The law enforcement on hand was roundly criticized for not doing its job. In one episode, a white nationalist protester wearing a bulletproof vest pointed a gun at a crowd of counter-protesters before firing a shot at the ground. He then reportedly turned and walked past a crowd of a dozen police officers who were standing behind a barricade ten feet away.
Complaints about law enforcement did not come just from counter-protesters. Rally organizer Jason Kessler said, “The police were supposed to be there protecting us, and they stood down.”4
The 3%ers, Oath Keepers, and other militias that showed up with their paramilitary gear, assault rifles, and an announced mission to protect free speech rights were seemingly more effective. According to multiple attendees at the rally, the conspiratorial, anti-government militias essentially replaced the official law enforcement, which remained behind barriers even as fights broke out.
Antifa was also present in large numbers at the rally and were credited by members of an inter-faith group with saving their lives by fending off over a hundred neo-Nazis. According to multiple members of the clergy, they would have been killed without Antifa's intervention, while police and the National Guard stood watching.5 Antifa's mission was not apolitical or peaceful, though. One member was captured on video punching Richard Spencer in the midst of raucous protest.
In the same infamous press conference in which President Trump equated the violence of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with that of counter-protestors at Charlottesville, he also labeled Antifa and related groups the alt-left. Trump had campaigned on victimization, somehow managing to be both the GOP frontrunner and under attack by his own party. Once he won the presidency and both houses of Congress, Trump needed to keep alive the narrative that he and his supporters were still victims.
With Black Lives Matter keeping a lower profile since 2016, Antifa emerged as the favorite target and villain of the right. Its members are consistently accused of suppressing free speech rights at pro-Trump, anti-Muslim, Patriot, and other right-wing rallies. Paradoxically, Antifa is blamed for being responsible for the violence at rallies, even as engaging in fights with Antifa members is a draw card for right-wing attendees. For the extremist right, Antifa is a win-win proposition.
The loosely bound movement has also become the subject of multiple far-right conspiracy theories. According to the SPLC, one theory claimed that Antifa “has become so vast, powerful and insidious that it threatens to overthrow the American government through an overnight revolution that entails the beheadings of white Christians.”6
Another popular theory, propagated by Alex Jones, was that Antifa was going to start a civil war on November 4, 2017. Though the revolution never happened, a mass shooting at a Texas church the following day was immediately seized on by conspiracists as evidence of an unfolding plan. Oath Keepers’ Stewart Rhodes warned his followers to expect a wave of left-wing terrorism aimed at conservatives, police, the military, and others. “Prepare yourselves,” he said, “in case this does lead to a full blown civil war.”7
Since Trump's election, angry divisiveness has become the only unifying feature of the nation's political landscape. On election night, tens of thousands of people protested across the country, from high-school students walking out of class to groups of people blocking freeways. In Portland, Oregon, up to four thousand people protested for six days. The incidents devolved into violence as some protestors smashed businesses with baseball bats, lit dumpsters on fire, and clashed with police who, in return, shot flash-bang grenades and tear gas and arrested over a hundred people.
The day after Trump's inauguration, half a million people marched in protest in Washington, DC—the city's largest ever rally—with hundreds of thousands joining in local protests across the country and world. The trollish online battles that had overtaken newspaper and website comment streams prior to 2016 played out on the streets of cities from Boston to Austin to Portland to Berkeley and Washington, DC.
The establishment press, like the Washington Post and New York Times, have run an average of at least one negative opinion piece on Trump's administration every day. The most consistent political goal of Democrats could be reduced to #resist and #impeach. In this feverish atmosphere, those opposed to Trump and the alt-right have also become more likely to engage in more extremist behavior. For example, during a May 2017 appearance on CNN, Democratic senator Ed Markey claimed that a grand jury was investigating Trump's collusion with Russia. It was a bombshell—and also untrue.
According to the New Republic, the rumor had been championed by a liberal blog known as the Palmer Report—a sort of left-wing Breitbart—and by anti-Trump Twitter personalities. What was clear was that the senator made the announcement without any sort of reliable reporting behind it. It's also clear that it was the sort of news that appealed to Democrats—probably including Markey—on an emotional level. Finally, a left-wing conspiracy theory had made it to the political mainstream!
A PEW research poll conducted in September and October 2018 showed, not surprisingly, that Democrats and Republican voters were massively separated on many of the biggest issues facing the country.8 For example, only 10 percent of people who supported a Republican candidate thought that the way minorities were treated by the criminal justice system was a big problem, while 71 percent of people who supported Democratic candidates did—a 61 percent difference.9 There were similar partisan discrepancies about the importance of climate change (61 percent), gun violence (56 percent), and the gap between rich and poor (55 percent).10 Not surprisingly, there was also a 56 percent partisan gap over whether illegal immigration was considered a very big problem—an issue about which there had been much more bipartisan consensus before 2006.11
All of the division during the past year has sat very well with Trump. Many pundits thought he would have to switch course—to compromise and lower his rhetoric and act “more presidential”—once elected. But he has remained in an extremist world dominated by Fox and Friends and the few dozen people he follows on Twitter. Trump surfed into the White House on a wave of enthusiasm for an alt-right agenda of whitewashed extremism. But while his election was a symptom of that extremism, his presidency has also filled extremism's most obvious hole. He provides a public, charismatic leader around whom to unify. Partisanship begets partisanship. Extremism begets extremism. Where is this going?
The men spent weeks in a secluded cabin in Maryland, stockpiling arms and secretly training their unofficial militia. They knew their effort to violently take over a federal building might be a suicide mission but were convinced the time for political solutions was past. Their sacrifice, the men reasoned, would set off a violent insurrection—the only way to cleanse the nation.
This scenario sounds like the apocalyptic Turner Diaries-inspired fever dream of a modern right-wing extremist militia. But it actually describes the planning for radical abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid on a US Army fort in Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Brown had hoped to seize arms and march down through the Appalachians, arming slaves in an insurrection that would eventually engulf the entire South.
Militarily, Brown's raid was a near complete failure but, just as his takeover of a federal building prefigured a modern militia's plan, the heated national debate that followed the raid sounds awfully familiar. Southern Democrats’ reaction was a ferocious anger mixed with paranoia. The other side, which consisted mostly of Republican Northerners, thought Brown's effort was misguided, but more than few added that his plan to spark violent rebellion throughout nearly half the country was nonetheless righteous. Northern abolitionist and author Henry David Thoreau went so far as to say said that Brown had the “spark of divinity about him.”1 While Brown and his men were killed before inspiring any slaves to join them, the debate that followed his raid is itself considered a direct step toward the Civil War that broke out the following year.
Following the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, the previously unthinkable specter of a second American civil war eme
rged for serious speculation. On August 14, the New Yorker's Robin Wright asked: “Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?”2
One of the national-security experts Wright interviewed, Keith Mines, who spent time with US Special Forces, the United Nations, and the State Department in the midst of multiple foreign civil wars, estimated that the US has a 60 percent chance of entering a civil war in the next 10–15 years. Other experts quoted put the likelihood of civil war at anywhere from a minimal 5 percent to virtually inevitable at 95 percent.3
The type of civil war these experts weighed in on would likely not resemble the formal military encounters seen at Gettysburg in 1863. The event would probably be closer to the Iraqi insurrection against US occupation, an ongoing and deadly campaign of political violence that required military intervention. The wide range of estimates revealed how hard it is to judge something that has no parallel in modern American history. Nonetheless, it's frightening that the question suddenly requires serious thought.
Of course, right-wing extremist groups have long thought—and sometimes acted—on the assumption that an apocalyptic clash was not just inevitable but desirable. The current gleeful anticipation of such an event across wide sections of the conspiratorial right is also concerning.
In June of 2017, the Guardian reviewed a number of right-wing pundits’ claims that a type of civil war was inevitable or already ongoing, including columns appearing in the National Review and the Federalist. Many, like Pat Buchanan writing in the American Conservative, were using the term civil war somewhat metaphorically, but their language was still militant: “To prevail, Trump will have to campaign across this country and wage guerrilla war in this capital, using the legal and political weapons at his disposal.”4 Injected into the feverish, conspiratorial media ecosystem, such claims are just one step short of calling for actual violence.
A year later, on June 3, 2018, the right-wing conspiracy blog Zero-Hedge republished a speech called “The Modern Civil War is Being Fought Without Guns…So Far!” It was pure clickbait, but was also picked up by multiple similar sites, shared 4,600 times and garnered 250 comments, some pro-civil war and many confident of a right-wing victory.
On June 25, Iowa representative Steve King tweeted a picture of an encampment around an ICE office in Portland, Oregon, with the caption “America headed in the direction of another Harper's Ferry. After that comes Ft. Sumter.”5 Two days later, Gab, the right-wing social network, announced in a since-deleted tweet “Civil War 2.0 is going to be lit. Who has all the guns and grows all the food?”6
Alex Jones jumped on the bandwagon in early July, tweeting “BREAKING: Democrats Plan to Launch Civil War on July 4th.”7 Although he was roundly mocked, Jones's influence—remember that he provoked a listener to fire shots in a pizzeria based on rumors that it housed Democratic-controlled child trafficking ring—can never be completely ignored. Neither can the 2018 re-election of Congressman King, just a few months after predicting civil war.
Time magazine's May 11, 2015 black-and-white cover featured an African American man running down a Baltimore street with dozens of riot gear-clad police in pursuit. The text, “AMERICA, 1968 2015,” was another comparison of the current United States with one of the most turbulent periods of its history. But some comparisons between the American tumult of five decades ago—which did not lead to civil war—and today suggest that the US is not actually going down the path of sustained, existential warfare. For all its divisiveness, today's level of public violence has nothing on the late 1960s and early 70s, with its multiple riots, assassinations, and the raucous protests against a disastrous war, all of which created the environment in which left-wing extremist groups like the Weathermen and Black Panther Party emerged.
Likewise, despite all the divisiveness and partisanship, there is no singularly irreconcilable issue like slavery. Abolitionists saw it as an unforgivable evil. Southerners believed that its destruction would mean tearing apart the entire economic and quasi-feudal cultural and social fabric of Southern life. The nation is much more integrated now, economically and socially. For most people, immigration, abortion, gun control, and other wedge issues have nowhere near the same overall impact as slavery did, particularly in the South.
But what is unique—and uniquely terrifying—about the United States today is that extremism, specifically right-wing radicalism, has entered the political mainstream more effectively at any time since at least the 1960s. Through the Trump administration and some members of Congress, it is directly connected to the levers of national political power. During his campaign and presidency, Donald Trump continually attacked national political institutions, including the legal system, elected officials and the media, encouraged violence and vigilantism, and repeatedly pushed back on democratic norms—including election results themselves.
In fact, many of the same factors that delivered the presidency to Trump—intractable political polarization, debilitated institutions, and extremely divisive media coverage—are cited by many historians, diplomats, and military experts as typical preconditions for civil war.
And, while a low-level civil war sounds better than a series of massive, bloody confrontations, it's also harder to know when you are slipping into one. Author Robert Evans wrote that Ukrainians he interviewed often described their civil war not as a defined event but a “bad dream.”8 Very few of them thought civil war was a possibility until bullets started flying. Likewise, in the midst of Lebanon's civil war, which eventually resulted in 120,000 fatalities, many people remained convinced that things weren't that bad. Though it lasted fifteen years, some people remained convinced it was always on the verge of ending.9
As they suddenly find themselves in a war, people act in ways they wouldn't have believed possible. David Kilcullen, a former state department employee focused on counterterrorism, describes debriefing captured insurgents in Iraq. The soldiers claimed that a form of “collective madness” came over them—they couldn't recognize their behavior during the war.10 The dynamic sounds a lot like internet trolls’ frenzied doxing attacks on harmless victims they don't know, except that instead of posting addresses and death threats, the soldiers cut off children's heads.
Another way to view post-2016 America is in terms of the process of radicalization. For example, the stabilizers critical to grounding individuals are now shredded on a national level. The sense the country is on a track to greater things is derailed. In July of 2016, multiple polls showed that between 60–80 percent of Americans thought the US was not headed in the right direction.11 Likewise, any measurement of traditional religion's ability to bind the country shows precipitous slippage. In the past two years, attendance at churches, synagogues, or mosques has hit historic lows, as has the number of people saying that religion is very important in their lives.12 Not only are marriage rates the lowest they've been in American history, but even the idea of what makes a family is divisive.13 At the same time, other typical stabilizers like civic duty, education, and social networks have been increasingly captured by polarizing media and tribal online relationships. But how would we know if the toxic divisiveness in the United States was deteriorating into a situation that met the modern definition of a civil war? Based on the extremist activity we've seen to date, what might be possible trigger events?
In the days before the 2016 presidential election, Trump made clear that the only way he believed he could lose was if the system was rigged against him. He encouraged vigilante-like unofficial observers at polls. He said he would only accept the results if he won. And, even after winning the Electoral College majority, Trump insisted—possibly following the lead of Alex Jones—that his loss in the popular vote was the result of millions of non-citizens voting for his opponent, despite a lack of any evidence. Following the 2018 midterm elections, which produced a mixed result for the Republican Party, the president again made unfounded claims about vote fraud and encouraged states with close races to abandon legally mandated vote recounts.
By 2020, the combination of an incumbent president who has spent his first four years attacking democratic institutions, highly publicized claims of both voter fraud and culling, and a hyper-partisan and conspiratorial media ecosystem guarantees that large segments of armed right-wing extremists—and possibly left-wing and African American extremist groups—will be convinced that any electoral result they don't support is illegitimate. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 all but guaranteed the Civil War. The election of anyone might pose a similar challenge 160 years later.
Another scenario involves the appearance of the Oath Keepers, 3%ers, and other heavily armed militias as private police forces at politically charged protests around the country. Through 2016, the groups occasionally usurped the traditional power of local police, but generally maintained that their role was to protect all Americans’ constitutional rights from an encroaching government. Following the election of Trump, their mission has changed dramatically. Instead of keeping their assault rifles aimed at a reputedly dangerous US government, they have increasingly become a freelance right-wing security force.
In 2017, the Portland, Oregon–area Republican Party voted to accept the Oath Keepers’ and 3%ers’ offers to serve as security guards. For some reason, the local GOP apparently didn't think the local police were sufficient to protect its members from alleged Antifa violence.14 In June of that year, the relationship between local police and unofficial militia security became even more blurred when a militiaman at a Patriot Prayer rally in Portland ended up assisting police in arresting a left-wing protestor.
In 2018, the Oath Keepers also organized a blatantly partisan protest outside of the Los Angeles offices of Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters—and one that had nothing to do with protecting the Constitution. She had recently called for Americans to make members of Trump's cabinet feel unwelcome at restaurants and other public places. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who claims to be a fierce proponent of the Bill of Rights, claimed that Waters had overstepped her free speech boundaries and incited terrorist violence. In his press release, Rhodes also echoed administration talking points, including unfounded claims about Mexico exporting terror, rape, murder, and corruption to the United States.15
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