I have learned many lessons in my studies of authoritarian takeovers of once-thriving democratic nations, which often lead to genocides. Strong leaders employ dehumanizing stereotypes and scapegoat entire groups while other citizens or entire nations refuse to intervene – and sometimes even contribute to the spread of authoritarianism.
This is also apparent at the micro level, such as with schoolyard, community-based, and electronic forms of bullying. Many others, not only the direct perpetrators of the oppression, play a key role. Dan Olweus, international researcher and bullying prevention specialist, enumerates the distinctive and often overlapping roles assumed in these episodes:
· The person or persons who perpetrate bullying
· The active followers
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· Those who passively support, condone, or collude in the aggression
· The onlookers (sometimes referred to as “bystanders”)
· The possible defenders of the targets of aggression
· Those who actually defend the targets of aggression
· Those who are exposed, attacked, targeted, victimized.
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“Coconspirators” are those who either perpetuate the abuse or actively follow the perpetrators. “Enabler” is the term given to those who fail to act and instead aid the perpetrators of the abuse. “Passive bystander” or “bad Samaritan” is the name for onlookers who are conscious of bad actions developing around them but fail to intervene.
Enabling and passively standing by takes many forms. Let us look at the case of those who are around an active addict, like an alcoholic.
Enabling can include anything from offering an addict substances to conspiring with an addict in a plot to steal money for the substance to reinforcing the denial of addicts by asserting that they don’t have a problem to downplaying the seriousness and making excuses for their behaviors to translating for others what the person “really meant” to downright lying.
Let us now apply the roles to the case of national politics and, specifically, to actions leading to the decline of democratic institutions and democracy itself. I will do this by asking several critical questions.
Following the second election of Donald Trump, I discovered that several of my acquaintances voted for the twice impeached convicted felon, who The Washington Post found guilty of making 30,573 false or misleading statements (or an average of 21 per day) during his first term.
Trump won 77,303,568 votes, or 49.8% – a plurality rather than a majority – of the votes cast for president.
Many political forecasters predicted members of the upper classes, who expected Trump to continue or enhance the corporate and income/wealth tax breaks from his first term, would vote for the former president. But many who voted for Trump were also blue-collar, working-class people who might have fared better voting for Kamala Harris and the Democrats – whose policies under the Biden administration have led to significant improvement in the economy over the past four years and have made the U.S. one of the strongest and most resilient economies in the world.
So why did people presumably vote against their own economic self-interests to elect a billionaire and his plutocratic enablers to the highest and most powerful office in the land?
Were they simply low-information voters who were not knowledgeable about the issues and solutions the Democrats offered?
Was the Democrats’ communication of the issues flawed, failing to reach voters on a deep level?
Did they “buy” the propaganda and lies of the Republican party and right-wing media factory, like claims the Democrats stole the 2020 election through the “deep state” or that trans women are a threat to women athletes? Did they believe the GOP when they said the Democrats have ruined the economy and that “illegal aliens” are coming to commit crimes, steal our jobs, and drain our resources?
Historians and political operatives will spend a long time investigating the actual reasons for the Democrats’ loss of the presidency and Senate in 2024, and undoubtedly they will find that many factors contributed. But how much should we hold the uninformed voter, the politically disengaged, accountable for the current state of affairs?
Donald Trump has long embraced the term “nationalism” in his “America First” policies, which advocate for our nation’s reduced involvement in the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union, and withdrawal from our commitments to the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran Nuclear Deal, among other policies.
During Trump’s time in office, he conspicuously moved right-wing extremists from the margins to the center of his MAGA movement. At a Democratic fundraiser in advance of the 2022 midterm elections, President Joe Biden blasted the so-called “Make America Great Again” philosophy, arguing that it is “semi-fascism.”
Many top Republicans pushed back against Biden’s assessment, but in August 2022, “Threats to Democracy” became the number one most important issue facing the country, according to a plurality of registered voters (21%) in an NBC News poll. 16% of respondents identified the biggest issue as cost of living, and 14% said the economy.
This came on the heels of a survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with Tulchin Research indicating that 53% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats believe that the U.S. “seems headed” toward another civil war.
Speaking on this point, Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham responded to Trey Gowdy, host of Fox News’s Sunday Night in America: “If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle [referring to the four Americans killed in Benghazi while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State]… there’ll be riots in the streets.”
Graham asserted this as a threat rather than a warning without even adding the obligatory, “But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
The SPLC survey also found support for the “Great Replacement Theory,” which was referenced by the mass shooter who opened fire in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022.
The theory has its origins in Europe, and its American iteration is a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants and the rise of nonwhite citizens to take power from white Christians of European stock.
When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they charged, “Jews will not replace us!”
Did the Civil War ever end?
Most historians agree that the nearly 20 years and two trillion dollars spent in Afghanistan – which resulted in 2,401 United States military deaths and another 20,752 wounded U.S. servicemembers – embodied our country’s “longest war.”
This may be true, but one could also argue that title belongs to the War Between the States, also referred to as the “American Civil War,” which began on April 12, 1861, with the bombardment of the South Carolina militia against Fort Sumter, a military garrison in Charleston.
While a treaty of surrender to Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant was signed by Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, no secession of hostilities or retreat from overt and covert combat have transpired.
Civil war raged here even prior to the adoption of its official designation as the “United States of America,” from the first footprints of European explorers and colonialists who exploited the land and committed genocide and enslavement of indigenous populations to the increasing hordes of “settlers” who ceded indigenous people’s lands against their will to 1619 Virginia bringing the first enslaved Africans to toil and die as chattel in the fields.
It continued through the war of revolution against the British, up to the Southern attack on Fort Sumter, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, the Civil Rights eras, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tea Party politicians, and the fights between the economic haves and have not. It continued through Covid and the anti-vaxxers, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, and the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The United States has been anything but united. Instead, the country’s history encompasses a perennial civil war that has been made more visible in the Trumpian age.
“This is democracy’s most challenging hour since Fort Sumter,” historian John Meacham has argued.
Meacham’s words may be true, but I don’t think a second civil war is imminent. I believe, instead, that we are seeing the ramping up of the war that did not actually end in 1865.
If we can keep it
Benjamin Franklin was one of the nation’s “founders” who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to draft our now-famous founding document. At the age of 81, though a perennial optimist, he had no illusions and thought it impossible to expect any group of people, no matter how wise or brilliant, to create a “perfect production.”
Even “with all its faults,” however, Franklin believed that this Constitution was far superior to any alternative that could possibly emerge. He had a warning, though. As the story is told, when departing the Constitutional Convention, a group of citizens approached Franklin and asked him what kind of government the delegates had created.
His response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
International security and defense analyst Monica Duffy Toft found that all civil wars share at least three common features. First, they come about after a prior conflict, like a previous civil war. Neither the issues nor the direct fighters need to be the same as the old, though. Very often, a charismatic leader arises and articulates a narrative about past glory or grievance that aligns with “their ideology, political ambitions, or even flows from simple historical ignorance.”
Second is a severe rupture in national identity: “National identity is divided along some critical axis, such as race, faith, or class. All countries have fracture lines and cleavages,” wrote Toft, “but some divides are deeper than others. Even initially minor cleavages may be exploited by domestic or foreign actors committed to redistributing wealth or power.”
Third is a shift from tribalism to sectarianism. In tribalism, groups question if other groups adhere to or project the best interests of the larger general community. In sectarian environments, the elites (economic, social, and political) and those they represent determine that anyone who disagrees with them is unpatriotic and evil and that they are actively attempting to undermine communities and the larger society.
To equate this to religion, some denominations bifurcate the apostates from the evil infidels. Currently, members of the MAGA Republicans (the apostates) portray the more mainstream Republicans as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), the evil infidels.
The rise to sectarianism and authoritarianism develops by what Toft calls “a severely damaged information space.” With the rise of cable news programming and entire networks since the 1990s, there has been an “ongoing shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting,” from professional journalism with a shared agreement of facts versus fiction and propaganda to a “new disconnected world” with “multiple competing versions of reality (‘alternative facts’).”
In her 2022 book How Civil Wars Start, Barbara F. Walter suggested, “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe… No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline or headed toward war… [but] if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America… you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency: 1. The “pre-insurgency” phase, and 2. The “incipient conflict” phase. Only time will tell whether the final phase is fully activated: The “open insurgency” phase began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that after his term ended the United States no longer technically qualified as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set – the one the CIA task force has found to be most reliable in predicting instability and violence – Walter wrote that the United States had become an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy had received the Polity Index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the first years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone.
By the end of Trump’s first term, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.
“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter said. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war. “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter states.
“A country standing on this threshold – as America is now, at +5 – can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.” Right now after Biden’s term, the score is back up to an 8.
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said.
And a 2021 survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17% of those who identify strongly as Republicans supported the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39% favored doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.
We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter wrote that once countries cross that threshold, there could be “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare including assassinations and ambushes.”
I wonder whether the United States would be experiencing an overt form of civil war if Trump had lost to Kamala Harris. I wonder where assessment agencies like the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance will place the U.S. on its list of backsliding democracies at the conclusion of Trump’s second term.
And as Dan Olweus taught us through his work on bullying, there is no such thing as a “passive” or “innocent” bystander. The turns this country takes depend on us all.
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