Bernd Debusmann/ wionews:

As arguments over politics in America’s two-party system grow hostile, political scientists have produced a string of studies and surveys to probe the potential of widespread political violence or even civil war. Such fears are understandable in a country that has more guns than people (332 million inhabitants, 434 million guns). Concern grew after the January 6 storming of the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump who believed Democrats had rigged the elections and stolen victory from their leader.
One survey, in particular, stood out for me. It was conducted by the research firm Ipsos for the Violence Prevention Research Program of the University of California, Davis, which described it as the first of its kind to explore the 8,620 participants’ “personal willingness to engage in specific political violence scenarios.”
Key results 50.1 per cent agreed that “in the next several years there will be civil war in the United States.” 67.2 per cent saw a serious threat to American democracy. 42.4 per cent agreed that having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy. A similar percentage thought that native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants. And one in five thought that political violence is sometimes justifiable. The survey was conducted four months before America’s midterm elections which will decide whether the Democratic Party can maintain its narrow majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. 435 seats in the House and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested.
As the elections, scheduled on November 8 draws closer, rhetoric on both sides of the political divide has become ever more heated. President Joe Biden described the most vocal strain of the Republican Party as “semi-fascism.” Majorities in both parties, according to the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, view members of the other party as immoral, dishonest, and closed-minded.
This ranks relatively low on the toxic insult score. A study published in the Journal of Democracy by Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on troubled democracies, found that both Democrats and Republicans harboured high levels of “dehumanising thought”. 39 per cent of Democrats and 41 per cent of Republicans saw the other side as “downright evil”. 16 per cent of Democrats and 20 per cent of Republicans said their opponents were “like animals.”
A history of political violence
Such feelings, she said, can point to psychological levels of violence, although this is a politely phrased understatement. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was partly driven by radio broadcasts calling for the extermination of Tutsi “cockroaches.” During the holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as “rats” and “subhuman”. Kleinfeld points out that political violence has a long history in the United States. In the late 1960s and 1970s, far-left groups carried out bombings and kidnappings. From the late 1970s, political violence began shifting to the right in the form of white supremacists, anti-abortion and militia groups.
In the past few years, government efforts to suppress and counter right-wing violence have primarily focused on groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Patriot Front. Drawing from the Global Terrorism Database and FBI statistics, Kleinfeld found that people committing right-wing violence often differ from the image of the typical terrorist.
“They often hold jobs, are married and have children, “ she found. “Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. These are not isolated ‘lone wolves’, they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.”
Talks of civil war become mainstream Only a few years ago, talk of widespread political violence or a second civil war was confined to the darkest corners of the Internet. No longer. It has become mainstream since followers of Donald Trump, many wearing sweatshirts saying MAGA CIVIL WAR January 6, 2021, stormed the Capitol to stop, for the first time in American history, the peaceful transfer of power.
In late August, Biden added to the steadily heating rhetoric in advance of the elections by singling out ”MAGA Republicans,” essentially Trump’s base, as followers of a philosophy “like semi-fascism.” (MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, the slogan that helped Trump win the 2016 elections).
Though Biden referred to just a part of the Republican Party, establishment party leaders promptly declared he had besmirched the entire party and more than 70 million Americans who voted for Trump. The temperature in America’s toxic political environment promptly became even hotter. One of the most discussed contributions to the debate over the prospect of political violence has been a book titled ‘How civil wars start and How to stop them’. The author, Barbara F. Walters, is a professor of International Relations at the University of California, San Diego, and serves on an advisory council run by the Central Intelligence Agency called the Political Instability Task Force. In her book, which made it onto the New York Times bestseller list earlier this year, she cites examples from Iraq, Syria, Yugoslavia, Ireland, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, South Africa and the Philippines. The task force looked at a wide range of variables, including poverty, ethnic diversity, population size, inequality and corruption to help researchers make predictions. To their surprise, the best predictors of instability were not poverty and income but a political system in the middle. How does the United States fare in this way of looking at instability? Walters comes to a sobering conclusion, “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”