From our correspondent in the United States,
Barriers broken down. Broken windows. Police officers overwhelmed. Elected elected officials. On January 6, 2021, American institutions, stormed by 2,000 supporters of Donald Trump rejecting the verdict of the ballot box, faltered. But they held on. It remains that a year after the attack on the Capitol, in a country torn by divisions, two out of three people agree at least on one point: democracy “is in crisis and risks collapsing”.
With Democrats and Republicans poles apart on the origins of the evil and the remedies to be brought to it, “we are much closer to a civil war than any of us would like to believe”, warns Barbara Walter, expert researcher of conflicts regional in his book How Civil Wars Start.
“The Big lie” takes root
The countless fact-checks and the contested audit commissioned by the Arizona conservatives – which did not shit – did not change that: two in three Republican voters are convinced that Joe Biden’s victory was marred by “Electoral fraud,” according to an Ipsos poll for public radio NPR. Donald Trump, who gave up speaking on Thursday, does not miss an opportunity to rekindle the flame of what Republicans denounce as “the Big lie”, the “big lie”.
With the midterms of November 2022 looming, and especially a possible rematch Biden-Trump in 2024, a bis repetita seems inevitable. “I expect the Republican Party and Donald Trump to continue to reject results when their candidate loses. This sows doubt on the legitimacy of an election and represents a threat to democracy, ”said Chris Edelson, professor of political science at the American University of Washington. For the post of governor in California, Larry Elder even howled with fraud… before the closing of the polls.
Weak mesh sizes in institutions
The 2020 election highlighted the multiple potential points of failure of a complex electoral system. If the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia had not resisted a phone call from Donald Trump asking him to “find” a little more than 12,000 ballots to change the results, if electoral agents – conservatives – had not certified the results in Michigan and Pennsylvania, if Mike Pence had refused to validate the count of the voters, the United States would have been plunged into an unprecedented constitutional crisis.
For Carolyn Gallaher, professor of international relations specializing in extremism at the American University of Washington, “the biggest threat remains the legal actions that Republican executives take to undermine democracy.” She cites electoral reforms, which limit postal voting. But also the “vote ID” laws, which mainly penalize African-American voters who do not all have valid identity papers. Or the appointment of electoral agents adhering to the “Big lie” thesis.
Militias and the risk of a 21st century “civil war”
Among the rioters on January 6, around 40 members of far-right groups and militias (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters) will be tried from next spring for criminal conspiracy. Prosecutors say their communications seem to suggest their action was planned, without it being known whether they acted alone or coordinated with Donald Trump’s relatives like Steve Bannon or Roger Stone, who refuse to collaborate with the parliamentary commission of inquiry.
Barbara Walter has studied for over twenty years the circumstances that led to civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Northern Ireland. Within a CIA committee, she participated in the development of an instability scale modeling the risks of regional conflicts. Back at the University of California at San Diego, she applied this model to the United States. And its verdict is relentless: America has become an “anocracy”, a regime intermediate between democracy and autocracy. Identity fault lines in the Republican electorate, with low-educated white men fearful of losing their dominant status, the sounding board of social media, and the circulation of 400 million guns create an explosive mix.
It does not predict a risk of a remake of the Civil War, with two opposing armies. Because on CNN, she explained this week that a civil war of the 21st century would be “much more decentralized”, similar to an “insurgency with paramilitary groups clashing using unconventional tactics borrowed from guerrilla warfare and terrorism. In Kenosha (Wisconsin) and Portland (Oregon), clashes between antifa activists and militiamen left four dead in the summer of 2020.
Nina Silber, chair of the history department at Boston University, nods. “There is a risk of violent confrontation and civil war in the United States, but it will not be in the form of the 19th century.” According to her, the danger is “the confrontation of political factions seeking to undermine democratic standards”.
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