They accentuate the interests of a faction to the exclusion of others. ![]() Factionalisation means political party elites are no longer looking beyond their own narrowly defined core constituencies for electoral or political support. This is different from political polarisation among the electorate and people. The political and state system, as Professor Barbara Walter proposes in her book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, has by then fallen victim to ‘factionalisation’. The state machine and the body politic has cracked, and a schism has opened up within the political establishment. There is a key moment – ‘anocracy’ – when an autocratic government becomes incapable of maintaining order as it has acceded to democratic demands and lost state capacity to repress and a key moment of great danger when a democracy has declined to such an extent that the particular democratic state’s government proves incapable of providing legitimate pathways to change and whose law enforcement institutions fail. In the US case today, the threat looms as democracy declines and slides towards authoritarianism because leaders consolidate their own power rather than respect democratic or constitutional norms. The transitional moment is the moment of greatest danger. And they are most likely to happen during transitions from autocracy to democracy and vice versa. First, the power goes off and then you hear machine guns on the streets.Īnd most people tend not to pay too much attention until it’s too late.Ĭivil wars also do not just happen randomly, or all that often, at least historically. Psychological limits of the possible have to be stretched, new normals more widely accepted – such as armed militias policing political rallies by a mainstream political party. For much of the time in their developmental phases they are slow-burning, small things building up a head of steam. How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop ThemĬivil wars don’t generally explode with a single ‘big bang’. The Republican party recently censured two of its own elected congressional representatives and declared the coup and insurrection of January 6 “legitimate political discourse”. It was, Milley noted with due care, a “Reichstag moment” – the process by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazis consolidated their power in 1933 by instituting mass terror and setting alight the German parliament. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley called the Januattacks on the Capitol “a coup attempt…treason”, according to Bob Woodward’s Peril. Add to this establishment liberals’ historic unreliability in the struggle against the far right and open fascism, the United States, the self-declared beacon of democracy and critic of authoritarianism, is heading towards its own style of fascism.Īt his inaugural address, President Joe Biden spoke of how “much to do in this winter of peril”. It is equally joined at the hip to corporate donors, and internally divided. The other main party shares the other’s fear of progressive mass mobilisations against racism and police violence and for economic equity. ![]() One of its two main political parties has effectively given up on democracy. The American political system is close to the brink of civil war and fascism, US style.
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