurt by sanctions insisted on reform, they dismantled it. If South Africa could reform, so can the United States.
I wish I could take all the facts and figures that experts have collected over the past half century and tell you exactly what will happen to our country. But even with the best data, we cannot predict the future. All we can do is try, along with our fellow citizens, to shape it in a positive, peaceful way. Political scientists have spent decades studying the forces behind civil wars and the dynamics of terrorism; these insights can be used not just to anticipate war but to thwart it. We know why democracies decline. We know why factions emerge and the conditions under which they thrive. We know the early warning signs and the tactics of violent extremists. Groups like the Proud Boys have a playbook. But there is no reason why we, the people of the United States, cannot choose to carve out our future; we, too, have a playbook.
—in any given year, less than 4 percent of countries that meet the conditions for war actually descend into armed conflict—but where they do happen, they tend to repeat themselves. Between 1945 and 1996, over a third of civil wars were followed by a second conflict. Since 2003, with the exception of conflicts in Libya and Syria, every civil war has been a sequel—a repeat of a previous war. Leaders of these movements (or their modern incarnations) will go underground or disappear, waiting for a moment when grievances are reignited or the government is once again weak. Then they will begin to build a new movement. Even if the original leaders and soldiers are long dead, old fault lines often haven’t been repaired, and the myths and stories live on. Ethnic groups, especially those in decline, often fight a second civil war because the conditions that drove their original grievances either haven’t been addressed or have worsened. The next generation of fighters has lived with the loss, and witnessed the further downgrading of their people. They are determined to take back what they believe is rightfully theirs. Croats and Serbs have fought multiple times throughout history. So have the Sunni and Shia in Iraq. And the war between the Moros and the Philippine government has gone through several iterations as various groups have disappeared, only to reemerge in new forms. Ethiopia, Myanmar, and India have experienced multiple civil wars. Experts call it “the conflict trap,” and while it’s of course bad for the combatants, it’s good for outside observers. Countries like China and the United States, which have each experienced only one civil war, can learn from others’ mistakes.
Back in 2014, I was commissioned by the World Bank to study the conflict trap. I looked at all civil wars between 1945 and 2009, and what I found was this: Most countries that were able to avoid a second civil war shared an ability to strengthen the quality of their governance. They doubled down on democracy and moved up the polity scale. Mozambique did this after its civil war ended in 1992, when the country moved from one-party rule to multiparty elections. In the wake of a conflict that ended in 2003, Liberia increased institutional restraints on presidential power and pushed for more judicial independence. Countries that created more transparent and participatory political environments and limited the power of their executive branch were less susceptible to repeat episodes of violence.
Improving the quality of a country’s governance was significantly more important than improving its economy. In another large study commissioned by the World Bank, James Fearon considered the economic question. When a rich country had a worse government than experts would expect given its prosperity, he found that it faced “a significantly greater risk of civil war outbreak in subsequent years.” So a wealthy country like the United States is more likely to experience a civil war when its government becomes less effective and more corrupt, even if its per-capita income doesn’t change.
Until this study, we knew that anocracy left a country at higher risk of civil war, but we didn’t know exactly why. What was it about anocracies that made them particularly vulnerable? Or to put it another way, which features of democracy were more or less important? Fearon found that “all good things tend to go together” but that three features stood out: “the rule of law” (the equal and impartial application of legal procedure); “voice and accountability” (the extent to which citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media); and “government effectiveness” (the quality of public services and the quality and independence of the civil service). These three features reflect the degree to which a government serves its people and the degree to which its political institutions are strong, legitimate, and accountable. Improvements in governance tend to reduce the subsequent risk of war.
The quality of American governance has been declining since 2016, according to the Polity Scale and since 2015 according to V-Dem’s scale. One of the most obvious ways has been in accountability. Free elections are the central mechanism of accountability in a democracy, but unlike many other countries, America lacks an independent and centralized election management system. According to the political scientist Pippa Norris, an elections expert and the founding director of Harvard University’s Electoral Integrity Project, almost every new democracy going through a transition sets up a central independent election management system to protect the integrity of elections. This helps to build trust in the electoral process. Uruguay, Costa Rica, and South Korea all did this when they created their democracies. Large federal democracies such as Australia, Canada, India, and Nigeria have also managed their elections this way. Canada’s election system is run by Elections Canada, and all voters follow the same procedures no matter where they live.
An independent and centralized election management system establishes a standard procedure for designing and printing ballots and tabulating votes accurately and securely, untainted by partisan politics. It can handle legal disputes without the involvement of politicized courts. In a 2019 report, the Electoral Integrity Project examined countries’ electoral laws and processes and found that the quality of U.S. elections from 2012 to 2018 was “lower than any other long-established democracies and affluent societies.” The United States received the same score as Mexico and Panama, and a much lower score than Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Chile. This is the reason why it is easier to spread claims about voter fraud in the United States, and why Americans are more likely to question the results.
The right to vote has also been increasingly politicized, with Republicans repeatedly stacking the deck against minorities. Strengthening the Voting Rights Act would go a long way toward eliminating voter suppression and deepening people’s trust in the system. Another important reform is automatic voter registration (AVR), where anyone who interacts with the Department of Motor Vehicles is automatically registered to vote unless they opt out. In states that have already adopted AVR, including California, Oregon, and Washington, the measure has led to major increases in voter turnout. It is the single easiest thing that we could do to make our government more participatory and, therefore, more democratic. These measures won’t assuage the far right—their vision of a white Christian nation depends on disenfranchising minorities—but shoring up the system as a whole could earn the support of moderate Americans and deepen their trust in the legitimacy of their leaders.
America might also take inspiration from the small wave of democratic rejuvenation that is occurring, even as democracy retreats worldwide. Canada and Scandinavia are leading the way. Canada focused on reaffirming voting rights after the center-left Liberal Party won a majority of votes in 2015. The 2018 Elections Modernization Act eliminated voter identification requirements, restricted political party and independent campaign spending and donations, expanded voting rights to include all Canadians abroad (even those who have lived outside the country for more than five years and are not planning to return), improved voter privacy, gave the commissioner of Canada elections more investigatory power, banned foreign donations, and required online platforms such as Google and Facebook to “create a registry of digital political advertisements” so that citizens could see who was trying to influence elections. In 2020, Canada received one of the highest freedom and democracy scores in the Freedom House Report.
In our country, gerrymandering—the practice of redrawing congressional districts to favor one party—tends to bring more extreme candidates to the forefront, since getting through primaries requires appealing to more extreme voters in those districts. These voters turn out in higher numbers because they tend to be more passionate about the outcome. Only federal lawmakers—America’s own de Klerks—have the power to institute a national reform of this system. Doing so would weaken the influence of extremist voters in both parties and greatly increase the potential for bipartisanship.
The U.S. government could also increase bipartisanship—and help avert conflict—by reexamining the electoral college system, which is, in its own way, a form of political gerrymandering. The American system is structured to exacerbate the urban-rural divide by giving small states disproportionate power in the Senate. Since 2000, two presidents have lost the popular vote but won the election after electoral college victories. Switching to a system where the popular vote determines who is president would prevent that, and also make it virtually impossible to win without appealing across racial lines. Want to know how to undercut destructive ethnic factions in the United States? Make each citizen’s vote count equally rather than giving preferential treatment to the white, rural vote.
This type of reform, however, is unlikely. Eliminating the electoral college through a constitutional amendment would require supermajority support, and this will be hard to achieve, since jettisoning the current system will put the Republican party at a disadvantage. But Congress could work to resolve another factor in Americans’ loss of faith in democracy: the idea that government serves special interests more than voters. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, individual donors can contribute unlimited amounts of cash to tilt the political scale in favor of candidates aligned with their own, rather than the country’s, best interests. The handful of individuals who donate billions of dollars to float dubious campaigns also tend to be far more ideologically extreme than the average American citizen. To prevent this, the federal government should close fundraising loopholes for candidates and officeholders, as Canada and other countries have done, and reinstate campaign finance rules.
All of these electoral problems damage the perceived legitimacy of the government, weaken America’s democracy, and worsen governance. They also move the country deeper into the anocracy zone. Today, Americans are distrustful of their government. They believe, quite rightly, that their democratic institutions often don’t serve the people’s interests. The solution is not to abandon democracy but rather to improve it. America needs to reform its government to make it more transparent, more accountable to voters, and more equitable and inclusive of all citizens. Rather than manipulate institutions to serve a narrower and narrower group of citizens and corporate interests, the United States needs to reverse course, amplifying citizens’ voices, increasing government accountability, improving public services, and eradicating corruption. We need to make sure that all Americans are allowed to vote, that all votes count, and that, in turn, those votes influence which policies are enacted in Washington. Americans are going to regain trust in their government only when it becomes clear that it is serving them rather than lobbyists, billionaires, and a declining group of rural voters.
Americans must be educated about the key levers of power in our democracy and the ways in which they can be manipulated. According to community organizer Eric Liu, “too many people are profoundly—and willfully—illiterate [about] power: what it is, what forms it takes, who has it, who doesn’t, why that is, how it is exercised.” And if Americans remain ignorant about how power operates in American politics, then people with nefarious purposes will step in and take it away from them. A 2016 survey led by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that one in four Americans could not name the three branches of government. This is why civic education, which has been declining for decades, must be reinstated. It teaches America’s youth how our democracy works, and the values, habits, and norms that are necessary to maintain it. A group of six former U.S. education secretaries, both Democrat and Republican, recently made the case for revamping civics through a project called the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy. They pointed out that we spend 1,000 times more per student on STEM education than we do on history and civics. The roadmap “cultivates civil disagreement and reflective patriotism”—an urgent task now that our democratic institutions are so vulnerable and precarious. A twenty-first-century civics curriculum would not only create a stronger electorate to balance the power of elites, but also lead to greater faith and trust in the system. “Our democracy,” according to Liu, “works only if enough of us believe democracy works.”
realize they are on the path to civil war until the violence is a feature of everyday life. Noor in Baghdad, Berina and Daris Kovac in Sarajevo, and Mikhail Minakov and Anton Melnyk in Ukraine—all confess that they didn’t see war coming until it was too late. By the time they grasped that something had changed, militias were operating in the streets and extremist leaders were hungry for war.
And these leaders, of course, have an incentive to keep the average citizen distracted from the work of the militias. At first, at least, they operate not by upending normal life but by reshaping it gradually, protecting their larger aims against possible countermeasures. This is a historical pattern. Milton Mayer, an American journalist who traveled to Germany in 1951, asked ordinary citizens about daily life in the years Hitler rose to power. One man, a baker, repeated a common refrain: “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.” Another German, a philologist, recounted that people could no more see it “developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
Our own psychological biases often prevent us from recognizing internal threats. It is much easier to blame outsiders for a heinous act than our own fellow citizens. Law enforcement officials, for example, are more likely to minimize the danger posed by individuals living in communities they know—most often, white communities—than by those they are less familiar with. It is no surprise that we tend to regard foreign terrorists as part of a larger movement while domestic terrorism is thought of as rare and isolated. In fact, unlike in other countries, such as Canada, the United States designates only foreign (not domestic) groups as terrorist organizations. There is no law that criminalizes domestic terrorism—none of the Capitol insurgents could be arrested on these grounds. Many Americans just don’t want to believe that our biggest threat comes from within.
Politicians on both the left and the right have also been reluctant to discuss America’s domestic terror problem, for political reasons: They either actively benefit from the support of extremists or worry about the political cost of turning on them. This collective blindness, willful or not, has put us in a precarious position. We are more prepared, as a country, to counter foreign enemies such as al-Qaeda than we are to disarm the warriors in our midst, even though the latter are currently more virulent and dangerous. If we are to avert civil war, we must devote the same resources to finding and neutralizing homegrown combatants as we do to foreign ones.
Already, we are behind. The United States has been slow to identify far-right infiltration of our security services, a threat that is common in the buildup to civil war. A 2009 report from the Department of Homeland Security observed that “right-wing extremism” was on the rise. The team behind the report, led by Daryl Johnson, had begun to scour extremist websites and message boards in 2007 and were surprised by what they found: bomb-making manuals, weapons training, and hundreds of militia-recruitment videos (on YouTube). Johnson’s report suggested that veterans might be especially susceptible to recruitment, based on a 2008 FBI assessment that found that more than two hundred individuals with military experience had joined white-supremacist organizations since the 9/11 attacks. The report, however, led to an outcry among congressional Republicans and veterans groups, and the DHS was pressured to withdraw it.
But Johnson was on to something. Though the networks of the armed services and law enforcement are vast, and white supremacist sympathies are far from dominant, there is nevertheless some overlap. An FBI report written in 2006, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” detailed the influence of white nationalism on police forces. “Having personnel within law enforcement agencies,” the report said, “has historically been and will continue to be a desired asset for white supremacist groups seeking to anticipate law enforcement interest in and actions against them.” A follow-up report, in 2015, found that right-wing and anti-government “domestic terrorists” appeared to be using contacts in law enforcement to access intelligence and avoid detection.
Indeed, the recruitment of former fighters appears to strengthen a movement. Janet Lewis, a civil war expert from George Washington University, found that almost all the rebel groups that were able to grow and endure in Uganda did so, in part, because they were able to enlist former soldiers and police officers to their cause. Ex-military and those in law enforcement offer a ready-made band of individuals with the training and experience to be effective soldiers. The 2009 Department of Homeland Security report also identified this phenomenon and concluded that “rightwing extremists [in the United States] will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge.”
If Obama was slow to respond to the threat of domestic terrorism, whether from outside or within government agencies, Trump simply ignored it. Instead, he continued the government’s policy, since 9/11, of focusing aggressively on Islamic terrorism. When he was pressed on domestic terror, he repeatedly portrayed left-wing militants as the real danger. FBI director Christopher Wray highlighted the threat posed by right-wing groups, and Trump’s response was to publicly criticize him. The muddled reaction by law enforcement to the attacks on the Capitol revealed the widespread failure to grasp the true menace—and reach—of extremism in America. After the attack, Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that arrests of white supremacists had almost tripled over the course of the last three years. He warned them that domestic terrorism was “metastasizing across the country.”
Stopping this cancer must be a priority. The decline in militias after the Oklahoma City bombing was in large part the result of an aggressive counterterrorism strategy supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations. The immense scale of the bombing led to real change within the FBI: In less than a year, the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) doubled—these are units that draw on the expertise of various agencies and levels of law enforcement—and there was an increase in hazardous-device training programs for local, federal, and state police officers. In 1996, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed, leading to the hiring of hundreds more investigators by the FBI. In 1997, various of the new JTTFs were responsible for preventing domestic terrorism acts by the KKK and other white supremacist groups. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI enlisted more than 1,400 investigators to sift through three tons of evidence to find the bomber Timothy McVeigh without any digital photographs. Deputy Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was the man put in charge of the investigation, and as the Biden administration’s new attorney general, he will also oversee the investigation of the Capitol attack. In this way, he will help shape the American response to domestic terror over the next decade.
response look like? If we know what terrorists are after, and how they are likely to pursue their goals, we can formulate our own counterstrategy, drawing on the experiences of other countries around the world. In the same way that extremists wield common tactics to destabilize democracies, so too are there field-tested methods of undermining, and disabling, their efforts.
The best way to neutralize a budding insurgency is to reform a degraded government: bolster the rule of law, give all citizens equal access to the vote, and improve the quality of government services. In the words of David Kilcullen—former special adviser for counterinsurgency in George W. Bush’s administration and chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department—the most important thing governments can do is to “remedy grievances and fix problems of governance that create the conditions that extremists exploit.” If America does not change its current course, dangers loom.
In the case of the United States, the federal government should renew its commitment to providing for its most vulnerable citizens, white, Black, or brown. We need to undo fifty years of declining social services, invest in safety nets and human capital across racial and religious lines, and prioritize high-quality early education, universal healthcare, and a higher minimum wage. Right now many working-class and middle-class Americans live their lives “one small step from catastrophe,” and that makes them ready recruits for militants. Investing in real political reform and economic security would make it much harder for white nationalists to gain sympathizers and would prevent the rise of a new generation of far-right extremists.
This is how most governments respond when faced with the possibility of insurgency—they institute the reforms necessary to avoid war—and it usually works. The Provisional IRA actively pursued a war of attrition against Great Britain, demanding fairer treatment, and they continued to launch terrorist attacks until Westminster eventually agreed to reform. The U.S. government shouldn’t indulge extremists—the creation of a white ethno-state would be disastrous for the country—nor should it exempt them from federal laws, but it could address grievances that affect a broad range of citizens, improving living standards and increasing social mobility after decades of decline. As Robert A. Johnson, head of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, put it: If America put “much more money and energy…into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and healthcare, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
Governments that work to show they’re effective receive an added benefit. Not only do they make it harder for extremists to radicalize moderates, they also undercut the ability of extremists to step in and compete with the state to offer services. Hamas’s popularity was built on the benefits it provided to Palestinians who were being neglected by the Israeli government, not on the attacks it launched against Israeli civilians. On some level, the support of the population comes down to who can provide the best services and the most protection. Today, U.S. lawmakers could, for example, reform existing immigration laws, laying out a path to citizenship and reducing the number of illegal immigrants, while ensuring that all citizens—white, Black, and brown—have affordable housing, the opportunity to go to college, and access to effective addiction treatment. The government should obviously take a zero-tolerance stance on hate, and punish domestic terrorism, but it could weaken support for extremism by addressing the legitimate grievances that many citizens have.
There are times, however, when the demands of insurgents would be dangerous for democracy, leaving a government little choice but to engage in targeted retaliation. President Lincoln was correct to refuse to negotiate with Confederate states over slavery. In these cases, governments should arrest, prosecute, and seize the assets of insurgents, making it harder for them to operate. Governments should also pursue a strategy called “leadership decapitation,” which involves imprisoning the leader or leaders of a terrorist group to hasten its collapse. Sometimes there is legal recourse. Following the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, a team from Georgetown Law School sued the right-wing demonstrators, citing an archaic state law prohibiting the gathering of “unauthorized militias.” Most of the groups that participated in the rally are now barred from ever returning to the city in an armed group of two or more.
In the United States, lawsuits have been particularly effective against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1980, a group of three Klansmen went on a shooting spree in a Black neighborhood in Chattanooga. They burned a cross on the train tracks and then, using a shotgun loaded with birdshot, injured four Black women who were two blocks away. Flying glass injured a fifth. The women sued and were awarded $535,000. More important, the judge issued an injunction against the Klan, preventing it from engaging in violence in Chattanooga. That means that if members of the Klan in Chattanooga were to violate the order they would be criminally liable. In another case, in 1981, a man named Michael Donald was walking into a store in Mobile, Alabama, when he was abducted by two members of the United Klans of America who were seeking retribution for the acquittal of a Black man in the shooting of a white police officer. Donald was beaten, had his throat slit, and was hanged; he was nineteen years old. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the United Klans of America, then one of the largest KKK groups, on behalf of Michael’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, using the Civil Rights Act of 1870 as the basis. Ms. Donald was awarded $7 million in damages for the loss of her son. This bankrupted the group, leaving Ms. Donald the owner of their headquarters.
Governments can also undermine extremists’ attempts to intimidate. Intimidation works only because the local population doesn’t believe that the government can take care of them or protect them from violence. The best way to counter this is not only by reestablishing people’s trust in the legitimacy of government, but also by ensuring adequate law enforcement and justice. This signals that the government is capable of protecting the population and identifying and punishing the perpetrators of crimes. It also discourages citizens from seeking protection from the extremists, which is often the first step in switching moderates’ allegiance. If citizens in rural Nevada or Oregon know that the federal government is in charge, as opposed to a far-right sheriff, they might be less apt to support a militia. This strategy, however, could also backfire, particularly in the West, where people are more likely to be fearful of federal encroachment on their land or freedom. In this case, the government could enlist federal agents who are from the area, or it could shore up local security forces that are viewed as legitimate by local citizens. This could go a long way toward building trust and acceptance of government even in places skeptical of government overreach.
What about outbidding? Local citizens will gravitate to the group they believe is more likely to deliver security and success. If you make sure my family is safe, and I believe you will give me a good job, I’ll support you. Governments can undercut support for extremists by reducing grievances, providing benefits for all citizens, and supplying hard evidence that playing within the system is more fruitful than defecting. The U.S. government, with its enormous wealth and institutional capacity, has the ability to outbid any insurgent group. If people feel that the government is on their side, they won’t need the insurgents. Delivering basic services can help the United States break out of the cycle of loss of hope and loss of faith in government.
What happens when insurgents want to prevent a compromise with the government? Moderate lawmakers and citizens have to believe that extremists can’t thwart a deal or impede reform by issuing death threats or threatening other violent action. Here in the United States, a deal would likely take the form of gun control legislation or immigration reform, and members of Congress would need to feel safe enough to publicly support such measures. Northern Ireland’s peace deal, the Belfast Agreement, succeeded, in part, because it required the passage of a popular referendum, which then revealed overwhelming Catholic and Protestant support for the deal. Governments can prevent extremists from holding legislation hostage by advertising public support for reform, and by identifying and punishing those who threaten or resort to violence in an effort to stop it.
deeply partisan times, and it is common to hear polarization described as the root of our problems. Liberals have become more liberal, conservatives have become more conservative, and there is little chance of the two sides meeting in the middle. Polarization, many pundits have argued, is tearing America apart.
But political polarization does not increase the likelihood of civil war. What increases the likelihood of civil war is factionalization—when citizens form groups based on ethnic, religious, or geographic distinctions—and a country’s political parties become predatory, cutting out rivals and enacting policies that primarily benefit them and their constituents. And nothing abets and accelerates factionalization as much as social media. After January 6, people kept asking me: What should we do? Do we need better policing? Better domestic terror laws? Does the FBI need to aggressively infiltrate far-right militias? My first answer was always the same. Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers, and enemies of democracy. America’s collective anger would drop almost immediately, as it did when Donald Trump could no longer reach every American twenty times a day, every day. (As the journalist Matthew Yglesias noted on Twitter: “It’s kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever.”) Curbing the dissemination of hate and disinformation would greatly reduce the risk of civil war.
A central driver to factionalism has always been conspiracy theories. If you want to incite people to action, give them an “other” to target. Emphasize a behind-the-scenes plot designed to hurt their group. Convince them that an enemy is steering the country to their disadvantage. This is exactly what slaveholders in the South did in the years before the Civil War. They portrayed abolitionists as an existential threat to their way of life. Online platforms have made conspiracies more virulent, more powerful. Modern conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of Infowars have painted immigrants and Jews as an existential threat. As Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
This kind of paranoia has always been part of the fabric of American life. But a new conspiracy theory took hold during the Trump era: QAnon, a fringe movement claiming that a secret cabal of prominent pedophilic Democrats are plotting to take down Trump. A December 2020 poll found that fully 17 percent of all Americans—almost one in five—agree with the statement “A group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.” Perhaps even more destructive, QAnon followers have joined with millions of other Trump supporters to spread the Big Lie—the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and that Democrats are intent on cheating to preserve power. In the weeks after the chaos of January 6, 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter cracked down on QAnon, removing accounts and pages associated with the group.
It doesn’t have to be this way. America is where the social media industry was born, and it’s home to the five major tech companies that control most of the information that is spread on social media. The U.S. government regulates all kinds of industries—from utilities and drug companies to food processing plants—to promote the common good. For the sake of democracy and societal cohesion, social media platforms should be added to the list. The impact would be global. Indeed, events in Charlottesville and elsewhere have inspired far-right movements around the world. The Capitol insurrection brought to light how U.S.-based movements are part of a global network of extremism. As pro-Trump supporters marched from the White House to the Capitol, alt-right propagandists in Berlin cheered them on. In Tokyo, meanwhile, demonstrators rallied under Rising Sun flags. Regulating social media would likely strengthen liberal democracies around the world.
It would also minimize factionalism by inhibiting foreign meddlers. Foreign governments have long sought to influence the outcome of civil wars. The United States sent billions of dollars to Chiang Kai-shek to try to help him defeat Mao’s communist rebels. European countries sent supplies to the Confederacy during our own Civil War. The United States fought proxy battles with the Soviet Union in civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Angola, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
But now any country, any group, and any individual can use the internet to destabilize an adversary. Rivals of the United States are deeply invested in stoking civil conflict, through support for a preferred group or by inciting both sides. Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer, has long understood the power of disinformation. Others have caught on. The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project—together with a team of scholars at Princeton—found that Russia, together with China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, used clandestine social media campaigns fifty-three times between 2013 and 2018 to try to influence the internal politics of another country. Most of the campaigns examined by the Princeton team (65 percent) aimed to denigrate a public figure, usually a politician, in order to get his or her opponent elected. (Between 2012 and 2017, for example, seven of the ten most-read online pieces about Angela Merkel were fabricated, according to BuzzFeed.) The United States was the main target of these attacks but not the only one. Great Britain, Germany, Australia, and others were also targeted. Almost all the attacks were aimed at democracies.
Social media has created the perfect conditions for factionalism by making it easy for outsiders to sow distrust and division. In 2016, a Facebook account called Blacktivist, supposedly run by Baltimore-based Black Lives Matter organizers, shared videos of police brutality and information on upcoming rallies. It also hawked “Blacktivist” merchandise with T-shirts emblazoned with “Young, Gifted, and Black.” The page had received 360,000 likes—even more than the official BLM page. CNN later reported that Blacktivist was one of more than 470 accounts linked to a Kremlin effort to infiltrate the Black Lives Matter movement. The larger goal, experts believe, was to inflame racial, regional, and religious tensions here in the United States.
The threat is as serious as a foreign power hiring mercenaries to fight on U.S. soil. America is a technological and military giant, but the internet and social media have left our democracy vulnerable to potent attacks. It used to be that if you wanted to aid a radical movement in another country you would drop leaflets from planes, distribute books and newspapers, send advisers to instruct soldiers, and smuggle arms and ammunition across borders. Now all you have to do is dominate the narrative on social media, and watch factionalism take root.
The United States is supposed to be a model of democracy, a beacon of freedom, but we have allowed money and extremism to infiltrate our politics. We can strengthen our democratic institutions and our society: We did this with the New Deal, when our government put people back to work, lifted many Americans out of poverty, and restored Americans’ faith in their economic system, reviving a sense of hope. We did it in the civil rights era, when citizens demanded equal rights and freedoms for African Americans, and the government responded, satisfying a desire for equity and justice.
And we can do it again, by reclaiming and mediating our public discourse so we can get off the path of self-segregating, predatory factionalism and restore hope in the long-term health of our country. We are already seeing this at the local level, where groups of citizens in every state are forming small organizations to try to restore civic values. One such group is Citizen University, started by Eric Liu, the son of Chinese immigrants, and Jená Cane, the granddaughter of a family who owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. Both have dedicated their lives to rebuilding America’s civil society, one block, one neighborhood, one town at a time. “We want to put an end to the myth,” Cane said, “that we’re a rugged, individualistic society, when the truth is that throughout our history, when disaster strikes, when a community needs rebuilding, when people are in need, Americans come together to help one another. That’s who we really are.”
One of the programs run by Citizen University is called Civic Saturday. Jen Boynton, a reporter, attended a Civic Saturday in Athens, Tennessee, in 2019. Almost seventy people attended the event in a dilapidated downtown park. What she found was the civic version of a church service: local citizens coming together to worship the Constitution and build their faith in our democracy. Instead of opening with a prayer, they opened with the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead of singing a hymn, they read a poem from an American author. Instead of reading a Bible passage, they read the Declaration of Independence. The first Civic Saturday was held in 2016 in Seattle, and Liu and Cane (who happen to be married) hoped—prayed—that people would show up. They came in droves; more than two hundred crowded into the bookstore that was hosting the first event. Five months later, eight hundred people came. What people are hungry for, said Liu, is community. Today, Civic Saturdays are being held in over thirty cities and towns around the country, both red and blue, from Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Kansas City to Southern Pines, North Carolina. “The great majority of people in America,” said Liu, “want to be part of a healthy version of us and not the January 6th version.”
And then there is EmbraceRace, a small nonprofit based in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was founded in 2016 by two parents of mixed-race children whose goal is to help other parents raise kids in a world where race is appreciated and embraced. BriteHeart is another nonpartisan group based in Tennessee that is dedicated to strengthening civic participation. According to Kate Tucker, who helps lead the group, “We don’t know if Tennessee is a red state. We do know it’s a non-voting state.” Living Room Conversations and Braver Angels both pair people from the left and the right in order to begin to rehumanize “the other.”
There are so many organizations like this emerging around the country, as Americans have begun to realize how fragile our democracy is and take action to preserve it. It is at the local level—in churches, voluntary associations, and grassroots groups—that we can once again come together and relearn the power of citizenship and community. Our shared history and ideals can inspire and guide us, reviving our national pride in a system that is truly of the people, for the people, and by the people.
in the lead-up to the 2020 election, my husband, Zoli, and I found ourselves asking a question neither of us had ever contemplated before: Were we nearing the time when we would have to leave our country?
My mother immigrated to the United States from a tiny town in Switzerland where women in her home canton did not get the right to vote until 1991. Her life on a small dairy farm had been hard, and there was no possibility of college. She moved to New York City in 1958 and fell in love with baseball, business, and the friendliness and ease of Americans. She never wanted to go back. My father journeyed to New York from a small town in Bavaria where he had lived through World War II. He started a small business and built it into a success. “Only in America,” he says, “could this have happened.”
Zoli, who came from Canada to attend college in America, has his own immigrant story. His father fled to Canada in 1956 from Hungary, after the Russians moved in and cracked down on student protesters. Between us, Zoli and I have many passports: Swiss, Canadian, Hungarian, German. But the United States is home. The most joyous holiday at our house in San Diego is Thanksgiving. It embodies everything we are grateful for: friends, family, food. America has given our family the gift to pursue our dreams. The gift to be ourselves. The gift to feel safe and free and to prosper.
This is where we want to live. But in November, after the election, Zoli and I began to actively discuss a plan B. Joe Biden had won, but Trump and many Republicans were doing everything they could to overturn the results. When the attack on the Capitol took place, on January 6, it seemed that America might be at a turning point. I knew from my research what happened to people who waited too long to leave combat zones. Daris was lucky enough to survive the siege of Sarajevo. Many of his neighbors were not.
Over the Christmas holidays, Zoli renewed our passports. We considered whether it made sense to apply for Hungarian citizenship for our daughter, Lina. In the end, we decided on Canada, because we could drive there in less than a day if necessary. Switzerland would be the backup. We were used to making emergency plans while traveling to conflict-prone countries: “If a coup happens in Zimbabwe while we are there, what do we do?” But now, suddenly, we were charting an escape route from our own beloved country. It seemed unfathomable.
The founding fathers could have created any political system they wanted. They could have anointed George Washington king, established an aristocracy, divided America’s rich land, and made themselves lords. But they were determined to create a democracy. The idea of such a system existed—in the narrow model provided by the ancient Greeks, and in the writings of Hume, Locke, Rousseau, and other political philosophers—but the reality did not. No country had ever attempted democracy on this scale, over such a large territory, where so many people would rule themselves. Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay tried to anticipate all the challenges the new nation would face: state versus federal power; how to prevent the tyranny of the majority; the threat of destructive factions. They knew that such a country would be raucous, unwieldy, and prone to conflict. And yet they persisted, believing a better, freer world was possible.
Of course, from another perspective—shared by millions—the dream was a nightmare. America was created to serve white men with property. The founders themselves were slave owners and did not believe that slaves deserved rights and freedoms. In fact, they did not even consider the enslaved to be full human beings. They also did not believe that white workers who didn’t own land could hold public office. And they did not believe women had any say in any of these matters. They were broad-minded, but only by the standards of their era. And even if they had been visionary enough to reify the idea that all men and women were created equal, it would have been impossible for them to anticipate the many changes America would face. Industrialization. Megacities. Cars. They had no way to predict the country’s future wealth and military power, or the changes wrought by globalization. The internet? Climate change? Trips to Mars? These are things they could not have fathomed.
America faces a monumental challenge: to create a truly multiethnic democracy, one that can survive and thrive as global migration continues to mold the country’s demographics and identity. The world has changed dramatically since the late 1700s. Democracy is no longer just for white men who own farms. It now includes women; rural, urban, and suburban families; people who were born here and people who risked their lives to come here; white, Black, brown, mixed race, and everything in between. We need them all: Countries that try to stop immigration will slowly die because their populations will dwindle. Our democracy will have to protect the rights of small groups while also forging a unifying national identity. We will need to show the world that a transition to multiethnic democracy can be done peacefully and with no decline in prosperity.
The United States will be the first Western democracy where white citizens lose their majority status. This is projected to happen in 2045, but other countries will follow. Around 2050, white citizens will become a minority in Canada and New Zealand. The shift will likely happen in the United Kingdom in 2066, and in all English-speaking countries by 2100. Far-right parties in all of these countries have issued ominous warnings about the end of white dominance, seeking to stoke hatred by emphasizing the great costs—economic, social, moral—of such transformation.
But that’s a myth, the latest in a long line of fables spun by people who see power as a zero-sum proposition. Many American cities have already proven it wrong. In Birmingham and Memphis—and other cities that have transitioned from a white to a Black majority—Black mayors have been elected and won the support of white voters. Whites who had worried that Black leadership would lead to Black retribution and white economic decline realized that their fear had been misplaced. Their lives continued much as before, while the lives of Black residents improved. People learned that having a multiethnic party in power was not a threat to their well-being. A new peaceful equilibrium was reached.
California is another successful example. Since becoming minority-white in 1998 (Texas followed in 2004), the state has seen its economy grow by 200 percent. Unemployment has dropped by almost 3 percent. GDP per capita in the state has increased by 52.5 percent. I moved to California in 1996. I live forty miles north of the Mexican border and teach on a campus that is only 21 percent white. Every day I see a vision of a more promising future: eager students, hardworking immigrants.
California’s transition met fierce resistance. In 1994, the state passed Proposition 187, the so-called Save Our State measure, prohibiting undocumented immigrants from receiving public services like healthcare and education. The referendum made the state the first in the modern era to approve major legislation aimed at deterring immigration and punishing the undocumented. Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, handily won reelection by campaigning in favor of Prop 187, running ads showing grainy footage of immigrants crossing the border en masse. He was California’s version of an ethnic entrepreneur. His play to white fear, which included harsher criminal justice policies, was a winning strategy. The greater the minority population—the greater the threat to white supremacy—the greater the white backlash.
But all of that began to change when California became a majority-minority state. As the minority population amassed enough support to wield political power, the state began to embrace its diversity, feeling its way toward policies that benefited not just white citizens but also Black citizens and immigrants—including laws that provided in-state tuition and driver’s licenses for the undocumented. Large-scale increases in education spending and major reductions in prison populations followed, improving the welfare and well-being of all residents. In less than three decades, the state shed its reputation for anti-immigrant activism to become a forward-thinking model for policies on immigration and inclusion. California still has many challenges: It has a quarter of the nation’s homeless residents, and ranks fourth highest in terms of income inequality. There has also been a number of recent attacks on elderly Asian residents. It is by no means a utopia. But the state’s journey from racial fear to broad racial acceptance shows what’s possible.
To fulfill the promise of a truly multiethnic democracy, the nation must navigate deep peril. We need to shore up our democracy, move out of the anocracy zone, and rein in social media, which will help reduce factionalism. This will give us a chance to avoid a second civil war. If we can do that, we might be in a position to tackle another looming threat: climate change. A warming planet will increase the number and severity of natural disasters, endangering our coastal cities, and causing heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts. It will also certainly increase migration from the global south to the wealthier, white north. In the absence of a strong and effective government response, it will tear at our social fabric. My students know about these challenges, and they are inspired and emboldened to do something about them. They are the new face of the American dream. When I get depressed, I think of them. There is no better place to be than a classroom filled with a bunch of first-generation students determined to change the world.
Zoli and I renewed our passports last December, but we have no intention of leaving. We love this country too much to walk away. If America leads the way for the rest of the world, then California leads the way for the rest of America, and we want to be here to help with the transition. America, I have to believe, is not at the end of its history. It is at the beginning of a remarkable new era, when we will have the chance to live up to our founding motto—E Pluribus Unum—where out of many, we will become one.