America’s New Age of Political Violence — with Barbara F. Walter

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1:35So the murder of Charlie Kirk, this feels different. It feels as if we're on the precipice of something really dark. And I was thinking, when's the last time the nation was in this type of dark mood? And I would argue it's been a very long time. There's something very strange going on here. The vibe is very much that we are perhaps entering a descent into some sort of darkness. Even the January 6th riot or insurrection, whatever the term you want to use, it was embarrassing, or I found it embarrassing and humiliating, and it made me angry. But this makes me, or I think this makes us somewhat a little bit queasy.

2:15This feels as if something really terrible might happen, that this might be the starting gun or the ending gun for some sort of downward spiral. and we wanted to bring in someone who has a background in civil wars and political violence so we found Professor Barbara Walter who is a professor at UC San Diego School of Global Policy and it was with that let's bust right into it in this very what feels like a very precarious unsettling time. Here's our conversation with Professor Barbara Walter.

3:02Professor Walters, where does this podcast find you? I'm in San Diego right now. I was born in San Diego. My parents were living in Toronto. My mom was seven months pregnant and they got sick of the Toronto winter and they read an article saying San Diego had the best weather in North America. So they drove there and I was born there a few weeks later. Anyways, let's bust right into this. As someone who studied political violence, what stands out to you most in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination? So what worries me about the Kirk murder or any type of crisis or crisis or emergency that happens between now and 2028 is that there is always an endgame to democracy.

3:45And the endgame is how does an aspiring dictator actually finally shut the door on democracy? And it's not easy to do because citizens don't want to give up their rights and freedoms. And so if they think they're losing, that democracy is about to disappear, they'll fight against that. So the strategy that you see these aspiring dictators pursue time and time again is they seek a crisis or an emergency or they manufacture a crisis or a war. Netanyahu is doing that right now in the Middle East to keep himself in power. But it could also be something like the Charlie Kirk murder, where you use this.

4:30And we have a name for people who they're violence entrepreneurs. You use a violent episode to, one, demonize your opponent, say, oh, my gosh, look, they're animals or they're dangerous or they're going to kill you. Um, and, and two, to convince people that power needs to be centralized, to, to declare a state of emergency, to declare martial law, and people will almost always trade, um, freedom for security. And so I think I don't think this is that that Reichstag moment. And I write about it in my Substack newsletter. This is not the Reichstag moment. But I think there will be a moment between now and 2028 where Trump finds some crisis and he uses it to scare the bejesus out of Americans and convince them that he needs to gain more power to protect them.

5:28And Americans are going to give it to him. I've read that a lot of times that these individuals think that they're, in order to capture social capital, believe that this is sort of a heroic act of violence. I've also noticed a pattern with political violence that it tends to be young men, young white men. And I'm curious also, have you done any studies connecting online behavior and a certain type of online behavior with either political violence or just mass shootings in general? I haven't done that particular research. Interestingly enough, Facebook has. Do you remember a few Decembers back, there was a whistleblower, a Facebook employer named Francis Haugen, who turned over tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documentation to Congress and to the Wall Street Journal.

6:26And those documents outlined the internal experiments and studies that Facebook had done with the universe of the data that only Facebook has access to. And they looked at the effects of online time on a whole host of outcomes from depression to anxiety to violence. And, you know, not surprisingly, they found that the more time you spent on Facebook and I assume other social media outlets, and again, you'd have to look at the content they were looking at, the more likely you were to experience a lot of these negative outcomes. So Facebook knows that. We also found out recently that Facebook suppressed information they had about the effects of social media on children.

7:21So we know that spending hours and hours a day alone in your living room or in your bedroom, watching violent videos or engaging in really extremist chat rooms does increase how radical you ultimately become and how likely you already use violence. And then to get back to young men, the vast majority of this type of violence is committed by young men. And young men are spending more and more time online. And in some ways, it's really, it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. Here are all these, you know, young men with, you know, promising futures. This was an A student. He got a full scholarship to college.

8:16He had his whole world ahead of him. And yet, most of his time increasingly was spent online. And we'll find out exactly what he was looking at and what he was engaging in. But we know that that does not make for healthy, well-adjusted, peaceful people. There's been a lot of discussion or a lot of rhetoric around, you know, kind of this is war. And then some other people saying that it feels that one of the reasons this just feels so awful is it feels like there's a sense in the air that we may be on the precipice of something just very bad. And you have actually studied civil wars and around the world.

9:02And what are the kind of the you've studied them globally. When you look at America today, what parallels or kind of warning signs do you see? Well, I'll start with the underlying conditions. For five years, between 2017 and 2021, I served on a task force run by the CAA called the Political Instability Task Force. And one of the goals of that task force was to come up with a model that would help the U.S. government predict what types of countries were likely to experience political violence and political instability within the next two years. And when this model was created, you had two types of people on the task force.

9:44You had experts on conflict like myself, and you had data analysts who worked for the agency. And the data analyst asked the experts to tell them everything we thought might potentially lead a country down the path towards war. And we gave them 38 different factors. So we actually didn't know which were the most important ones. So things like poverty, whether a country heavily discriminated against a particular group, whether a country was ethnically homogeneous or not, all sorts of stuff. And the analysts went away. And when they came back, they said, it turns out only two conditions were highly predictive.

10:28And they were not the conditions that the experts expected. The first condition is something we called anocracy. all that means is a partial democracy. So the vast majority of political violence, the vast majority of civil wars do not happen in healthy democracies and they do not happen in full autocracies. They happen in between, in this middle zone where a country has some elements of democracy and they have some elements of autocracy. And they especially happen in these onocracies if they're rapidly moving from one side to another. So if you have a democracy that's rapidly declining, that puts it at risk of political violence.

11:14If you have an autocracy that's rapidly democratizing, think about Yugoslavia in the 1990s, that's where you get political violence. So that's the most important feature. Do you have a weak and rapidly changing type of democracy. The second is whether citizens in those inocracies were basically choosing political party based on race, religion, or ethnicity rather than on ideology. So you're joining a political party not mostly because you're conservative or liberal, but you're joining because you're Black or white or Muslim or Christian or Serb or Croat. So if a country had these two features, it was a partial democracy with these identity-based political parties.

12:05The task force put that country on a watch list. We called it the watch list, and we considered it at high risk of political violence and instability within the next two years. So if you take those underlying conditions, and you think about the United States today, the United States is now solidly in the anocracy zone based on the measure we used on the task force. We are no longer considered by any group that studies democracy a full democracy. We are in this middle zone. If you look at our political parties, they started breaking down into, you know, by race and religion starting around 2018.

12:47It got a little bit better in the last election where Latino men and African American men gravitated from the Democratic Party towards the Republican Party. But I suspect that's going to go back in the next election. So by both of these measures, the United States is in this high-risk category today. Those are the underlying conditions. So then look at the more immediate conditions. So what tends to trigger civil war? What tends to trigger civil war often contested elections. It's elections that people don't trust, elections that are very close, and elections that have this sort of winner-take-all, zero-sum feeling to them, that if you lose the election, there might never be another election again, and you might permanently be shut out of power.

13:46When you have that surrounding elections, people tend to start to give up on playing by the rules. and the more extreme elements in the parties and their message, which is, you know, the system is broken. You know, we're never going to fix it. Violence is justified. That message begins to resonate with the more moderate members of the party. And that's when you start to get in trouble. We'll be right back.

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17:33I think that's fascinating, this notion of an anocracy, and that is somewhere in between. If you're Singapore, China, or Russia, quite frankly, not a lot of risk. If you're, I don't know, Japan or Canada, healthy democracy, but something, the hybrid in between isn't a good place to be. I think that's really fascinating. The second thing you mentioned that I didn't get a strong feel for whether we're there or not is when things are, when there's racial divisiveness. A lot of this rhetoric is positioned as white Christian nationalists. Obviously, non-whites tend to gravitate, I think, towards a more progressive viewpoint.

18:11Well, I'll stop there. Do you think we fit the conditions for that second criteria? You know, it's really interesting. You know, I thought by this time, Donald Trump in his second term, we would clearly fit that criteria because I, you know, Donald Trump in his first term was more upfront. I thought about supporting the white nationalist agenda. He sort of lauded the rioters or the people who are parading in Charlottesville in 2017. He stepped back a bit with that. And I think he's realized that, for example, the Latino community could be a potential voting bloc for him. You know, he hasn't really, you know, his immigration rates have disproportionately affected non-whites.

19:04But I think he's a little more sensitive to the fact that Latinos helped him win. They're the fastest growing population here in the United States. They're not going away. And he doesn't want to alienate them too much. And because the white population is declining compared to other groups in the United States, The Republican Party needs to reach across racial and religious lines. And so I think he's been a little more sensitive to that. But having said that, you know, after the 2020 election, if you looked at who voted, you know, how Americans vote, the vast majority of black Americans voted Democrat.

19:49They still do. A majority of Latinos vote Democrat. a large majority of Muslims and Jews and Asians vote Democrat, and whites overwhelmingly vote Republican. It was about 80 % of whites voted Republican. And this is in a country that's multi-ethnic and multi-religious. So that really starts to meet this criteria of identity-based rather than ideologically-based. And also, when you look at who who gravitated towards the Republican Party over the last 10, 15 years, it was working class whites. And ideologically, they would be much better served by the Democrats. So they're choosing the Republican Party for a whole host of other reasons unrelated to, you know, what would be in their in their economic and social interests.

20:45So what's your sense of things? Do you feel that the table is set for something, and revolutions can take on different forms, right, or civil war can take on different forms? Do you think the table has been set for some sort of civil unrest that only gets worse and worse? Or like most things, will this begin, will the half-life of this be a few weeks and we'll move on to the next big thing? You know, I wish I didn't have to say this. I think we're actually in a really very tough, bad spot. And I'll tell you why. America has experienced political violence throughout our history. And in the 60s, we saw that.

21:20But the response was almost always uniform. If we go back even to the 1990s, in the 1990s, we started to see the rise of violent extremist militias in the United States. And Americans didn't really get it, didn't see this until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. And that sort of, you know, threw them into the limelight. And the response to that by American citizens was absolute horror, absolute condemnation. It didn't matter what drove this person. It didn't matter what political affiliation he had. All Americans condemned that violence. The second thing that happened was it activated the FBI to aggressively go after militia groups across the country and figure out who the leaders were, figure out where they were organizing, and really in some respects neutralize them.

22:22So if you look at 1995, it was the peak of militias in the United States until recently. And after the FBI started focusing on this problem, we saw a pretty consistent and rapid decline. That is not happening today. We've seen the rise of militias pretty quickly since about 2008 with the election of Barack Obama. And now we're seeing a series of, you know, domestic terror attacks. And the response isn't by the FBI, you know, let's look at the problem that we have and let's root it out and let's figure out what's driving this. And the response by Americans is not, this is absolutely terrible. You're seeing pockets saying this is war.

23:14You know, this is, we need to get retribution. We need to, you know, eliminate the enemy. And this is not a healthy dynamic. We need to treat this in a unified way that violence in whatever guise, especially politically motivated violence is not acceptable. And the FBI needs to address that. And And we have an FBI that is politically motivated and not necessarily interested in rooting out all types of violence. We'll be right back.

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26:36You're a full-time prof. I spend a lot of time on campus. And there seems to be a very disturbing trend among students where they seem more accepting to the notion of violence as a means of countering what they see as violence, and that is words. And today, student acceptance of violence to silent speakers is at a record high. One in three students say violence is acceptable to stop a speaker, up from one in five in 2020. What do you account for the change? What do you think is responsible for the change? I think the single biggest factor that's driving a lot of the breakdown of societal norms and societal threads and societal decency and civility is the internet.

27:26You know, if you look at countries, if you look at democracies, if you look at speech, it really didn't start to unravel and get really heated and negative and uncompromising until about the late 2000s. And that, of course, is the introduction of the smartphone and the rise of people's reliance on social media for most of their news. And then when you started to have algorithms that were, you know, when the tech companies figured out that they could design algorithms that would push information into people's hands that was sort of addictive, information that they couldn't keep their eyes off of, that kept them tied to their phones, that information was in many cases the most emotionally charged, the most incendiary.