... a rigorous yet readable analysis of the prospects for a second American civil war ... the civil-conflict equivalent of How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — a much-needed warning that uses cross-national research to examine the United States. Given how prescient Levitsky and Ziblatt were, and how expert Walters is (she is a leading scholar of civil wars), it is a warning to heed ... I’ve been skeptical of the notion that the United States is on the verge of another civil war. Walter has made me reconsider ... This is a book that everyone in power should read immediately ... Besides delivering an up-to-date view of civil wars, Walter provides a state-of-the-art accounting of why they begin ... Walter has answers, lots of them.
Only a fanciful vignette about two-thirds of the way through—envisioning a morning of chaos in November 2028, with bombs going off across the country as California wildfires rage—made me think that Walter was 'fear-mongering,' or at least pandering to our most literal-minded instincts. Then again, if things are as dire as she says, forcing us to see what a collapse might look like may arguably be the responsible thing to do ... Walter’s earnest advice about what to do comes across as well-meaning but insufficient—though I’m not sure how much of it is her fault, considering that the situation she has laid out looks too inflamed to be soothed by a few pointers in a book.
The power of Walter’s model is that she does not need to reference the United States. One plots our nation automatically as one reads. (The United States currently has a polity score of +5, within the anocracy zone for the first time since 1800.) ... Walter’s otherwise harrowing book stumbles when describing how greater violence might erupt, focusing on fringe groups over likelier flash points. According to recent polling, only one-third of Republicans say they’ll trust the results of an election their candidate loses. With a strongman-in-exile who’s already got one violent insurrection under his belt actively stoking those dynamics, Walter’s concentration on extremists like the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division feels like a distraction ... a sobering vision of where we may be headed, and for that reason they should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.
The title of the book is misleading. It isn’t really about civil wars generically, but about one conceivable conflict in particular: the Second American Civil War. Roughly at the halfway point, having established how fratricidal conflict occurs, Walter turns her attention fully to her own country. Naturally, she knows how absurd such a possibility will seem to many readers as they take the subway to their downtown offices or listen to the audiobook as they drive the kids to school ... Yet for all that, Walter is not fatalistic.
The central contention is that civil wars are most likely to occur in countries that exist in a 'middle ground' between democracy and autocracy known as 'anocracy'. Here she relies on the widely used Polity Score ... The Polity Score offers false objectivity. The numbers appears to provide quantitative accuracy but they are necessarily derived from a host of subjective assumptions ... The general laws that Walter claims to have discovered also fail to capture the complex histories of specific conflicts ... Walter assumes that civil wars originate in endogamous factors when in fact they often result from exogamous ones ... The biggest weakness in Walter’s analysis is her failure to provide a clear definition of 'civil war' ... Walter is perhaps too ready to indulge the fantasies of white nationalists reared on the apocalyptic Turner Diaries ... Even if that scenario remains thankfully far-fetched, Walter is certainly right to be alarmed. The sheer quantity of guns in circulation means the US is likely to see yet more political violence. And, to her credit, she places the increasingly anti-democratic features of American politics into a global perspective that is all too rare.
Although Walter is very clear about the clear and present danger posed by a right-wing insurgency, she does not engage in the sectarian scaremongering sometimes indulged by the American left. In her conclusion, she proposes a positive rather than punitive approach ... There is a future where How Civil Wars Start could be remembered as eerily prescient. The best that Walter and the rest of us can hope for is that her book helped make its message ultimately irrelevant.
Walter avoids...polemic and overstatement ... Because Walter relies so heavily on this metric [by the Polity Project], some of the conclusions she draws remain suspect ... At the worst, such books leave their readers either in a state of paralysed fatalism or prepping for the coming catastrophe ... Walter’s concluding proposals...in principle sound attractive ... But the circular problem is that the fractured state of current American politics makes such reforms impossible. Were the country capable of adopting the reforms Walter advocates, it would not find itself in the dangerous state she otherwise convincingly describes. Most persuasively, Walter reminds us of the power of leaders to act either as instruments of destruction or renewal.
... a solid contribution to the field of conflict studies ... innovative ... Walter shows convincing evidence of the erosion of democracy in the United States and the resulting potential for violence ... Walter’s scenario for actual civil war is less convincing, but still deeply sobering. The book accomplishes two major objectives: effectively examining authoritarian themes and strategies practiced by some elements in the Republican Party; and suggesting prescriptive polices to arrest the erosion of American democracy. Walter’s use of data and comparative slant should promote serious debate ... Highly recommended.