"They are Preparing for War"

This piece is from back in March, but just came across my desk yesterday. It seemed interesting in light of the recent polling we've seen on the question of large-scale violence. It's an interview with a lady who studies civil war, originally for a program run by the CIA.

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. 

What you'll notice immediately about this is how subjective this 'variable' is. Calling it a variable makes it sound like it's a mathematical quality, and indeed they do assign numbers to it, from -10 to +10. The Center for Systemic Peace probably feels like they have objective standards for how those numbers are assigned, but the examples they give show that they have genuinely incomparable countries and cultures grouped together. In the most negative category is North Korea -- fair enough, a paranoid prison state run through brainwashing, starvation, and abuse -- and also Saudi Arabia. I realize there are a lot of people with complaints about shariah law, as applied in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Iran or under the Taliban. Putting it in the same category with North Korea is bonkers, though. For one thing high numbers on either side are supposed to show political stability, in this case through autocracy. 

...what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone.

The Saudis barely have control of most of the country, paying off tribal warlords for nominal loyalty but not control; even now they're facing a low-level insurgency from the Howitat tribe over the place where they want to build a model city. 

Meanwhile, compared to the DPRK or even the PRC they aren't very autocratic. Saudis travel freely all over the world if they want to do so, and people from all over the world travel there to go on Hajj. While their government occasionally kills a citizen if he goes too hard against the ruling regime, so does ours. We were in the top category at the time.

Indeed, the sudden drop of the USA from a +10 to a +5 (in the zone of potential violence) during and only during the Trump administration gives away how subjective this standard must be. The US government changed almost not at all during the Trump administration. The same people were in charge of it; it did the same things. There was almost no turnover in the bureaucracy. While Trump did provide a brake on some features, such as the growth of the regulatory state, nevertheless the state still continued to grow. Spending continued as recklessly as ever before. (Likewise telling is their history of the whole United States, which gives more time to Trump than to anything else that ever happened.)

So there's only two variables, and one of them looks like social-science bunk. What about the other one?

...the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity.

Now I would be surprised to see data that confirmed that organizing around communism wasn't predictive of civil war, but in part that's because the Soviet Union and Communist China seeded such wars as an act of foreign policy. Maybe after the Cold War ended this stopped being as highly predictive as it would once have been. 

So, arguendo let's say this is correct. This is the point that I really started paying attention because we have indeed seen a lot more organizing along racial lines in the last few years. The clearest example is the BLM movement, but more to her point are the militant groups like the New Black Panthers and the 'Not F--king Around Coalition' [sic]. And not just to protest, but to riot and to engage in violent acts against the government -- for example, the weeks-long nightly attacks on the Federal building in Portland, Oregon. Antifa is not as good an example on her terms, being ideological and looser-organized, but it is a good example of what she says is the most dangerous sort of insurgency in the contemporary area: the 'leaderless insurgency.' 

So I read carefully to see how she would address these things, and of course the answer is that she does not mention them at all -- is not thinking about them at all, as far as I can tell. 

[W]atching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries. 

Anyone who believes that 'our institutions' are being weakened by hostile action needs to take a second look at the facts. They are doing it to themselves. Partly this is the natural process of ossification, where ever-larger bureaucracies create ever-more layers of rules and decision-making bodies that have to be dealt with in sequence. By the time a problem comes all the way up and a decision comes all the way down, the problem has changed and the bureaucracy now has a different problem to report back up. Partly, too, the money is so great now that corruption is inevitable; and partly those things coincide, so that identifying and rooting out corruption is just one more problem the bureaucracy can't solve. As they become more corrupt and more irreparable, they become less competent at solving the problems assigned to them. A collapsing faith in them is fully warranted by the facts alone.

Still, if you want to talk about a conspiracy to weaken an institution, how about "Defund the Police"? How about the recent media full-court-press on delegitimizing the Supreme Court because it now issues some conservative rulings? How about bypassing state legislatures to enact election laws in an unconstitutional way, which did more to undermine trust in our election system than anything I've seen yet? How about ordering the US Army to conduct a retreat and withdrawal operation in such a blinkered and unprofessional way as to make it appear that we were driven out of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and then refusing to hold anyone at all accountable for it? 

So she is blind to the most obvious examples of what she is citing as a major concern, both in terms of what groups are organizing along racial lines to fight the government and in terms of who is undermining our institutions. What is she worried about? Veterans.

Here in the United States, because we had a series of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, and now that we’ve withdrawn from them, we’ve had more than 20 years of returning soldiers with experience. And so this creates a ready-made subset of the population that you can recruit from....

What we’re heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is.... They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs. We’ve already seen this in other countries with powerful militaries, right? The IRA took on the British government. Hamas has taken on the Israeli government. These are two of the most powerful militaries in the world. And they fought for decades. And in the case of Hamas I think we could see a third intifada. And they pursue a similar strategy.

Here it’s called leaderless resistance.... Do not engage the U.S. military. You know, avoid it at all costs. Go directly to targets around the country that are difficult to defend and disperse yourselves so it’s hard for the government to identify you and infiltrate you and eliminate you entirely.

I end on that note to remind everyone of the point raised earlier, which is that there is a clear example of this operating today in the Antifa movement. Nor are they shy, for that matter, about claiming words like 'insurgency' or 'revolution,' or to argue that the United States has to go, to be replaced by some better kind of thing they imagine in the future. It's not on her radar, though. 

The thing is, there's no parallel movement on the right to Antifa. The random militias that exist in Michigan and wherever are not going to overthrow the government; most of them seem to be thoroughly-infiltrated by the FBI in any case. I suspect many of them were set up by the FBI as mousetraps to draw in the small number of actually militant people out there. The infamous Klan is now not even a shadow of itself, just a few kooks spread widely across this country. The Proud Boys aren't a celebrated movement among conservatives, who in general don't like street violence or thuggery. There's no money, either: there's nothing like the archipelago of funding sources available to the political left from microgrants to general funding vehicles from government institutions or universities. 

What I do see people on the right doing is preparing for collapse: not to wage war, but to pick up the pieces when this system falls apart. That turns out mostly to be an exercise in strengthening local government institutions through direct participation, and developing useful skills like hunting, carpentry, and gardening. In a way that should be scarier: a judgment passed that the system cannot be saved, should not be saved, and is disposable with proper precautions. If we neither need it nor want it, if it is increasingly frightened of and baleful towards us, why pay all these taxes?