On the right, the decline of WASP power, e.g. via shifting demographics and culture[5]
On the left, decline in economic power of the 99%.[6]
Distributed media makes it harder to control the narrative, and more likely that extremists find each other.
Possibility for local support[7]
i. Some limited coordination with far-right groups among local law enforcement[8], where it’s possible this could lead to a festering insurgency in rural areas where local law enforcement is unwilling to step in[9].
Financing maybe easier these days (crowdsourcing, crypto).
Black swan: we don’t have much data on insurgencies / SPV in developed countries, but developed countries haven’t existed for long. We might just not know what it looks like.
I don’t know if I can make a strong case for it being impossible for civil wars to emerge from developed countries.
WMDs: maybe it’s easier to kill a lot of people these days, so it might only take a few actors to cross my arbitrary >5k deaths SPV threshold.
Ward et al has ‘high-intensity conflictual events’ (protests, fighting, killings) as the second-highest correlated variable with higher probabilities of conflict / civil war.
Voter Study Group found that 21% of Americans thought that violence was at least a little justified if the [opposing party] won the 2020 election. This study also found an increase in the tolerance of violence since 2017.
In 2018, the most recent year the FBI reported data. Also my inner Steven Pinker compels me to note that the overall violent crime rate has been declining steadily
I currently think the most-likely-to-foment-insurgency ideologies are about disenfranchised populations, in large part due to the Ward et al having ‘Excluded Population’ as by far and away the highest correlated variable with conflict. Ward meant Excluded Population to mean “excluded from political access to the state”, which I understand to be groups that cannot vote, or are otherwise feel they are being deprived of political power like the shia in iraq or hutu in rwanda.
The “Ideologies of Rebellion” section of this article covers some adjacent far-right ideologies. They often seem to orbit around a decline in WASP power, as the author of this thesis makes a (biased) case for. I wonder if given more opportunities to evolve, some violent version of this ideology could garner support in more than 5% of the population (where 5% is a wild guess for the level of local support at which fighting an insurgency becomes difficult).
See the “Far-Right Links with Law Enforcement” graphic in this CGPolicy article. There’s a history of this, see e.g. this retired sheriff helping to defend Clive Bundy’s ranch from federal officials.
some models for things getting worse
(I attempted to rank this list and the sub-lists from stronger to weaker models)
Some pre-insurgency qualities
More protests
correlate with more conflict[1]
create more opportunities
for violent-leaning people to find each other and become more radicalized
to evolve more virulent ideology
to become better organized
Already exist plenty of resources & training
Highest guns per capita
Lots of people with military experience—e.g. to source more weapons, to train recruits, and to fight effectively
Shifting overton window
More political polarization
Non-negligible support of political violence[2]
More and larger protests (involving both far right & left)
Trump
More mass shootings, hate crimes[3]
Ideologies
Disenfranchised populations[4]
On the right, the decline of WASP power, e.g. via shifting demographics and culture[5]
On the left, decline in economic power of the 99%.[6]
Distributed media makes it harder to control the narrative, and more likely that extremists find each other.
Possibility for local support[7] i. Some limited coordination with far-right groups among local law enforcement[8], where it’s possible this could lead to a festering insurgency in rural areas where local law enforcement is unwilling to step in[9].
Financing maybe easier these days (crowdsourcing, crypto).
Appeal to authority
ACLED has the US on its list of 2020 conflicts to worry about[10]
David Kilcullen is the kind of person who might know and has recently written a couple articles highlighting that characterize the US as in a pre-Mcveigh moment (May article) and an incipient insurgency (June article).
Black swan: we don’t have much data on insurgencies / SPV in developed countries, but developed countries haven’t existed for long. We might just not know what it looks like.
I don’t know if I can make a strong case for it being impossible for civil wars to emerge from developed countries.
WMDs: maybe it’s easier to kill a lot of people these days, so it might only take a few actors to cross my arbitrary >5k deaths SPV threshold.
Ward et al has ‘high-intensity conflictual events’ (protests, fighting, killings) as the second-highest correlated variable with higher probabilities of conflict / civil war.
Voter Study Group found that 21% of Americans thought that violence was at least a little justified if the [opposing party] won the 2020 election. This study also found an increase in the tolerance of violence since 2017.
In 2018, the most recent year the FBI reported data. Also my inner Steven Pinker compels me to note that the overall violent crime rate has been declining steadily
I currently think the most-likely-to-foment-insurgency ideologies are about disenfranchised populations, in large part due to the Ward et al having ‘Excluded Population’ as by far and away the highest correlated variable with conflict. Ward meant Excluded Population to mean “excluded from political access to the state”, which I understand to be groups that cannot vote, or are otherwise feel they are being deprived of political power like the shia in iraq or hutu in rwanda.
The “Ideologies of Rebellion” section of this article covers some adjacent far-right ideologies. They often seem to orbit around a decline in WASP power, as the author of this thesis makes a (biased) case for. I wonder if given more opportunities to evolve, some violent version of this ideology could garner support in more than 5% of the population (where 5% is a wild guess for the level of local support at which fighting an insurgency becomes difficult).
While Occupy fizzled, maybe some violent iteration of it could snowball? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
I currently model local support as important for sustaining an insurgency, from reading e.g. How Insurgencies End and Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency.
See the “Far-Right Links with Law Enforcement” graphic in this CGPolicy article. There’s a history of this, see e.g. this retired sheriff helping to defend Clive Bundy’s ranch from federal officials.
See the ‘Rebel Opportunities’ section of this Just Security piece for a brief case.
Conflicts where “violent political disorder was likely to evolve and worsen”