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This is going to be our group's first online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry - it's easy to use and free to join.

Here's the link to the event: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82806162675?pwd=VXRtRkpCcEltWGlObzNNQi9WZXp2QT09

Meeting ID: 828 0616 2675
Password: 1eZGZB

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UNDERSTANDING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

INTRODUCTION:

This is a reboot of a meetup we held 3 years ago. Due to the ongoing protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the national debate over how the riots & looting affect the public image of the cause of policing reform, I figured it would be a good topic for our group to revisit. I apologize if some of the articles I linked are a couple years old and make the outline feel a bit "dated", but it's the best I could do on short notice.

CAVEAT: I realize this is a highly emotional issue for many people and highly polarizing, but we need to try to approach it dispassionately & critically as if we were social scientists trying to get at the truth, not activists trying to rally support for a cause. As moderator, I'm going to insist that we stick to the discussion outline fairly closely, and that means we won't spend much if any time discussing George Floyd's death or the various ideas people have for policing reform. Instead, we want to address the more general question of how violent protests can advance or hinder a political cause. If you absolutely need to just vent & express how current events are making you feel, find another meetup for that. I don't want to have to resort to muting people, but I will if you start ranting or try to derail the discussion.

We'll start by discussing the way that social norms about the use of violence by private citizens ties in with broader concerns about the "rule of law" and the state's "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence". In the second part of the discussion, we'll address the sociological & political science research into the effects of political violence on public opinion and public policy, as well as how political violence compares with non-violent forms of protests. In the third part, we'll look at some theories that try to explain the cyclical nature of political violence and we'll address the chances of a serious breakdown in law & order in the U.S. which the scholar Peter Turchin sees as a serious possibility, and we'll contrast this with some reasons why other scholars think that an extreme political calamity like a "Second Civil War" or collapse of the U.S. government is unlikely, at least in the near future.

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

I know I've linked a LOT of material below, and I certainly don't expect you to read every article and watch every video that I've linked below in order to participate. Instead, I just want everyone to try to look at one or two links in each section. Total, this shouldn't take more than 30-45 minutes of your time. Hopefully, participants will look at different materials and we'll be able to compare notes during the discussion and you'll find out what you missed. We'll go over the basics in everything linked below, and I'll make sure you leave with a better understanding of these issues. As you can see, I've jotted some notes under each link that summarize the major points so you can get a general overview of what each author says without having to examine everything.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 40 minutes on each section.

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I. THE ETHICS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE:

  • IS IT EVER ETHICAL TO PHYSICALLY ATTACK POLITICAL ADVERSARIES TO PREVENT OR PUNISH OBJECTIONABLE SPEECH (E.G. HATE SPEECH, FIGHTING WORDS, STOCHASTIC TERRORISM)? OR SHOULD FORCE ONLY BE USED TO DEFEND ONESELF OR OTHERS FROM AN IMMEDIATE THREAT OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE?
  • IS IT EVER ETHICAL TO DESTROY GOVERNMENT PROPERTY AND/OR PHYSICALLY ATTACK GOV'T AGENTS IF THE GOV'T HAS DONE SOMETHING UNJUST, OR ONLY IN CASES WHERE THE LEGAL PROCESS IS BROKEN?
  • IS IT EVER ETHICAL TO LOOT AND/OR DESTROY LOCAL BUSINESSES TO PROTEST GOV'T INJUSTICES, OR ONLY IN CASES WHERE THE BUSINESSES DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE INJUSTICE? DOES IT DEPEND ON WHETHER THE BUSINESS IS A LARGE CORPORATION OR A SMALL FAMILY BUSINESS AND/OR THEIR LEVEL OF INSURANCE?
  • DO RIOTS POSE A SERIOUS CHALLENGE TO THE STATE'S "MONOPOLY OF LEGITIMATE VIOLENCE", OR ARE THEY MOSTLY JUST AN ANNOYANCE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS?
  • DO ANTI-POLICE PROTESTS TYPICALLY GENERATE A "FERGUSON EFFECT" - I.E. ARE POLICING SLOWDOWNS FOLLOWED BY AN INCREASE IN CRIME RATES? IF SO, COULD LONG-TERM REFORMS IN POLICING COUNTERBALANCE THE SHORT-TERM HARMS FROM A CRIME SPIKE?
  1. Devo Nicks, "When Is Political Violence Acceptable? -- Just War Theory, Utilitarianism, and the Regressive Left" (video - 23:51 minutes)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyb_txorVh4

Devo is an anime & videogame vlogger who rose to prominence after clashing with Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) during Gamergate. For a non-academic, he offered a surprisingly cogent argument about why physically attacking people for having abhorrent political ideas is wrong because it endangers the rule of law. He frames his arguments in terms of the "just war theory" from traditional political philosophy. Just War theory is based on the idea that political violence is only justified when it "intends to and results in protecting people from an even greater harm" (e.g. tyranny, widespread persecution, or genocide). In less dire conditions, political violence is not preferable to the rule of law which benefits everyone by keeping the risk of violent victimization fairly low. He also criticizes the naïve utilitarian arguments often used by those who think that "hate speech" by extremists should be met with violence, noting that philosophers like Immanuel Kant pointed out that this type of reasoning would lead to a "tyranny of the majority".

  1. Trevor Noah, "George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper" (video - 18:12 min.)
    https://youtu.be/v4amCfVbA_c

Daily Show host Trevor Noah posted a video response to the protests that erupted shortly after George Floyd's death. He argued that the proximate cause of these protests was the tensions created the coronavirus quarantines and widespread unemployment, followed by the shocking news of the Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd killings. He said that even though the killers were arrested & charged with murder, this was only due to luck that resulted in someone filming these events and then posting it online. He argued the destruction of property and looting during the protests was understandable, if not justified, by the breach in the "social contract" represented by the police committing murder. He said, “The only reason you didn’t loot Target before is because you were upholding society’s contract. There is no contract if law and people in power don’t uphold their end of it.”

  1. Robert Taylor, "The Myth of the Rule of Law"
    https://mises.org/blog/myth-rule-law

Taylor cites the law professor John Hasnas' perspective on the "rule of law" and argues that it is a myth designed to ensure that the public's compliance with the interests of the ruling class. This is consistent with the tendency of scholars at the Ludwig von Mises Institute to take more radical "paleo-libertarian" and "anarcho-capitalist" positions on government. They see the nation-state as a "monolithic, top-down coercive regime imposed by legislatures, state police, and bureaucracies" and they see the law as "not a neutral body of rules to help keep order and govern society" but "merely an opinion with a gun". Instead of our current legal system, Mises scholars like Hasnas tend to favor a common law that evolves over time from custom & judicial precedents rather than statutes and adjudicated by a decentralized system of competing courts & private arbitration.

Note: The paleo-libertarians' disdain for the coercive nation-state which they see as run in the interest of elitist globalists has bled over into the Alt-Right. Ironically, these arguments are also very similar to the views of left-wing anarchists who also view the "rule of law" as highly dubious. The radical left tends to see the "rule of law" as masking "structural violence" (Johan Galtung's term for institutional sources of harm like poverty, pollution, police harassment, incarceration, etc.) and "symbolic violence" (Pierre Bourdieu's term for pervasive yet indirect forms of coercion like racism, sexism, classism, etc.). In this sense, even countries that aren't embroiled in civil wars are still rife with violence exercised on behalf of the elite, and so the oppressed are justified in using violence to resist & overthrow them.

  1. Jamiles Lartey, Ryan Felton & Louis Beckett, "'Ferguson Effect' Is A Plausible Reason for Spike in Violent US Crime, Study Says"
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/15/ferguson-effect-homicide-rates-us-crime-study

The Guardian reviews a recent Justice department-funded study that suggests three possible drivers for the more than 16% spike in homicide from 2014 to 2015 in 56 of the US’s largest cities: (1) police disengaging from vigorous enforcement in black neighborhoods due to intense criticism & rioting after they've shot unarmed black suspects, (2) systemic breakdown in the black community's trust in police & the justice system, leading some to take the law into their own hands, (3) a rise in ex-cons returning to society due to decarceration policies. The criminologist Richard Rosenfeld says that the evidence points to the 2nd factor being the most dominant, and that this "crisis of police legitimacy" represents a dangerous decline in the rule of law in some locales.

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II. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF NON-VIOLENT PROTESTS & THE "RADICAL FLANK EFFECT" AS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD:

  • IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MODERATES & RADICALS ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM ADVERSARIAL OR COMPLIMENTARY?
  • ARE RADICALS THAT ARE FRIGHTENING TO THE MAINSTREAM USEFUL BECAUSE THEY CAN HELP MODERATES BARGAIN WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT FOR REFORMS, WITH THE IDEA THAT THIS WILL HELP DEFUSE THEIR MORE HOT-HEADED ALLIES?
  • IS NONVIOLENT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE SUFFICIENT, OR DOES IT NEED "DIVERSITY OF TACTICS" (I.E. A MIX OF VIOLENCE & NON-VIOLENCE) TO FORCE CONCESSIONS?
  • WHEN DOES POLITICAL VIOLENCE SWAY PUBLIC OPINION, AND WHEN DOES IT BACKFIRE & LEAD THE MAINSTREAM TO SEEK OUT A CONSERVATIVE OR AUTHORITARIAN LEADER WHO PROMISES TO REESTABLISH "LAW & ORDER"?
  • HOW DO DIFFERENT TYPES OF VIOLENT TACTICS ENTER THE ACTIVISTS' "REPERTOIRE OF CONTENTION" & WHAT SOCIAL FORCES CONTROL IF/WHEN ONE OR BOTH SIDES ESCALATE TO LETHAL FORCE?
  • IF VIGILANTE ATTACKS ON POLITICAL OPPONENTS BECOMES NORMAL, DOES IT CREATE A SLIPPERY SLOPE THAT COULD LEAD TO SOMETHING LIKE ITALY'S "YEARS OF LEAD"?
  1. Chris Mooney, "How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL"
    http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/keystone-xl-protesters-science-joe-nocera-bill-mckibben?

The science journalist Chris Mooney discusses psychological research that helps explain the feud between radical activists trying to block the Keystone pipeline and liberal moderates who thought opposing it was futile or pointless. The moderates tended to paint the radical left activists as nuts who make the environmental movement look bad - a type of ingroup criticism known as "hippie-punching" or "reverse tribalism". Research by Yale political scientist Alan Gerber suggest that center-left moderates score high in the personality trait of Openness. This trait appears to make them more likely to remain politically unaffiliated, hewing to a sort-of "knee-jerk centrism" which leads them to criticize those they see as too radical. Conversely, research by Ravi Iyer of USC shows that radical environmentalists tend to score higher than moderate liberals on 3 of Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations: "care/harm," "fairness/cheating," and "sanctity/degradation". This may leave them more susceptible to moralizing narratives and more viscerally offended by perceived abuses of the sanctity of nature. The moderates, who are less driven by pure "care/harm" concerns, may tend to be less emotional about preserving the environment in a pristine state, and are thus more willing to endorse trade-offs.

In the 2nd half of the article, Mooney introduces the question of whether the moderates are right that radicals create a public backlash that interferes with the movement's wider goals, or whether the radicals are right that their protests create space for, at minimum, the achievement of more moderate goals. He suggests turning to the study of the "radical flank effect", a term coined by Herbert Haines, a SUNY-Courtland sociologist in his 1988 book Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954-1970. Haines argued that radical groups like the Black Panthers and individuals like Malcolm X generated enough fear in the public & government officials that it made the more reasonable demands of the moderates like Martin Luther King Jr. look like an attractive way to head off civil unrest. Haines pointed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act, and 1968 Fair Housing Act as examples of what he calls this a "positive radical flank effect". But he also raised the possibility of "negative radical flank effects"—indeed, he pointed to the backlash to black radicalism that kicked in by the early 1970s. However, Haines argued the "positive radical flank effects" were more decisive in the long run, since the backlash didn't erase the earlier victories encoded in the civil rights legislation.

  1. Erica Chenowith, "The success of nonviolent civil resistance" (video - 12:33 min.)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w

Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at the University of Denver and one of the first researchers to do broad, quantitative analysis of the relative success of violent & nonviolent political movements around the world. She looked at 323 campaigns from 1900-2006, categoried them as violent or non-violent, and looked at whether they achieved their states aims (i.e. regime change, anti‐occupation, secession). She found that violent campaigns appeared to work more in the 1940s-1950s, but that the nonviolent campaigns have had a much higher success rate since the 1960s.

When she looked at why nonviolent resistance was more effective than violent insurgency, she found 2 major reasons: (1) nonviolent campaigns can mobilize more people than violent campaigns (i.e. nonviolent protests are less physically demanding and usually less risky because they are often met with less force by the regime), and (2) mass nonviolent action is more likely to divide the regime, whereas violent action is more likely to unite the regime (i.e. nonviolent protests tend to generate more public sympathy, inspire less backlash, and encourage security force defections). Chenoweth mentions that every movement in her study that achieved sustained participation from 3.5% of the population succeeded - this has come to be known as the "3.5% Rule".

Chenoweth also looked at the consequences of violent & nonviolent campaigns after they achieved success, and she found that violent
campaigns tend to create “structural violence” that lingers after the insurgency ends, whereas nonviolent campaigns are more likely to improve governance and stability.

  1. Ray Valentine, "You Call This an Uprising?"
    http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2016/06/you-call-this-an-uprising/

Valentine takes issues with Chenoweth's research findings, arguing that she classified several successful campaigns such as India's independence movement, South African anti-apartheid movement, and the 2011 Egyptian revolution as "nonviolent" despite violent flanks & incidents of defensive violence. He argues that new research is revealing that despite the rhetoric of its leaders, many rank-and-file participants in the US civil rights movement were armed to defend themselves from white mobs. Striking workers in the Great Depression defended themselves when police and scabs tried to break their pickets. The contemporary movement against militarized policing and mass incarceration included riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, Anaheim, and Brooklyn. All of these actions would violate the Engler’s guidelines for strict, disciplined nonviolence, and none of them got in the way of mass participation. Valentine concedes that "most civilians movements are surely primarily nonviolent most of the time, but they frequently contain moments of intensified militancy" He says he doesn't want to romanticize or advocate for violence, but also argues that "policing the limits of acceptable tactics is usually counterproductive, and denouncing anything that might be construed as violent — especially in the name of appealing to a hypothetical, implicitly middle-class 'public opinion' — largely serves to split movements and legitimize repression."

Valentine also notes that Chenoweth is is affiliated with a center at the University of Denver that is funded by the Departments of Defense & Homeland Security and the CIA. He notes that these connections have not gone unnoticed on the left, leading some of the global left to instinctively view outbreaks of mass protest against governments hostile to the US as imperialist plots. Valentine resists viewing everything through a conspiracy theory lens, but he notes that the failure of nonviolent activists to bring about socialist revolutions is presumably "a feature rather than a bug" from the perspectives of the neoliberal interests that Chenoweth represents.

  1. Jonathan Chait, "New Study Shows Riots Make America Conservative"
    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/new-study-shows-riots-make-america-conservative.html

Chait cites some recent research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow that shows that Herbert Haines may have been mistaken about the net effect of the "radical flank effects" generated by the black radicals of the 1960s-70s. Wasow compared poll data showing the public’s concern for civil rights as well as concern for “social control” with incidents of violent & nonviolent protests, and found they match up pretty closely:

Wasow also looked at county-by-county voting and compared it with violent & nonviolent protest activity, and he found that black-led protests in which some violence occurred are associated with a significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Examining counterfactual scenarios in the 1968 election, Wasow estimated that fewer violent protests were associated with a substantially increased likelihood that the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon.

Thus, Chait argues, "the physical damage inflicted upon poor urban neighborhoods by rioting does not have the compensating virtue of easing the way for more progressive policies; instead, it compounds the damage by promoting a regressive backlash. The Nixonian law and order backlash drove a wave of repressive criminal-justice policies that carried through for decades with such force that even Democrats like Bill Clinton felt the need to endorse them in order to win elections "

  1. Ryan Cooper, "Moderate Liberals' Weak Case Against Riots"
    http://theweek.com/articles/556803/moderate-liberals-weak-case-against-riots

Cooper is critical of Chait's article and the idea that Wasow's research on the civil rights movements & black radicalism in the 1960s-'70s shows why the Black Lives Matter movement shouldn't use riots. He brings up 4 objections: (1) The crime rate was much higher in the '60-'70s which made a public backlash to rioting and the election of a "law & order" candidate like Nixon more likely than today when crime rates are much lower; (2) The relative scale of recent riots is much smaller compared to those of the '60s-'70s; (3) Wasow's analysis shows that black-led riots were associated with a 1.12-1.55% decline in Democratic vote share. That conceivably could have tipped the 1968 election, which was extremely close, but it wouldn't have mattered in 1972, when Nixon won by 23 points; (4) Riots might lead to better policy from the existing government, at the cost of a hit to public opinion. For instance, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, sparking days of chaos in many American cities, only a week later Congress passed the Fair Housing Act.

  1. Mencius Moldbug, "Right-Wing Terror As Folk Activism"
    http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/07/right-wing-terrorism-as-folk-activism.html

The "Neoreactionary" thinker Mencius Moldbug wrote this essay shortly after the Norwegian ethno-nationalist Anders Behring Breivik massacred 77 civilians at a socialist youth camp. He argues that right-wing terrorism cannot be effective in most modern nations because it's essentially a "violent flank" without a moderate center-right. There are conservative political parties, but they tend to disdain the use of terrorism because it goes against their instinctive deference to law & order. Without any covert allies in the establishment, there's no one who can use the looming threat of right-wing violence to push for concessions to conservative political goals. Moldbug argues that Breivik thought right-wing terrorism could work because he grew up in a leftist world and his heroes like Max Manus (the WWII Norwegian resistance fighter) are leftists for whom terrorism really does work. Moldbug says that the only possible change a right-wing activist has to shift his country rightward is to join the political left and subvert it from within, gradually turning international socialism into nationalist fascism.

  • Note: Contra Moldbug, perhaps police brutality fulfills a similar function for the political right that left-wing terrorism does for the political left. Essentially, it may be rogue cops, not right-wing terrorists, that function as the violent flank that garners conservative support.
  1. Lisa Wade, "Is Mass Murder Now Part of the Repertoire of Contention?"
    https://psmag.com/is-mass-murder-now-part-of-the-repertoire-of-contention-1303ba84be33

Wade introduces the sociologist Charles Tilly's concept of the "repertoire of contention" - i.e. the set of various tools & tactics available to a protest movement in a given time frame, as well as the social norms that govern their use. She argues that evidence is beginning to suggest that mass shootings are becoming more frequent and may soon become an accepted tactic among political radicals.

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III. CONFLICT CYCLES & DIRE PREDICTIONS:

  • WHAT FACTORS ARE BEHIND OUR SOCIETY'S GROWING POLITICAL TENSIONS, AND WHY DO THEY FOLLOW CYCLES?
  • WAS PETER TURCHIN'S 2010 PREDICTION OF A RISE IN CIVIL UNREST AROUND 2020 PRESCIENT OR JUST LUCKY?
  • COULD A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OR A SUDDEN EVENT - LIKE A TERRORIST ATTACK - RESULT IN A CIVIL WAR OR GOVERNMENT COLLAPSE?
  • TO WHAT EXTENT DO CYCLICAL THEORIES OF HISTORY RELY ON POST-HOC THEORIZING & CONFIRMATION BIAS?
  • IS THE SURFACE-LEVEL TURMOIL SURROUNDING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MATCHED BY DEEPER STRUCTURAL DANGERS?
  1. Paul Rosenberg, "Breaking point: America approaching a period of disintegration, argues anthropologist Peter Turchin"
    http://www.salon.com/2016/10/01/breaking-point-america-approaching-a-period-of-disintegration-argues-anthropologist-peter-turchin/

Peter Turchin is a lifelong academic who's shifted from zoology (his PhD) to studying ecology, anthropology & history, and his theories are taken much more seriously in academia than Neil Howe's "Fourth Turning" theory to which it's sometimes compared. His 2016 book, "Ages of Discord", posits a 50-year conflict cycle in American history, starting around 1820 ("The Era of Good Feelings" when economic & social factors were very benign), peaking initially around 1870 (Civil War), then in 1920 (First Red Scare), then in 1970 (Civil Rights & Student Protests), and if this pattern continues it will peak again around 2020. Some of this 50-year cycle is due to generational amnesia about the consequences of political violence & social turmoil - every other generation (25 years each) has to re-live it.

Turchin also sees social conflict as being tied to deeper economic & demographic factors which can make the magnitude of each peak milder or more severe. His "structural-demographic theory" represent complex human societies as systems with 3 main compartments (general population, elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with sociopolitical instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks. (In other articles, Turchin emphasizes the difference between cliodynamics' use of oscillations & feedback loops and the more rigid "clock-like" cycles that many amateur theorists tend to use. There are a lot of economic & demographic factors that can advance or delay the action of the feedback loop, so one must be cautious about thinking a given society's cycles will always last the same amount of time or that the cycles in different societies will always be the same length.)

Turchin's model has 3 sources of conflict: (1) There's a Malthusian cycle that ties in with the "iron laws" of wages & rent — prosperity leads to population growth that outstrips gains in agricultural productivity, which leads to increased rent, falling wages & declining living standards, urban migration, and eventually civil unrest. (2) During the latter phase of the Malthusian cycle, there's "elite overproduction," i.e. cheap labor & high rent enriches the elites, whose numbers grow, producing their own set of problems in the form of intra-elite competition. (3) There's a "dynastic cycle" where prosperity & population growth leads to growth of the army & state bureaucracy, as well as higher taxes to fund them, and as this process runs into diminishing returns it pushes the state toward fiscal crisis & loss of military control, opening the way for an elite coup or popular rebellion.

The article notes that "because Turchin’s focus is on the model and how well it accounts for measurable historical changes, the book is not a set of prescriptions for how to get out of our current mess. But the example of how we escaped the last time [i.e. in the period following the 1920 peak in conflict) is surely useful in a general sense... And what we find is a surprisingly mixed bag of what we might today call liberal and conservative measures, intended to restrain out-of-control competition and conflicts." Turchin argues that the progressive economic policies of FDR's New Deal helped boost wages & employment, and tighter immigration restrictions — although often motivated by racism — did help as well by decreasing the labor supply. The Ivy League universities & medical schools enacted tighter admission policies which discriminated against non-WASPs, but this did help decrease elite overproduction. As the article states, "One obviously doesn’t have to approve of every social reform of that period to appreciate the fact that they did help rebuild social trust, eventually reaching levels [by the 1950s] not seen since the 1820s. This is what science at its best does for a democracy — not tell us what we must do, but clarify the costs, benefits and trade-offs involved, including the tragic costs of doing nothing."

13a) Justin King, "How The US Military Is Preparing To Put Down An American Insurgency"
https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-military-preparing-put-american-insurgency/219890/

King, an activist & independent journalist, criticizes an article by retired Army colonel Kevin Benson in the November 2012 edition of the respected Small Wars Journal. The article is entitled "Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A 'Vision' of the Future," and it strategizes about how the US military could suppress a right-wing "militia" insurgency that popped up during an economic crisis. In the scenario, the DoD responds to this threat by establishing a “show of force” to demoralize the insurgents, and then they mount offensive operations by surprise to take down the checkpoints. Towards the end of the campaign, the military seizes power and radio stations and begins mopping up operations once the civilians in the area have fled.

However, King argues there can be no “show of force” to insurgents who don’t take & hold territory but use sabotage and hit & run tactics instead. He argues that US counterinsurgency doctrine is visibly flawed since it failed to pacify Iraq & Afghanistan.

13b) Justin King, "Cycle of Insurgency: What an insurgency in the US would look like"
http://thefifthcolumnnews.com/2016/07/cycle-of-insurgency-what-an-insurgency-in-the-us-would-look-like/

In a follow-up essay, King argues that insurgencies follow a predictable cycle: (1) pamphleteering, (2) reactive protests, (3) preemptive rioting, (4) military & police crackdown, (5) widespread rebellion. After the shooting of police in Dallas in 2016, King says this places us in the 3rd stage and he anticipates a brutal crackdown that will provoke activists to form terrorist cells that will grow into insurgencies and eventually set off a civil war.

King paints a dire picture: Bombings and ambushes are daily occurrences. Police forces and other government representatives are targets, as are their families. Attacks on infrastructure become commonplace, and when the roads become unsafe to travel due to ambushes and IEDs or the infrastructure is destroyed, the trucks that deliver all of our food, fuel & medical supplies stop. He predicts food shortages within 3 days and loss off clean drinking water within a month. Anyone dependent on medicine like insulin (~3 million Americans) would probably die, and tens of millions would probably starve, die of disease, or be killed in the fighting & looting.

King argues the US military would be unable to suppress a full-scale insurgency because they simply don't have enough manpower. It took 170K US troops to (fail to) pacify Iraq's insurrection and the US has a population about 10 times the population & 20 times the land area of Iraq. Even if the DoD deployed ever single member of the Army & Marines, they could only field 750K troops and that’s about one million troops shy of the needed number to match the (in)effectiveness of Iraq’s counter-insurgency operation. UN peacekeeping forces would be unlikely to help much, since without US contributions they don't have enough operating funds, and other countries would be hard pressed to offer help since a civil war in the US would cause the world economy to tank.

  1. Stuart Wexler, "White Supremacist Provocateurs Are Tipping America’s Protests Into a Race War"
    https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-white-supremacist-provocateurs-are-tipping-u-s-protests-into-a-race-war-1.8884913

Wexler is one of the top investigative researchers in domestic terrorism & radicalism, and in a Washington Post article in 2016 he pushed back on the idea that the current tensions between police & black communities are about to erupt into mass violence. He pointed out the improvements in policing and community relations since the 1960s, including more black officers and black administrators, and he also noted that both right-wing hate groups like the KKK and black nationalist groups are much more fragmented today due to the efforts of law enforcement and hate group tracking orgs like the SPLC & ADL. However, in a recent article in Haaretz, Wexler said he's not so sure anymore. He points out that widespread unemployment is acting as a social stressor, Trump is acting to inflame tensions, and there are scattered reports of far-right groups trying to infiltrate the anti-police protests and act as agent provocateurs.

  1. Sam Harris, "Former Air Force data scientist explains why the US won’t see a violent political revolution anytime soon"
    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-isnt-on-the-brink-of-a-violent-political-revolution-because-it-doesnt-have-enough-teenagers-2017-4

Harris, a data scientist (not the New Atheist author), argues that there's simply not enough young people in the U.S. to fuel a revolution. When he worked for the military, he did analysis on hundreds of factors across centuries worth of data for many countries to determine what drove the levels of violence in a society, and he found that the most significant factor was the number of individuals aged 13–19 relative to the number of individuals aged over 35. If the 35+ year-olds outnumbered the teenagers, there was no chance of civil war. Unlike the U.S. in 1860, teenagers are drastically outnumbered by the 35+ year-olds in 2016.

  1. Dylan Matthews, "Stop making second American Civil War clickbait"
    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/1/17401384/civil-war-weimar-larping-punditry-analogies-disaster-porn

Matthews takes issue with a New Yorker piece that "Experts estimate a 35% chance of a U.S. civil war over the next ten to fifteen years." He points out that it relies on an informal survey of an unnamed group of “experts” (apparently American civil war historians) conducted over dinner by Foreign Policy magazine’s Thomas Ricks. Matthews argues that intentional experts on civil wars, like Gennady Rudkevich, who have considered a larger sample of conflicts could’ve told Wright that civil wars in rich democracies, excluding secessionist terror campaigns like ETA’s in Spain or the IRA’s in the UK, basically never happen.

He criticizes the constant comparisons between America today and America right before the Civil War and or the Weimar Republic right before the Nazi takeover: "America is not on the verge of a civil war. Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. America’s democratic institutions are facing considerable stress, but it’s not on the verge of becoming Nazi Germany, and it’s still a good way away from becoming 2018 Hungary or Venezuela, for that matter."

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