How you label the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — an “insurrection,” a “riot,” an “assault,” an “attempted coup” — says a lot about how you view American politics. Like a Rorschach test, the dramatic images of that day evoke horror and revulsion in some, indifference or even approval in others.
Perhaps even more important, though, is what you think Jan. 6 foretells about American politics. Was it a temporary deviation brought on by an idiosyncratic moment and man, a grim marker of the new normal, or a harbinger of much worse to come?
Journalists and social scientists tend to approach these questions in very different ways, and two timely books, “The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It” by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague and “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them” by Barbara F. Walter, exemplify these contrasts. One is a gripping ground-level narrative of the weeks after Donald Trump lost the popular vote; the other, a rigorous yet readable analysis of the prospects for a second American civil war. One ends on a hopeful note — brave election officials, many of them Republicans, certified the results. The other describes a frighteningly plausible scenario in which the Biden presidency presages large-scale violent conflict within the United States.
Regarding one big point, however, these accounts agree: 2020 was a lucky break. The guardrails held, but only barely. Without fundamental reforms, they may not hold longer. And the very forces that weakened those guardrails make repairing them extremely hard. Whether the outcome is civil war or — far more likely, in my view — a democracy that’s increasingly undemocratic, Jan. 6 may come to be seen as a critical test of foresight and fortitude that too many in power failed.
“The Steal” is a marvel of reporting: tightly wound, as you might expect from Bowden, the author of “Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War,” but also panoramic — a kaleidoscope of stories about how officials and activists in pivotal states like Arizona and Georgia responded to Trump’s false claims of election fraud. To Bowden and Teague’s credit, they give zero credence to these claims. Yet they provide sincere, if not sympathetic, insight into the thinking of those who believe them and how they acted on those beliefs.
The result is a narrative that mirrors the way elections are actually run in the United States: state by state, county by county, precinct by precinct. Rather than focus on the president’s wild claims and increasingly comical legal challenges, “The Steal” centers on the people doing the decentralized work of American elections: manning polling stations, counting ballots, certifying results, considering legal challenges and overseeing all these activities on behalf of the parties.
In 2020 on the Republican side, that oversight veered more and more into interference. As Election Day stretched into Election Week, GOP activists — linked via social media, validated by Trump and his echo chamber, and motivated by a toxic mix of disinformation and distrust — ramped up their harassment of election workers who, for the most part, performed heroically under terrible circumstances. Despite the pandemic and the resulting deluge of mail-in ballots, despite threats of foreign meddling and ample domestic meddling by Republican lawmakers who tried, before the election, to make voting harder, the biggest barrier to an accurate, timely count in 2020 wasn’t technical but tactical: how to get the job done without getting fired, ostracized, threatened with harm (against you or your family), forced into hiding or worse.
Consider the post-election pyrotechnics in Delaware County, Pa., a sprawling suburban and exurban region near Philadelphia known as Delco. Delco is one of those once-red places that has trended blue as the suburbs of big cities have become more diverse and more linked to the urban knowledge economy. It also contains many rock-ribbed Republican outposts whose denizens are resentful of the change, despite their reliable overrepresentation in state politics thanks to GOP gerrymandering and the clustering of Democrats in those same big cities (where most of their votes are “wasted” in deep-blue districts).
To handle the crush of mail-in votes, Delco purchased sophisticated machines to count the ballots. In Pennsylvania, as in many states, early-arriving ballots couldn’t be removed from their envelopes until the polls opened, making expedited processing essential. Watching the machines to identify problems was like watching a computer to identify viruses — the envelopes moved so fast they were invisible — so Republican poll watchers shifted their focus to a supposedly nefarious “back room” they couldn’t see into clearly. When election workers moved their activities out of the room, the activists claimed that fake ballots were hidden in a locked closet inside. One of the activists, a burly poll watcher named Greg Stenstrom, grew so agitated he had to be sent outside by police. (Stenstrom, a White man who insisted he would “get into a fight” to stay put, was allowed to walk away by a deputy sheriff who knew him — one wonders how a Black man the officer didn’t know would have fared in the same encounter.)
In nearby Erie, Pa., the threat of violence was more tangible. After right-wing propagandists accused the local postmaster — ironically, a hardcore Trumpist — of election fraud, the man was doxed on social media, chased through a parking lot, confronted at home and forced to hide with his family. Across the country, similar scenarios played out. In Republican-controlled states, the backlash would soon help fuel another round of hyperpartisan gerrymandering and voting restrictions designed to protect GOP power in blue-shifting districts, as well as a worrisome new trend: the rewriting of state electoral rules to ensure that partisan elected officials had the final say over contested outcomes.
GOP activists’ greatest ire was reserved for Republicans who had the temerity to certify results that conflicted with Trump’s “big lie.” Whether or not you voted for the president, acknowledging reality made you a Never Trumper. After years of fomenting outrage against the system, the Republican Party was reaping the whirlwind: a new generation of candidates dedicated to a false narrative, and a set of aggressive, organized and often armed grass-roots allies who believed that one party should be purged of any dissidents and the other destroyed. In Delco, the disorderly poll watcher Stenstrom, now teamed up with a Facebook-savvy activist named Leah Hoopes, saw every responsible move by fellow Republicans as betrayal. The two concluded, in Bowden and Teague’s words, that “it was all a sham” — “that, at least in their corner of Pennsylvania, every vote, every government policy, every appointment, every government contract, was prearranged and that, in essence, everybody in power was corrupt.”
The internal monologues of disillusioned citizens like Stenstrom and Hoopes are what make “The Steal” so readable and revealing. They are also a little frustrating. It’s never entirely clear if you are hearing their voices or Bowden and Teague’s. I don’t expect everyone to share my footnote fetish, but I did crave greater clarity about when I was reading a more or less verbatim recounting of interviews as opposed to a journalistic reconstruction.
Far more important, Bowden and Teague say nothing about how the overwrought suspicions, patent misbeliefs, and elaborate but false theories articulated by these radicalized voters might be effectively countered. Here is where the limits of the journalistic approach loom large — and the need for a deeper diagnosis becomes apparent.
Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” is the civil-conflict equivalent of “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — a much-needed warning that uses cross-national research to examine the United States. Given how prescient Levitsky and Ziblatt were, and how expert Walters is (she is a leading scholar of civil wars), it is a warning to heed.
I’ve been skeptical of the notion that the United States is on the verge of another civil war. Walter has made me reconsider. Her biggest contribution is to update the image most of us have of intrastate wars — an image she shows is woefully obsolete. Today, deadly conflicts within nations rarely involve armed forces on both sides. Compared with the past, moreover, they’re much more likely to occur in weak democracies (as opposed to weak dictatorships). They’re also highly contingent on the role of social media and the quality of political leadership, for good or ill.
A second American civil war, then, wouldn’t look anything like the first. It would involve right-wing paramilitaries, not secessionist states, and it would be decentralized, drawn-out and defined by terrorism — think Northern Ireland, not North vs. South. Above all, it will happen, or not, based on what we do now, which makes Walter’s warning even more valuable. This is a book that everyone in power should read immediately.
Besides delivering an up-to-date view of civil wars, Walter provides a state-of-the-art accounting of why they begin. Three factors emerge as critical: eroding political institutions; extreme racial and ethnic factionalization, especially when previously privileged groups are losing power; and the capacity of prominent leaders to foment violence, with social media their current (and highly effective) weapon of choice. These are all factors that put the United States at risk.
So how should those in power respond? Unlike Bowden and Teague, Walter has answers, lots of them: Make make our democracy work better, restrict and break up social media, crack down on armed right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters. Walter is careful to not imply that the heroic Republicans who certified the 2020 election can be counted on to stand in their way (many of them have lost office or seen their authority stripped, in any case). Nothing less than systemic reform of our democracy and sweeping counter-terrorism will defuse the threat in a nation awash in firearms. Most of those whose countries descend into civil war think it can’t happen — until it does. Walter wants us to know it can happen here, and act accordingly.
This is a bracing, vital message, but it leaves us with a problem too little acknowledged by journalists and scholars, even ones as able as the authors of these excellent books. What happens when the greatest threat to democracy and civil order emerges from a party that, outside the presidency, has dominated American politics for the past few decades? Walter’s long list of good prescriptions would be a lot more useful if there were doctors in the house (or, more to the point, the Senate) who could start administering them. Instead, serious political reform — including the Democrats’ stalled voting rights bill — depends on changing the extra-constitutional yet entrenched Senate filibuster in the most malapportioned upper house in the developed world. Trump’s defeat notwithstanding, virtually every institution of American government overrepresents the White, rural and Republican places where the most radicalized citizens now live.
The most immediate risk, in my view, isn’t civil war but increasingly hegemonic control of state governments and the national government by a party systematically advantaged by America’s aging institutions — institutions that the party’s leaders are ever more aggressively tilting in their favor. Add to this the corrosive effects of ethno-nationalism, disinformation and mistrust, and you have the great conundrum that is American politics today: A year after the light of democracy shone through the broken windows of the Capitol, most of those on one side of the aisle continue to gamble that safeguarding their power is more important than preserving their republic.