America’s road to January 6

What do the US, Lebanon, Bosnia and Northern Ireland have in common?

Back in the late 1940s American politics had a problem. The issue was serious enough for Congress to authorise a committee looking into divisions between the country’s two parties. The trouble was that there were no divisions – the gap between the Democrats and Republicans had become ‘razor-thin’, and it was feared the lack of difference between them was a ‘destructive force’ in democracy.

To resolve this, in 1950 the American Political Science Association released a report calling ‘on Republicans and Democrats to heighten their contradictions’ and so provide ‘the electorate with a proper range of choices between alternatives of action’.

No one can accuse America’s two parties of having a ‘razor-thin’ gap between them today. Indeed, in the US House of Representatives polarisation is now higher than even in the era following the Civil War.

Partyism increased so much in the decades either side of the millennium that by 2014, 27% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans believed their rivals were ‘so misguided that they threatened the wellbeing of the nation’. Another poll found that a third of Democrats and Republicans consider the other party ‘a very serious threat to the country’.  

The proportion of Republicans and Democrats who say they ‘hate’ the other party rose, from around 15% in the 1980s to just under 50% in 2016. A report two years earlier, from the National Academy of Sciences on ‘motive attribution asymmetry’, the belief that one’s opponent is driven by hate and one’s own group by love, found that Republicans and Democrats had the same level as Palestinians and Israelis. And this was before Trump.

According to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, co-authors of How Democracies Die, members of the two parties have ‘come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.’

Loser’s consent is a vital component of democracy, and so the events of January 6 last year, when a motley mob of Trump supporters violated the US Capitol in protest at the election, were genuinely shocking. The day has already become part of the folklore of one of the country’s two warring tribes, about the other side’s malice and extremism, and while most Trump supporters did not approve of the attack, two-thirds do believe that violence may be needed to preserve the American way of life. Large majorities of Republicans also think that the 2020 election was stolen.

The incident only increased fears, or fantasies, that America might break up or even descend into civil war, a subject covered with increasing frequency in articles and books, Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start being the latest. It seems highly unlikely, as an outside observer, but the US does share one key characteristic with those countries which have suffered civil war – demographic instability. Yet it’s the one thing American elites seems most proud of, almost to the point that it’s how they define their country.

Thirty years ago, Bosnia erupted into a war that cost 100,000 lives, including an atrocity so incomprehensibly evil as to be like something from the eastern front. In the Bosnian war, Serbian aggression was driven by a fear that Orthodox Christians, once a plurality in the republic, were in demographic decline. Indeed, there was a direct correlation between districts which had falling numbers of Serbs before 1992 and where the ethnic violence happened.

Demographic instability also underpinned the tragedy in Northern Ireland. The statelet had been created in 1921 from the six most Protestant counties in Ireland, but higher Catholic birth rates became a growing source of anxiety. Hoping to encourage some nationalists to leave for the Republic or England, Unionists ramped up discrimination, the police often acted brutality towards protesters, and the revived UVF committed the first murders of the Troubles under Gusty Spence.

While Catholics were growing agitated, and the moribund IRA was revived, poorer and more rural Protestants were losing their deference to the traditional tribal leadership, a pattern often found in countries approaching conflict; many were entranced by a demagogue called Ian Paisley, who whipped up anger and hatred, without ever actually going along with the paramilitaries.

Things can change very quickly. Northern Ireland in the 1960s may have been the most peaceful society in human history; in 1963 and 1964 its homicide rate was 0.07 per 100,000, about a quarter of that of today’s Japan or Singapore, the two least violent (non-micro) countries. By the end of that decade, it was in a state of near-civil war, showing how it only takes a small number of dedicated partisans to turn life into hell for everyone.

Lebanon was similarly precarious in its demography, following its independence from France. Here the Christians, dominated by the Francophile Maronites, were losing the battle of the cradle (although the country shares France’s reluctance to accurately record these facts in censuses, so exact numbers are uncertain).

As well as smaller families, Christians also had far greater opportunities for emigration to the new world, to where Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian Christians had been steadily heading since the 19th century. Manhattan had a Little Syria at one point; one Christian village in Lebanon may have lost 13 people on board the Titanic. The demographic balance was also further destabilized by the arrival of Palestinian refugees escaping the Israelis, and soon, militias were seen drilling in the streets of Beirut; fifteen years of war followed.

Serbs, Ulster Protestants and Maronites all feared that the country was slipping from them, a sense of urgency also felt in perhaps the most significant essay preceding the election of Donald Trump, Michael Anton’s ‘United 93 Election’. Written under a pseudonym for the Claremont Institute, Anton used the analogy of passengers taking control of a plane cockpit hijacked by terrorists. If they did not act now, soon it would be too late.

It is perhaps not surprising that so many Republicans feel this way when their opponents repeatedly tell them so. When Democrat senators gleefully announced that: ‘The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party’, or when New York Times op-eds boast about ‘replacing’ them.

Although BLM protests were marked by significant looting and arson, it is not surprising that Republicans were the first to cross the line towards something far more explicitly, politically violent. Time is against them, and faced with a fear that their time is running out, people can become dangerous.

The nature of America has drastically changed in one lifetime, becoming something far more ideological and utopian, compared to what it once was. At the time that Northern Ireland was descending into war, the United States was in many ways just another country. As Christopher Caldwell wrote: ‘Americans understood themselves as they always had — as essentially a European country, displaced westward’, a country ‘combining… wealth, cultural homogeneity, and relative equality of status and income’. It then had its lowest foreign-born population share since the Republic was founded, and the largest sources of migration were Italy and Germany.

This changed with the Hart-Celler immigration reform of 1965, which had overturned the Immigration Act of 1924 and its ‘national origins’ system. The aim of the old law had been to keep the country ethnically stable, and the forty years of its imposition did indeed see the melting pot working effectively, with intermarriage rates rising across all ethnic groups and the country enjoying unprecedented levels of social capital, relative equality and stability. Little wonder that so many see it as a golden age for America.

But the 1924 law had one major, in retrospect unforgivable, sting. Nine years later Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe began desperately seeking shelter in the US, but only around 100,000 managed to negotiate the various hurdles put in place (some would say deliberately). Later in the war, and when the full horror of what was happening became apparent, polls showed that Americans, with characteristic generosity, overwhelmingly supported giving refuge to Jews, but by then it was too late.

And the old law, once overturned, almost by definition could never be morally justified again, seeing as it purposely kept out the descendants of the new (the problem all retrospective criticism of immigration suffers from, since we all exist). But the 1965 act, despite what its backers and the president said, drastically changed America’s make-up. The majority population went from 86% to 60% today, and is expected to become a minority around 2045.  

The New York Times quoted two academics, Maureen Craig at N.Y.U. and Jennifer Richeson at Yale, whose paper Majority No More? found that ‘White Americans considering a future in which the white population has declined to less than 50 percent of the national population are more likely to perceive that the societal status of their racial group — in terms of resources or as the “prototypical” American — is under threat, which in turn leads to stronger identification as white, the expression of more negative racial attitudes and emotions, greater opposition to diversity, and greater endorsement of conservative political ideology, political parties, and candidates.’

Similar papers have been quoted showing that, when presented with a future where they become a minority, white Americans become more nationalist, conservative and tribal – but what is surprising is that anyone finds this surprising.

Multiracial democracies are a recent innovation, and those with majority groups below 60% have a very poor record. Among other examples, Zanzibar had been a British colony for several decades before independence created a democracy in which black Africans comprised just over half of the populations, with ‘Arabs’ (including Persians and other Asiatic groups) the remainder. Within a short while a bloody revolution killed thousands and caused thousands more to flee, among them a young Farrokh Bulsara, whose Parsi family placed a picture of their former protector, the Queen, on the wall of their family home in Middlesex.

Another former British colony, the island of Fiji, reached statehood with a similar balance between its indigenous and Indian descended population. Its history has been relatively peaceful, with four coups but no civil war or genocide. Many multicultural states would consider that a win.

In multicultural democracies people tend to vote along ethnic and confessional lines, and as America has become more multicultural so have its voting patterns followed a similar trajectory, with the Democratic Party an alliance of minorities and the rich (who are, as Amy Chua put it, a sort of minority in themselves). In contrast, Republicans now enjoy a 40-point lead among white men without a college degree. Diversity is only one of 10 drivers of polarization cited by Jonathan Haidt, yet it is also the only one which is an article of faith among one party, and the country’s elite.

There is, of course, a strong counter argument to the ‘emerging Demographic majority’ theory in which demography is destiny. Hispanics in particular are moving to the Republican Party in large numbers, in part at least repulsed by the pro-crime, race-hysteria of the opposition. Donald Trump was, paradoxically, one of the least racially polarizing of modern US presidents, improving his vote share among all minorities in 2020.

The Republicans may evolve into a sort of multi-ethnic working-class alliance, as many American Catholic commentators hope; the downside of this would be a populism pushed towards self-conscious coarseness and stupidity of the ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ variety; as one sceptical conservative put it, soon Republican commentary will just be people making farting noises to own the libs. This new type of party may happen, but working-class solidarity is generally a feeble force in history, far less powerful than ethnicity and religion.

America’s partisan divisions are not about race, but run along a number of divides that combine to create a ferocious split: college v high school education, rural v urban, Christian v atheist and, among women, married v single. Similarly, the English Civil War was not about religion, but the role of the king and his right to tax, and whose side you took depended on a range of social and personal factors – but religion was a huge one, and where the religious divide was strongest, the fighting was the most bitter. England’s political divide might not have been flammable enough to cause war without the accelerant of religion.

Soon the US will become the latest state in which the largest group has lost its supermajority, following Lebanon and Northern Ireland. That the country’s commentariat greet this change with wild-eyed joy is perhaps testimony to the great optimism that built the country. Or perhaps it is naivety. One thing we can be sure of, at least, the ‘destructive force’ of boring consensus politics has been safely vanquished, and Americans now have a ‘range of choices’ in their politics. It’s just that those choices are mostly terrible.