The civil war as if we were there

(Washington, DC) I must admit that it’s funny, seeing Civil War 15 minutes walk from the Capitol.

The film, which holds first position at the box office, makes us follow journalists and photographers who cover the advance of the insurgents on their way to the American capital.

We don’t understand what the war is about. Nor why the very progressive California forms an alliance with conservative Texas. But is it really important in this post-ideological era? We feel the cold hatred in which all the characters are immersed. The press photographers lead us along a road strewn with corpses, keeping us level with the whistling bullets. They are not particularly friendly. They follow the conflict with no real passion other than the next maid shot, as impervious to the tragedy into which the country is sinking. Numb, not to say frozen, witnesses to the national collapse.

Alex Garland’s film is not the first to depict the United States on the brink, pre- or post-apocalyptic. Except that when leaving the cinema of the 7^e Rue, I was left with a sort of nausea at the repulsive plausibility of the story.

What is likely in this film is not a war between the American federal state and two secessionist coalition states. It is the shift into a form of political violence.

In the public mind, the thing is no longer seen as a paranoid vision, or a completely extreme possibility. This is one of the legitimate topics of political discussion.

In Montana, Dakota Adams, the son of the founder of the Oath Keepers, told me that The Roadby Cormac McCarthy, was the favorite book among this group of far-right, survivalists and “ preppers » (who are preparing for a form of apocalypse). The epic tale of a father and his son in a United States in rubble was seen at home as a quasi-prophecy, rather than a fiction.

But the idea of ​​sudden uncontrollable political violence is now supported by several experts and analysts.

The mayor of the capital of the same Montana, Wilmot Collins, fled Liberia precisely because of the civil war. He arrived here 30 years ago and can’t believe the deterioration of the political climate. When I tell him about the possibility of civil war in his new country, he takes a breath. He does not categorically exclude it.

“There are people that you know, that you thought you knew, and all of a sudden you realize their ideology… Yes, I am very worried. This hatred was buried, repressed, but Trump released it. I recently read that the United States is at 23^e rank of the happiest countries. Twenty three ! It’s sad… “

Daryl Johnson, a former civilian employee of the US military, became known 12 years ago as the author of a report for the Department of Homeland Security on the risks of terrorism in the United States. United.

“We were monitoring several groups when Barack Obama announced his candidacy in 2007,” he told me in an interview. Once he became the candidate, which coincided with the return of several veterans from Iraq, we saw the level of extremist activity skyrocket. »

Its 2009 report concluded that far-right groups posed the No. 1 terrorism threat in the United States. It was harshly criticized by Republicans as a political mix-up.

In 2019, Daryl Johnson released Hateland, which is a sort of historical catalog of contemporary violent extremist groups in the United States, going back to the 1970s, through Waco, Oklahoma City, etc. Written two years before the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol, where several of these groups were present, it is as if he predicted what happened.

“I didn’t think this would happen at the Capitol [un lieu très protégé], but we had rehearsals in several states. »

In October 2020, for example, the FBI arrested 13 people who planned to kidnap the governor of Michigan and armed overthrow of the government.

“A civil war? I hope not, but the potential is there, says Mr. Johnson. Obama’s arrival was a catalyst for extremists and white supremacists. But Trump is an accelerator. We don’t even pay attention to the violence anymore. We quickly move on from mass killings, which seem isolated, we put it down to mental health, but often their perpetrators have been radicalized. When someone blows themselves up in the Middle East, they may have mental health issues, but we don’t hesitate to call it terrorism. »

Political scientist Barbara F. Walter has studied civil wars for 30 years. She went into the field in Burma, Rwanda, Sri Lanka…

Along with other experts, she contributed to a model to try to predict the occurrence of civil wars – there have been 250 since the end of World War II. When she started her career, the topic was “international.” But in How Civil Wars Startedit does not explain why the United States is at risk of civil war.

Among the risk factors, she says in this well-documented work, the most important is the state of democracy. It is not the most repressive countries that are most at risk. These are countries in transition between two models: authoritarian regimes as they move towards democracy… or democracies as their institutions deteriorate.

Because the democratic degree is measured from -10 to +10, according to a series of criteria: the integrity of elections, the independence of the courts, a free press, etc. The relaxation of an authoritarian regime can cause a country to enter a zone of turbulence. If identity tensions are exacerbated by “ethnic entrepreneurs”, then it can become very dangerous. The CIA foresaw the possibility of civil war in the former Yugoslavia, for these reasons.

Conversely, a country obtaining the “perfect democratic score” (like the United States, Canada, several European countries, etc.) can enter perilous territory if its system deteriorates.

This adjoining zone, between -5 and +5, is what it calls an “anocracy”: the country enjoys certain democratic elements, but degraded, or experiences a form of more or less acute authoritarianism.

And for Barbara F. Walter, there is no doubt: the United States is on the verge of anocracy, having fallen to +5 at the end of Donald Trump’s mandate – only to rise again.

Trump convinced tens of millions of people that the presidential election was rigged. That justice is politicized against him. He still says that the country could disappear if he is not re-elected. He speaks of the January 6 insurgents (several of whom were former soldiers) as “hostages”, and of foreigners as “invaders”, to frighten the segment of the population who no longer recognizes themselves in their country. Because it is another risk factor: the feeling of a loss of control over the country among a once dominant class.

“People don’t realize how vulnerable Western democracies are to armed conflict,” she wrote two years ago. Neither in the former Yugoslavia, nor in Rwanda, nor in Ireland, nor in Ethiopia did people suspect the extent to which violence could erupt.

The civil war that Professor Walter speaks of would not resemble the scenario of Civil War. The American imagination is still too imbued with that of 1861-1865, South against North. Rather, she imagines a kind of more or less organized violent chaos, more or less dispersed throughout the country, involving autonomous militias, which would lead to an authoritarian spiral, and even more violence.

This is not a prediction. It is an inventory: the cold analysis of the factors that we have seen at work for a century in dozens of countries.

It’s “possible” like never before in 160 years. We are talking about it. We’re making a film about it.

The United States may be realizing that it is no longer that “shining city on a hill.”