Last week we started discussing Barbara Walter’s analysis of the danger of civil war in America. Let’s address how to stop it. But because most measures run into Congress, all roads lead through election day.
She wrote “The best way to neutralize a budding insurgency” is to remove the grievances by “improving the quality of government services,” “bolster[ing] the rule of law, [and] giv[ing] all citizens equal access to the vote.”[1]
Walter argues that extremists’ grievances stem both from feelings of ethnic loss, and loss of factory and mining jobs. She adds, accurately, that
many working-class and middle-class Americans live their lives “one small step from catastrophe,” … [which] makes them ready recruits for militants. … [R]eal 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.[2]
Many extremists aren’t poor. Nevertheless the combination of MAGA ethnic discomfort and the desperation of working people fueled the attack against democracy, the Capital and other armed threats and murders. MAGA folk think they’ll do well with revolution and treason is a technicality to them.
Violent revolutions typically build on working people’s grievances and then give the rich the money, like the Communists in Russia and China or dictators in Latin American. Dictators fleece the public for themselves and their rich friends. Those with most to lose expect to gain by violence. Indeed, MAGA Republican representatives have already rewarded the richest Americans, saying tax breaks for the wealthy would create jobs, which turned out to be in China or elsewhere abroad. Meanwhile, they’re the major threat to everything we care about – workers’ rights, women’s rights, equal care and concern for all Americans, global warming, the survival of American democracy, justice and just plain civilization in America.
Reversing that depends on taking control of Congress. But the MAGA extremists’ Republican representatives fought all Democratic proposals to improve American workers’ lives – medical care, the minimum wage, workers’ rights, good jobs for American working people and projects to benefit us all.
Walker also wants to take away
the social media bullhorn … [to] 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.[3]
As Voltaire once said, “whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” But the protection given to media to circulate falsehoods was also enacted in the 90s – so that too depends on Congress.
Walter also explains how enforcing the rule of law helps to defeat efforts to intimidate us, to reestablish trust in government’s ability to protect us from violence, and to discourage people from seeking the protection of extremists.[4] Enforcing the rule of law is partly independent of Congress, but not independent of the courts that Trump restaffed.
So before we can write needed laws, we citizens have to organize, encourage people who share our concerns to vote, and vote the entire ballot to put good people in; we have to get ourselves and each other to the polls, protect voters at the polls, and stand up for election workers trying to give us an honest count. No one can do that for us. Government of the people, by the people and for the people depends on our standing up for it.
— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 13, 2022.
[1] Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, 209
[2] Id. at 209-10.
[3] Id. at 214.
[4] Id. at 212.
Constitutionalism and Democracy 