PBS took the democracy is in danger hysteria to new levels on Tuesday’s Amanpour and Company as Hari Sreenivasan interviewed Prof. Barbara F. Walter to inquire on just how close the United States is to another civil war. Walter, who wrote the book How Civil Wars Start, warned that all the pieces are in place for “Christian” “white men” to start one.
Sreenivasan began by accepting the premise that a civil war could break out and asked, “You have studied several types of societies who have been on the brink of, who've been in the middle of, a civil war, who've been after, who've survived after one. How is America on that timeline? How far along a timeline toward a civil war is the United States?”
Walter argued that the conditions are there in the U.S., “we know very clearly that the two big risk factors are whether a country has a weak and partial democracy, and whether in those countries its political parties had divided along racial, religious, and/or ethnic lines. So, it really didn't take a lot to know those facts, and then look to see what was happening here in the United States.”
Of course, Walter overstates just how polarized those demographics are when it comes to our political parties and to the extend they are polarized, it is not exactly new, but conceding that would lead to a rather boring conclusion that would not lead to a PBS appearance.
Ratcheting up the doom-mongering, Walter continued:
We also know who tends to start civil wars. Most people think it's going to be the poorest members of society, and they have the motive, they have the grievances, they have a reason to rebel, or they think it's the most heavily discriminated or it's the immigrants, all these groups who are, in some ways, downtrodden ted. But, again, they don't start civil wars. The groups that tend to start civil wars, especially ethnically-based civil wars, are the groups that had once been dominant and are in decline.
Again, Walter tried to force this onto present-day America, “So, they used to dominate politically, economically, and oftentimes, socially and they're losing that position oftentimes because demographics are changing… These were studies that were done on over 200 different civil wars that we've seen around the world. And if you apply that to the United States, you also see similarities.”
Elaborating, Walter further claimed:
The -- we've seen a significant rise in violent extremism since 2008. Some of its been on the left, but the vast majority of it has been on the far-right. And it's been perpetrated almost exclusively by white men. And again, if you look at the history of the United States, the group that had been dominant since the very inception of our country were white men. They also tended to be Christian, and they are losing that position. It's no longer guaranteed that you are going to get into the best schools, or get the best jobs, or have, you know, economic security your whole life.
Public broadcasting: where fearmongering gets taken to eleven under the guise of intellectualism.
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Here is a transcript for the November 1 show:
PBS Amanpour and Company
11/1/2022
11:37 PM ET:
HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Professor Barbara Walter, thanks so much for joining us. You have studied several types of societies who have been on the brink of, who've been in the middle of, a civil war, who've been after, who've survived after one. How is America on that timeline? How far along a timeline toward a civil war is the United States?
BARBARA F. WALTER: So, we have so much good research from really almost the last hundred years of countries around the world. I actually served on a U.S. government task force that was run through the CIA, that was designed to help our government predict where around the world civil wars and political instability, and political unrest was likely to break out. The CIA is not allowed to look at the United States. It is absolutely not a politicized organization.
And we knew -- we know very clearly that the two big risk factors are whether a country has a weak and partial democracy, and whether in those countries its political parties had divided along racial, religious, and/or ethnic lines. So, it really didn't take a lot to know those facts, and then look to see what was happening here in the United States.
We also know who tends to start civil wars. Most people think it's going to be the poorest members of society, and they have the motive, they have the grievances, they have a reason to rebel, or they think it's the most heavily discriminated or it's the immigrants, all these groups who are, in some ways, downtrodden ted. But, again, they don't start civil wars. The groups that tend to start civil wars, especially ethnically-based civil wars, are the groups that had once been dominant and are in decline.
So, they used to dominate politically, economically, and oftentimes, socially and they're losing that position oftentimes because demographics are changing. Again, you know, this is not -- these are not studies that were done in the United States. These were studies that were done on over 200 different civil wars that we've seen around the world. And if you apply that to the United States, you also see similarities.
The -- we've seen a significant rise in violent extremism since 2008. Some of its been on the left, but the vast majority of it has been on the far-right. And it's been perpetrated almost exclusively by white men. And again, if you look at the history of the United States, the group that had been dominant since the very inception of our country were white men. They also tended to be Christian, and they are losing that position. It's no longer guaranteed that you are going to get into the best schools, or get the best jobs, or have, you know, economic security your whole life.
Suddenly, there's a lot of competition out there and you see a subset of this population becoming increasingly resentful, angry, and they truly feel that this is their country, and that they’re being patriots by saying what they believe is the true identity of this country and they're willing to use violence to do it.
