🤔The normality of a film depicting civil war would have caused widespread shock and confusion 15-20 years ago, but now it's accepted by the American public.
Ethnic factionalism, organizing around racial, ethnic, or religious lines, can lead to predatory political parties, highlighting the impact of identity politics on civil wars.
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In the year since the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, questions have lingered over whether the country is on the brink of conflict and fission. In “How Civil Wars Start,” political scientist and author Barbara F. Walter assesses stability and risk of violence in many countries abroad to lay out a case for why the United States may be headed towards a second civil war.📊
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🤔Citizens in anocracies forming political parties around identity rather than ideology could contribute to division and conflict.
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📉The US's democracy has been downgraded three times since 2016, indicating a concerning trend of political instability and violence.
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🌍The people who tend to start civil wars are the groups that had once been politically dominant but are in decline.
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🤝The US has the opportunity to show the world how to manage this demographic shift and create a truly multiethnic, multi-religious democracy.
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🏛️"To address anocracy, we have to improve the rule of law, ensure equal access to every citizen to the vote, reduce corruption, and improve the quality of government services."
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📉"Businesses can invest in better health care, better education and a higher minimum wage so that they create a group of people who are hopeful about the future and less vulnerable to the calls by extremists to burn the system down."
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🕊️We can prevent civil war by fighting for real democracy and ensuring strong democracy to truly achieve peace.
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🌍Civil wars kill significantly more people on average than interstate wars and are much harder to end, making them a major problem related to violence.
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📉Africa's democratic decline started in 2019, coinciding with the increase in internet penetration and reliance on social media for news.
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🌍Unregulated social media makes it easy for those who want to undercut democracy, with Putin using it as his main tool for weakening liberal democracies.
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🌐Russia successfully meddled in the US elections via the internet and disinformation campaigns, leading to a downgrade in the country's democratic rating.
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🌍Predatory parties organized along identity seek to gain political power to shut everybody else out, making them anti-democratic.
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🤔The two-party system may lead to authoritarianism very quickly, making it the worst design failure in the history of the world.
Ethnic Identity and Civil Unrest-
💥Factions along ethnic lines are the most dangerous and can lead to violence.
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🤔"Times of change make average citizens feel uncertain and insecure, creating opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurs to grab political power."
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🌍"Sons of the soil are ethnic groups that believe they are the rightful heirs to a country, and that the identity of the country should reflect their ethnicity and religion."
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🌍The belief that a certain group deserves to be in power in their country can be a driving force behind civil unrest.
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😬"If they're unsuccessful in taking their country back, the more extreme elements of those sons of the soil group often organize and they're the ones who start these wars."
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📚Barbara F. Walter suggests "We are now closer to a civil war than any of us would like to believe."
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🔍Anocracy and political organization are the most predictive factors for civil war in a country.
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💥Downgraded groups tend to initiate violence, especially when they are in political and economic decline, exacerbating their resentment and sense of decline.
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🤔The intention of some republican voters may be to end democracy in order to maintain power for white people, posing a significant concern for political violence in the U.S.
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🛡️Civil war usually begins when hope dies, and average citizens will push to pursue non-violent means to change the system.
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😳The failure of elections can push people towards more extreme actions when they feel like nothing else is working.
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🚨The type of civil war we would see in the U.S. is the type of civil war that we are increasingly seeing around the world, more like an insurgency.
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🌍"Our democracy demand that our politicians both on the left and the right institute real reforms so that we are no longer at risk of violence."
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🔍Jeff Sharlet's exploration takes him into the lives of the right, their churches, and their homes, providing a warning and a portrait of something we need to pay attention to.
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🤔"Fascism is a human disease."
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🌊The rise of Trump brought with it a fascist aesthetic, sparking a movement that grew in surprising ways.
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🌈The colorblindness of white supremacy imagines a world where they've erased all other color or can't see difference, building a movement with gravitational force.
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😳The idea of a "slow civil war" in America is a reality that is surging and being compared to historical civil wars.
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🔥America is in the middle of a ‘slow civil war’.
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🔫The intersectionality of the right is essential to the idea of whiteness, which underlies the entire danger America faces.
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🎥The first movie shown in the White House in 1915 was DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, justifying in the imagination of the movie, the rise of the Klan.
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