Is the United States on the Verge of Civil War?

AUTHORS: BRUCE HOFFMAN AND JACOB WARE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE CIPHER BRIEF ON 30 OCTOBER 2024

Is the United States on the verge of civil war? It is a possibility that has been frequently raised in connection with the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. It is also the subject of a hit dystopian film that premiered last April.

Three decades ago, we could all laugh at the absurdity of the White House being destroyed by aliens in the hit science fiction film, “Independence Day.” Today, however, the all-out assault on the White House depicted in Alex Garland’s “Civil War” leaves audiences singularly discomforted by its plausibility.

Although an actual civil war resulting from the 2024 election remains highly unlikely, a range of sufficiently alarming scenarios cannot be prudently dismissed or discounted—as the two recent attempts on former President Donald Trump’s life have shown.

Trump’s conviction last spring on 34 counts of falsifying business records further sharpened the political frictions already embedded in American politics. Almost immediately, threats to the judiciary and the array of Trump’s perceived and actual political enemies intensified. “Our judicial system has been weaponized against the American people,” was typical of the views expressed in die-hard MAGA circles. “We are left with NO option but to take matters into our hands,” far-right media personality Stew Peters asserted on his Telegram feed. Other social media platforms lit up with similar posts, “Time to start capping some leftys,” one post on Gateway Pundit urged. “This cannot be fixed by voting.”

The threats followed a decade of heightened far-right white supremacist and anti-government violence in the United States, striking from El Paso, Texas to Buffalo, New York, and making its most dramatic stand at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In that universe, it was axiomatic that President Joe Biden and his ‘minions’, having already stolen the 2020 presidential election from the ‘real victor’, had now enlisted the courts in a last-ditch effort to de-rail the electoral prospects of the presidential candidate who, at that time, was far ahead in the polls.

The first assassination attempt, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July, was – to this demographic – proof positive of the desperate lengths Trump’s opponents would go to in order to deny him the presidency. Last month’s attempt on the former president as he golfed in Florida confirmed the acuity of this argument. Unlike the Butler plot, authorities in Florida believe the suspect there may have been directly inspired by partisan politics.

Indeed, salient as the threat from far-right extremism in the United States is, it must also be noted that the threat of violence from far-left extremists is not non-existent.

“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” one student protest group recently proclaimed. Not to be outdone by this call to violent revolution, another student group at a different university quickly followed suit with a similar message. “We seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South, who have been on the frontlines in the fight against tyranny and domination which undergird the imperialist world order,” it boasted. “Resistance takes many forms, including armed struggle.”

The bloodied, decapitated likeness of President Joe Biden’s head displayed by a demonstrator in front of the White House last June was doubtless merely a tasteless manifestation of political street theater. But as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, words and images matter—perhaps even more so in the digital era—and have a propensity to inspire, motivate, and ultimately animate individuals “to take matters into their own hands”—as Stew Peters recently argued and the events of January 6, 2021, proved.

One of the most indelible images of the January 6, 2021, insurrection was the gallows—complete with hangman’s noose—that was erected outside the U.S. Capitol building, surrounded by a crowd calling for one of their own, a Christian, Evangelical vice president, Mike Pence, to be lynched.

In late August, a Virginia man was arrested for posting 4,359 threats targeting a variety of public officials, including President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. It was the 19 posts specifically directed at Harris and the claim that the person’s “AR-15 [assault rifle is] LOCKED AND LOADED” that finally prompted the FBI to intervene.

This environment provides fertile ground for America’s historical, foreign adversaries, too. An Afghan national was recently arrested for an election day plot. The would-be terrorist, according to the Department of Justice, had “conspired and attempted to provide material support to ISIS and obtained firearms and ammunition to conduct a violent attack on U.S. soil in the name of ISIS.” Such a plot surely would have proved greatly unsettling to the many Americans going to the polls and would have provided fruitful ammunition for conspiracy theorists questioning the integrity of the election.

To find a similarly unsettled time in American politics, one would have to go back to the 1960s, when separate assassinations were carried out against President John F. Kennedy; his brother and presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.; and then civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. That spate of tragedies did not end the incidence of political assassination or attempted assassinations in America. Only a few years later, a shooting attack on third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, left him in a wheelchair for life. In 1975, President Gerald Ford was the target of two separate, though unconnected, assassination attempts; and, in 1981 President Ronald Reagan narrowly escaped death from a would-be assassin’s bullet.

Similar acts of violence accompanied America’s recovery from the Great Depression. A lone assassin could have changed the course of history on February 15th, 1933. On that day, a disgruntled naturalized Italian immigrant opened fire on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt as he delivered a speech in Miami 17 days before his inauguration. The similarities between would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara and 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania are unsettling. Both failed to kill their primary target but they did take the lives of bystanders. And both were killed in the course of their attacks.

Sadly, it is not only candidates for the highest office in the land that face serious threats of violence in America. Members of congress increasingly find themselves targeted as well. In 2017, a self-professed supporter of independent Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to murder Republican Party members of Congress at an early morning baseball practice. He managed to wound six people, before the personal security detail accompanying then-House Majority Whip, Louisiana Republican congressman Steve Scalise, who himself was seriously wounded, returned fire and killed the gunman.

And, in October 2022, a far-right Canadian conspiracy theorist broke into the San Francisco home of then-Speaker of the House and Democratic Party congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. After learning that she was away, the intruder attacked and seriously injured her husband.

Neither of these incidents against the legislative leadership of their respective parties should be seen as aberrations. In recent years, the number of threats made against members of congress have increased ten-fold. There were already 900 such incidents in 2016—a depressingly high number. But by the end of the first year of the Trump presidency in 2017, that figure had more than quadrupled. And, then it doubled during the months immediately following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Since then, nearly half of state legislators across the United States have reported receiving “direct threats” to their lives. And too often, local election officials are being threatened, doxed, and otherwise deliberately intimidated.

According to the FBI, in September, election offices in some two dozen states received threatening communications. They were sent to officials in indisputably red states like Mississippi and Utah; blue states like Massachusetts and New York; and purple ones like North Carolina and Virginia. Messages in the letters and parcels, which contained a suspicious white powder that proved to be harmless, were signed by the hitherto unknown “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”

Research conducted by Seamus Hughes and his team at the University of Nebraska’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE), Center of Excellence, funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, report that 112 persons have been arrested this year for threatening public officials. This surpasses the previous record of 90 arrests recorded in 2023. Both Republicans and Democrats have been targeted, with more threats directed against Democrats.

Violence may always have been “as American as cherry pie” as the radical African-American nationalist H. Rap Brown famously averred in 1967, but support for its use by a broad spectrum of Americans against their own government and elected representatives is a more recent phenomenon—and one not seen since the years leading up to the outbreak of America’s catastrophic civil war in 1861.

A 2021 survey jointly conducted by the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and the Washington Post, found more than a third of persons who self-identify as Republican and only slightly fewer less of those who self-identify as Democrats, believe that the use of violence in the United States for political purposes would be “somewhat justified.” This view, we is expressed in a democracy where free-and-fair elections are supposed to be a guarantee.

More alarming still, is that when asked the same question the following year, even more self-professed Republicans—41 percent compared with 36 percent of Democrats—regarded the use of politically motivated violence as “somewhat justified.” Interestingly, the percent of self-proclaimed Democrats sanctioning political violence declined by ten points. As a Washington Post editorial nonetheless lamented, “Overall, the new survey reflects how much the partisan wars continue to rage across the country . . . [with] hopes for unity hav[ing] largely faded as doubts about democracy have grown.”

More recent polls are hardly reassuring. A 2023 survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” This past April, another poll of American voters found that 28 percent of Republicans strongly agree or just simply agree that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.”

Although only a fraction of Democrats polled shared that conviction, it was a not inconsequential 12 percent. Those who have seen the film, “Civil War” will doubtless recall the haunting question posed by actor Jesse Plemons, “Okay, what kind of American are you?”

Motive without means is of course immaterial. But, in this context, the situation is even more depressing. The United States leads the world—by far—in the number of firearms in private hands. While the United States comprises only 4 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for 40 percent of the globe’s firearms ownership. To drive home this point, there are 121 firearms for every 100 people in the United States compared with 53 in Yemen, the number two country by proportion of population. Indeed, more guns were purchased in the United States during 2020 alone—17 million—than in any other year on record.

It is therefore sobering to reflect on what this means for political discourse in America and attendant opportunities for violence. A 2024 survey conducted by the University of California at Davis revealed the faith that American gunowners have in their power to effect profound political change if moved to do so.

Over 42% of owners of assault-type rifles polled, for instance, agreed that political violence could be justified in certain, exigent circumstances. The number increased to 44 percent when recent gun purchasers were asked the same question, and to a staggering 56% “of those who always or nearly always carry loaded guns in public.”

Notably, then, firearms provide not just a capability for those who might be inclined to violence but might even be contributing to the radicalization and mobilization of Americans against other Americans.

Such sentiments have crystallized at a moment when an already polarized nation faces another highly divisive and nail-bitingly-close presidential election.

The far-right is especially eyeing these developments with suspicion and expressing ever more effusive concern over social media. Based on manifold posts, tweets, comments, and emojis, persons of this particular political persuasion will almost certainly be provoked should Trump lose another electoral bid. They will likely assume the mantle of his ultimate guardians—and indeed avengers. This combustible scenario is only catapulted further by an insistence from both sides of the aisle that this election is set to be the last in America.

At the same time, a Trump electoral victory could well prompt violence from the far-left, inspired in no small part by a strategy of revolution called accelerationism. Although first articulated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in their seminal 1848 pamphlet, Manifesto of The Communist Party, it more recently surfaced as a concept for a white supremacist revolution in the United States via a 1980s-era newsletter, titled, Siege.

In 2015, an online message board called “Iron March” published a digital edition of a collection of past writings that had originally appeared as a hardcopy book in 2003. The actual concept of accelerationism does not appear until page 199 where, the author argues, “the country isn’t going but has gone MAD; that the final END of society is accelerating; that the entire foundation itself is thoroughly corroded . . . Now isn’t that the most encouraging thing anyone has reported to you in a long, long time?”

Let us return to the question that opened this essay: is the United States on the verge of a civil war? Although we have argued elsewhere that the answer, for geographic reasons, is likely no, the question is no longer frivolous. We stand on the precipice of an election likely to offer an unprecedented mix of ingredients for widespread violence. America was up to the test in 2020. Time will tell whether 2024 can follow suit.