Gunmen, the storming of the Capitol, outdated judgments of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court: In the United States, conflicts are escalating in unexpected ways. Political scientists and historians see the country on the brink of civil war - or already in the middle of it. It's about ethnic identity and white nationalism, about hegemony and life plans, about fears and autocracy. Ex-President Donald Trump plays a key role.
ntv.de: Mr. Berg, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 at the latest, the United States has been going through a social ordeal that seems to have no end. What did he do with democracy?
Manfred Berg: The worst thing was that he successfully undermined the fundamental norm of peaceful democratic transfer of power: that the loser of an election accepts the result. Political scientists in the USA call this the loser's consent. A clear majority of Republican supporters still believe in the lie about the stolen election. A significant proportion even see the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as a legitimate form of protest. Through the work of the Committee of Inquiry, we have already learned many details about how far-reaching Trump was in his uncoordinated, yet very determined, intentions to annul this election through some sort of coup.
What happens when there is no more loser's consent?
Historians and social scientists see this as a precursor to civil war. There is a great precedent in US history, the Civil War of 1861-1865. It was triggered by the 1860 presidential election, when the South did not accept Abraham Lincoln's election and used it as a reason for secession.
In the USA it is often said that the strength of the democratic system is that it can renew itself towards a more perfect union. Was there another comparable situation after the Civil War from which there was a way out? Or is the United States in a historically unique position?
At the very least, I would argue that such a dangerous, aggravated, polarized, and violent situation has not existed since the Civil War. There has always been political violence at the state level. But such an acute polarization between two identity-based political camps that see each other as a mortal threat to their core values and ways of life, I would say, has not been seen since the American Civil War.
What are these different ideas about life based on?
This has to do with the demographic-ethnic polarization that is central to understanding American politics. About 90 percent of Republican supporters are white. They are only a minority among the Democrats. We have - as all studies, all surveys show - a clear polarization of the party system in that the Republicans are the party of the white, conservative, traditional, religious, rural milieu and the Democrats form a very broad coalition of social and ethnic minorities and the liberal, relatively well-off whites on the other. This is reflected in social spatial separation. There is the famous contrast between coasts and flyover country, but above all enormous conflicts between town and country. For the Republicans, the demographic development was and is a huge problem.
Both sides do not feel well represented in this conflict. Trust in the institutions - only 7 percent trust Congress, 14 percent trust the judiciary - is at record lows. Why is that?
After the Second World War, the United States was considered the epitome of a consensus-oriented civic culture. Because of its famous checks and balances, the American constitution has always been seen as a very stabilizing force. However, stability requires a willingness to cooperate and non-partisanship. When they fall away, this system, which offers enormous opportunities for blockage, becomes dysfunctional. Among other things, because the rural states are significantly overrepresented in Congress. In addition, there have been obvious attempts for about ten or fifteen years to make it more difficult for the minorities in the individual states to exercise their right to vote through manipulative and discriminatory electoral laws.
The Republicans didn't always have this anti-democratic tendency in the way they currently do.
There were always forces in the Republican Party who said we had to open up, we had to find new groups of voters. It was no coincidence that George W. Bush and John McCain were quite successful in wooing Hispanics. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has basically promised the restoration of Euro-American white hegemony with the slogan "Make America Great Again" and has led the party on a radically xenophobic and racist course. After the civil rights movement, the Republicans formed a completely new alliance in order to become a gathering place for conservative, and especially evangelical, white Christians. The liberal wing of the Republican Party, which had always existed, was marginalized. However, all of this was not necessarily politics that can be described as anti-democratic or dangerous to democracy, but rather the basis of the Reagan coalition, and it was very successful. It achieved large majorities in elections in the 1980s.
And today?
Today I rather see a great parallel to the period before the civil war in the 19th century. Back then, it was the slave-owning class that felt threatened, believing their power and way of life were mortal and they needed to defend themselves. Even then, it was more of an identity conflict than one involving material distribution issues. It's similar today. I see the demographic transformation of the USA as a very important factor. In the 1960 or even 1970 census, almost 90 percent of the population classified themselves as white, and a good 10 percent as African American. In 2020 it was still around 60 percent white, but almost 19 percent Hispanics as the largest minority, more than 13 percent black and 6 percent Asian. For several years now, more than 50 percent of children born in the United States have not been white. According to forecasts by the US authorities, by around 2045 white Americans will only be the largest ethnic minority. This change goes hand in hand with an enormous sense of threat in parts of the white population, with fears of foreign infiltration and fear of a loss of hegemony. These developments are driving polarization on a massive scale.
You had mentioned the civil war. According to international conflict researchers, there are two decisive factors that can also be observed in the USA. First, Republicans are grouped as a party around an ethnic identity, and second, democratic institutions are weakened. From a scientific point of view, is the US closer to a civil war than at any time since the Civil War?
Yes that is unfortunately so. When the norm of democratic transfer of power is undermined, when a possible electoral defeat is seen as a fundamental threat in these polarized identity camps, political violence is an option. Cultural influences also come into play here; a strong state is seen as a threat to freedom more in the USA than in Europe. Citizens claim the right to carry a weapon in order to be able to defend themselves against a tyrannical state if the worst comes to the worst. If the self-evidence of democratic institutions is no longer accepted and there is this strong polarization between identity-political camps that are watching each other, that's dangerous.
What role does the presidency of Barack Obama play in this development?
For a significant portion of the white population, Obama's election was a first-order narcissistic insult. Without him, Donald Trump would be inconceivable as a counter-model, as the leader and standard-bearer of a counter-mobilization of white nationalism. However, Trump's election victory in 2016 was not inevitable. Hillary Clinton lost to Trump because she campaigned poorly, presenting herself as representing an aloof, liberal elite that didn't care about the plights of ordinary people.
So the two camps are building up?
There have always been phases and upheavals in US history where it was clear that one side had more or less gained the upper hand. Consider the 1932 election, which ushered in the New Deal era and a long period of dominant liberalism. Then, at the latest, in 1980, with Ronald Reagan, conservative hegemony began. Today these camps, their respective constituencies and strongholds are roughly equally strong. The result is a make or break battle, a "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" to shift the weight to one side or the other. The fight for the Supreme Court and its political instrumentalization is also a very worrying sign. An institution that is actually supposed to have a peacemaking function becomes a political pawn. However, there were long periods earlier when the conservatives were extremely dissatisfied with the Supreme Court and then came up with the plan: We have to win back the Supreme Court. That has now been achieved.
There have been multiple identity-motivated gunmen, plots against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the storming of Congress on January 6, 2021. When can you say yes, this is a civil war?
When you talk about Civil War in the context of American history, you have certain very strong images in mind, namely the Civil War. This is a war that has claimed the lives of 700,000 people and has been waged by regular uniformed armies and professional military personnel. We can't imagine it like that these days. Much more typical is what political scientists call a low-intensity conflict, i.e. a high, constantly increasing level of political violence. Some hate crimes are motivated by the so-called Great Replacement Theory. That's nothing new, just think of the terrible attack in Oklahoma City in 1995. Those were right-wing terrorists. One could therefore argue that the US is engaged in a low-intensity civil war. This type of permanent violence, of terrorism, and also the increasing willingness to legitimize violence as a political tool, exacerbate the situation. Remember Trump's 2017 call: "Proud boys, stand back and stand by!" addressed to a far-right militia. The events of January 6, 2021, it is becoming increasingly clear, were a violent coup attempt initiated by Trump. All of this combined, I would define as a civil war-like situation. And the culmination of the potential for violence is always contested elections.
So tensions could erupt around the November 8 congressional elections?
The Republicans will probably win the majority in the House of Representatives. Then the President and Congress will be hostile to each other. In the past, the party-political division of power between Congress and the President was not a problem. Eisenhower has governed with a Democratic Congress most of the time. Nixon governed with a Democratic Congress. Reagan governed with a Democratic Congress. But back then, non-partisanship was still part of the political culture of the USA. Now there are polarized camps that have been deadlocked for many years. The signs are not good. Almost 40 percent of supporters of Republicans and Democrats consider dividing the country into red and blue states (Republicans and Democrats, editor's note) not a bad idea at all.
And should a Democrat win again in 2024, Republicans could find themselves even more cornered. In addition, there are the consequences of climate change and possible refugee movements from Central America that the USA has never seen before. So if the ethnic issue is central, the situation could deteriorate further.
The notion that it only takes the right president and he can reconcile the country is simply naïve. The United States is already too divided for that. Joe Biden was also just a compromise candidate. The November elections will be similar. At the moment, many problems are coming together that are multiplying. The American lifestyle, which we share in many respects, is also reaching its limits. California has 50 million inhabitants. That is almost as many as in the large Western European countries, but almost without water. And yet a lifestyle is maintained in which the residents of Los Angeles use more water per capita than the Germans. And it's raining a lot more here. The environmental catastrophes will be added in the future.
It all sounds almost apocalyptic.
Unfortunately, over the past few years and months, we've seen some things that many people thought were downright alarmist. As a historian, one tries to explain in retrospect why events that were not in the horizon of possibilities of the contemporaries actually happened. We are the contemporaries of our own present and also have to deal with the supposedly impossible. Twelve, fifteen years ago, especially after the election of Barack Obama, I was rather optimistic about the future of the USA and thought that this was a sign that the old conflicts were taking a back seat and that a new social consensus was emerging in a multi-ethnic society can give. It has been resolved. The polarization has continued.
with dr Manfred Berg spoke to Roland Peters
