Even with the metrics used by the CIA, the United States has only declined to be a partially democratic country. In a recent book, Civil War researcher Barbara Walter warns that the United States has become an almost high-risk country.
From white a pro-supremacist far-right car crashes into a protest parade in Charlottesville, USA. An armed extremist is planning to abduct the governor of Michigan. An armed group of presidents Donald Trumpin supporters and conspiracy theorists seize the U.S. House of Congress and threaten to suspend the democratic transition.
Are these isolated cases or a sign of a deeper turnaround in U.S. democracy?
Hardly at least individual cases, warns US professor who has studied civil wars and their outbreak for decades Barbara Walter.
Walter, who works at the University of California in San Diego, is part of a U.S. CIA intelligence team that monitors the risks of an outbreak of civil war overseas.
The working group is called the Political Instability Task Force. It seeks to identify, classify and anticipate factors that expose countries to civil wars or outbreaks of political violence.
The CIA is not authorized to use external surveillance indicators to analyze U.S. internal risks. However, it is these metrics that Professor Walter will introduce in his book to be published in January How Civil Wars Start and uses them to examine the political situation in the United States.
The conclusions are not flattering.
“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,” Walter writes in his book, The Washington Post lift first to the public.
“The United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has moved into a very dangerous area.”
U.S. President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the House of Congress, which was in the process of confirming the transfer of power to election-winning Joe Biden on January 6, 2021.
Walterin according to the change in the United States, the rate at which the decline of democracy has taken place is worrying. In practice, decay has occurred in five years. The stomach can be largely restored to Trump’s presidency.
Other reports have also taken into account the fact that the United States, long known as the world’s leading democracy, has taken a backseat.
For example, a month ago, the International Institute for Democracy, headquartered in Stockholm, ranked the United States among the declining democracies for the first time in history.
Read more: Report: The United States joined the ranks of declining democracies for the first time in history
A recent U.S. survey in turn revealthat up to 17 percent of Republicans who support Trump would be willing to use violence to get Trump back as president.
Trumpin during the period, the slippage was so rapid that the United States can no longer be classified as a purely democratic state, even in the light of the data used by the CIA. The CIA uses the so-called Polity Index in its analyzes, in which countries score from ten minus points to ten plus points.
The countries with the lowest ratings, ie -10 or -9, are authoritarian countries such as Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Democracies like Norway or Finland get a value of +10 on the Polity Index.
The U.S. was also in the +10 category for a long time, but by the end of 2020, it had lost five points by five years.
The threshold for genuine democracy has been considered to be +6. The current U.S. Democracy Index of +5 means that the U.S. is only a partial democracy.
Walter describes the United States as “anocracy,” meaning that the United States is something between an authoritarian and a democratic state.
Slipping into anocracy reasons these included the blackmail of opposition parties by the Trump administration and, ultimately, Trump’s efforts to undermine people’s confidence in the democratic voting process.
Memorial flowers in Charlottesville. A man in favor of white supremacy drove a car to an anti-racism demonstration procession in Charlottesville, USA in August 2017 and killed one person.
Walterin it is important to understand that civil war or other major political violence rarely erupts in fully democracies or fully authoritarian countries. The countries at risk are precisely intermediate countries, which are not fully democratic but also not full dictatorships.
The risk of unrest is high, especially if change is rapid – countries are either rapidly democratizing or rapidly deteriorating.
“Partial democracy is three times more likely to experience civil war than full democracy,” Walter writes in his book, The Washington Post. “A country that stands on the threshold, like the United States now at +5, can easily be pushed into conflict by poor governance or more undemocratic decisions that further weaken institutions.”
High countries at risk of civil war will be eligible if the index falls by six points within three years. The U.S. has come down five points in five years, which, according to Walter, means the U.S. is an “almost high-risk” country.
“If there is a high-risk country, [CIA:n] the working group raises it to the watch list. In that case, the risk of the country falling into instability or political violence within a couple of years is considered a risk, ”Walter said news channel in an interview with CNN.
I’m sure predictions of the outbreak or non-outbreak of civil war cannot, of course, be made on the basis of democracy indices alone. They can only perceive an increase or decrease in risks
Still, Walter says it’s important to understand that the U.S.’s slippage of democracy has happened quickly and that the U.S. can no longer be considered a model country for democracy.
“We are no longer the longest-preserved democracy in the world. It ended in January 2021, ”Walter said in an interview with CNN, referring to the efforts of Trump and his supporters to prevent a democratic change of power.
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