November 15, 2024 • 47 mins
Barbara F. Walter is one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terror. She is the author of five books and dozens of articles on these subjects and is a contributor to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, the BBC and the PBS NewsHour. She has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, Reuters and Foreign Affairs.
She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a TED2023 speaker. Her most recent book on civil wars, New York Times bestseller “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them,” was named the best book of the year by The Times (UK), and one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times, Esquire and Prospect Magazine. The New York Times Book Review called the book “Required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.”
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Episode Transcript
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You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,
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presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a special conversation with author and professor Barbara F. Walter.
Walter is one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism, and domestic terrorism,
and the author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.
This conversation was recorded in Chandler, Arizona in October 2024,
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and was moderated by Maricopa County Supervisor Jack Sellers.
Okay, I have some questions.
First, we'll be understanding conflict and predicting civil war.
In 2017, you served on the CIA's Political Instability Task Force,
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which developed a model to predict which countries were susceptible to civil war.
How can we predict political instability and which countries will experience violence?
Easy answer.
Yes, and I'm going to start with a kind of a fun story, which I rarely tell.
I don't know why I feel like telling it tonight.
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Maybe something a little bit different.
I'd been studying civil wars for almost 30 years by the time 2017 came around,
and I was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and I had volunteered to be the discussant
on a bunch of graduate student papers at a panel at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning.
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This is the worst thing you could possibly volunteer for.
It's thankless. It's an enormous amount of work.
There was three people in the audience.
It had taken me all day to read and comment on the papers.
I remember thinking, these are young scholars, and they really deserve to have some feedback.
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Anyway, we had the panel, and I knew two of the three people in the audience,
and the third person I didn't, and she came up to me afterwards,
and she said her name, and she said, I'm the head of the Political Instability Task Force.
Would you like to join?
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And I remember thinking, wow, this is bizarre.
So she came to check this out, and I guess I passed the test.
But there really is a thing that the CIA runs.
It's been around since 1994. You can Google it.
There's a Wikipedia page. Everything that I did was, or the Task Force does, is unclassified.
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They use the same data sets that are publicly available, and that eggheads like me use.
But one of the goals of the Task Force was to come up with a model that would help the U.S. government predict
what countries around the world were likely to experience political instability and or political violence
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within the next two years.
So they really wanted to know, okay, if there's countries that are starting to unravel, tell us now.
I assume so that the government could do something about it.
So when the Task Force was made up of two types of people, half were academics and researchers like myself,
half were data analysts who worked for the agency,
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and when the data analysts started putting together the model, they said,
tell us everything that could possibly even, you know, vaguely lead a country down a path towards violence.
And they're like, it doesn't, you know, you don't have to be sure.
Just give us anything that you have a hunch might matter.
And we gave them 38 different factors.
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And some of them seemed obvious to us if a country was poor.
If a country had a lot of ethnic and religious diversity.
If it had a group that the government heavily discriminated against.
These all seemed like things that would be more likely to lead to violence than peace.
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So the data analysts took these factors and they went away.
And when they came back, they said that only two factors were highly predictive,
and they were not the ones that we had expected.
The first was something that we called anocracy.
That was just one of many, many, many different measures of democracy that exist out there.
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Anocracy is just a measure of whether a country is a partial democracy,
or you can think of it as a partial democracy, partial autocracy.
It's neither fully democratic, but it's not fully autocratic.
It turns out that healthy, strong liberal democracies.
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So think about Denmark and Canada, Australia, Switzerland,
almost never experience political instability and violence.
It also turns out that hardcore autocracies, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, North Korea,
they also don't experience a lot of political violence.
If political violence happens, it happens in this middle zone.
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And in fact, if you were to graph it with the x-axis being violence,
the y-axis being whether you're really autocratic or really democratic,
this is what violence looked like.
It's really low and all the violence happens in the middle.
So it's definitely not a place that you want to be.
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It's especially dangerous if you're kind of moving into that zone rapidly.
So you're either trying to democratize really rapidly,
think about what Yugoslavia tried to do in the 1990s,
or you're going in the opposite direction and you're backsliding quite rapidly.
Think about Ukraine starting in the 2018s,
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or probably what's happening in Venezuela right now.
So if you're rapidly becoming less democratic or more democratic
and you're in this middle zone, that's where violence tends to occur.
The second factor was whether citizens in those partial democracies
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had organized their political parties mainly around race, religion, or ethnicity
rather than ideology.
So instead of joining a political party because you were ideologically conservative
or ideologically liberal, or you were a tried and true capitalist
or a tried and true communist, those are big ideological differences.
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You're joining a political party because you're white or black,
Muslim or Hindu Serb or Croat.
You see India now, it has the Hindu-Muslim split.
And if a country had those two features, it was a partial democracy
with these identity-based parties, the task force considered it at high risk
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of political instability or violence within the next two years.
And we put it on a watch list, we called it the watch list,
and we sent it to the White House.
So we, and the model when it was first created was about 80% predictive.
It was really, really good.
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That's since declined to about 70%, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out
why that's the case, but that's still highly predictive,
simply with those two factors.
So I could talk about how this applies to the US.
I believe people are interested in that.
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Yes, please.
People always comment that they're just like, you seem like you're a happy person,
and it's really disarming that you say these terrible things
and while you're kind of smiling.
And I want to apologize for that, but I am truly a very optimistic person
and a happy person.
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I think that's why I can tolerate maybe studying something like this,
but to get to the United States.
So the CIA is legally not allowed to monitor what happens in the United States
or monitor its citizens.
That's exactly the way it should be.
So for the five years that I served on the task force,
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we never ever talked about the United States from 2017 to 2022.
Not a word about the United States.
It really was quite astounding.
And it has to be that way.
But I was watching, I'm a private citizen, I was watching what was happening in the United States.
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I knew the data, I knew the model.
I had access to what America's anocracy score, and I could see it going down.
I had access to the data about how racially and religiously divided our parties had become.
And that's when I decided to write this book.
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I just thought, you know, this information should be in the hands of the American public so that we're prepared.
You know, when I started writing the book, it was absolutely inconceivable to most Americans
that we could ever have real sustained violence here in this country,
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or even that our democracy was seriously in decline.
You know, Americans didn't want to talk about the fact that, you know, we had a violent extremism problem.
Domestic terrorism has been increasing for 15 years in this country.
Nobody wanted to talk about it.
They didn't want to acknowledge that we had a white nationalism problem.
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You know, 75% of domestic terror incidents over the last 15 years have been perpetuated by white nationalist groups.
75%. Nobody wanted to talk about that.
And then one of the things that most people didn't know was that our democracy starting in 2016 based on the CIA's measure that it used in the model,
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which was not data that it had collected.
This, a nonprofit group, had collected the anocracy data.
It also showed that the United States' democracy had been downgraded.
So let me quickly give you a sense.
The center for, how do I want to put this?
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Every single country every year is graded based on how autocratic and how democratic it is.
It goes from negative 10 to positive 10.
Negative 10 is you're really autocratic.
You do not want to be in that group.
Positive 10 is you're really democratic.
That's definitely where you want to be.
And that's where the United States was for many, many years.
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In 2016, the Center for Systemic Peace, which grades each country every year, downgraded the United States from plus 10 to plus 9.
And the reason was that international election monitors deemed the 2016 election free but not entirely fair.
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There was some voter suppression, but mostly because our own intelligence agencies had found that the Russians had in fact meddled in that election.
So we got dinged.
We got dinged from a positive 10 to a positive 9.
In 2019, we were downgraded a second time to positive 7.
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And the reason for that is that we had an executive branch that was refusing to comply with requests for information and refusing to acknowledge subpoenas from the legislative branch.
Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's a big deal because the main check on executive power, the main check to keep our president from becoming a king,
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which is what our founding fathers desperately wanted to avoid, was having a legislative branch that was equally powerful and will and had the tools to contain a president.
But if you have a president who's essentially thumbing their nose at that, it's indicating that power has shifted.
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And we have been, the executive branch of the United States has been becoming more powerful over the last few decades.
It's not a recent phenomenon.
And then we were downgraded a third and final time at the end of 2020 because the first time in American history, we had a sitting president who refused to accept the results of an election and was actively attempting to overturn those results.
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So by December of 2020, for the first time since 1800, the United States was officially in the anocracy zone.
So that was the first thing.
So then the question is, okay, what about our political parties?
And our political parties, it used to be as recently as 2008.
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If you were to walk down the street and you would see somebody like me, a white woman, it would be hard for you to guess.
What my party affiliation would be.
Like if you were a betting person, it would be basically be a coin toss, whether I was a Republican or a Democrat.
Whites were basically evenly split between the two parties.
And that was mostly because the white working class was solidly Democratic.
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That began to shift in 2008.
And the white working class began to gravitate towards the Republican Party.
The Republican Party today, until even recently, it was as much as 90% white in a country that is multi-ethnic and multi-religious.
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If you look on the other side, over 90% of African Americans vote for the Democratic Party.
A large majority of Asians and Latinos vote for the Democratic Party.
Most atheists and Jews and Muslims vote for the Democratic Party.
So the very best predictor of whether you're a Republican today, number one is are you white?
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And number two is if you're evangelical Christian.
So that, by the definition of the task force, is becoming close to identity-based parties.
I suspect that if we had been allowed to include the United States in our model and in our observation,
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that we likely would have put the U.S. on the watch list in December of 2020.
And again, that means that you're at high risk of political violence and instability within two years.
And of course, just a couple of weeks later, January 6th occurred.
So this is something that our government monitors this all around the world.
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And I think we as Americans, we pride ourselves in believing that we have the world's oldest democracy.
We are a leader of the free world.
We've known nothing but democracy here, at least most of us, if we're white, have known nothing but democracy.
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And the reality is, is that it has been eroding over the last few years.
And we are behaving like a lot of other countries that have experienced Democratic backsliding
or have experienced a synocracy zone with these identity-based parties.
And you're starting to see the same types of instability and the same types of violence
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that we were seeing, for example, in the former Yugoslavia or that we were seeing in countries
in the months leading up to more sustained violence.
Thank you. And you probably have figured out that she makes a moderator's job very easy
because she just answered question two by me just saying, yes, please.
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Okay. America has already experienced a civil war.
How can Americans better understand this history and respond to threats of an internal conflict in the 21st century?
Yeah. So there's a thing called the conflict trap.
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That's actually a term conflict scholars use.
It means a little over 30% of countries that experience one civil war will experience a second and possibly a third civil war.
There's a very high recidivism rate in countries that have experienced one.
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We, of course, had this one of the most brutal civil wars that any country has experienced.
And I think one of the reasons why Americans have a really hard time wrapping their mind around the possibility
of a second civil war is that they're thinking of an 1860s version of a civil war.
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They're thinking, wow, is a big portion of the country going to secede?
Are we going to have these two big armies, really well equipped, strong, trained armies meeting each other in the battlefield?
And the answer is absolutely not. That was such an odd civil war even for the 1860s.
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And just as a little aside, because this is history that most people don't get,
the reason that will never happen again is because the US military in 1860 was actually not particularly strong.
It had about 16,000 soldiers under arms, and most of those soldiers were stationed out west to put down Indian uprisings.
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So it was distracted. And the Confederate states were actually quite strong militarily because they had active and well-trained and well-equipped militias.
They were actually called the Minutemen as a tip to the hat of the Revolutionary War.
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And these militias existed throughout the Confederate states because they were there to put down slave uprisings.
So when the 11 Confederate states decided that they were going to secede, and when Lincoln basically said,
no, you're not, we're going to fight you to ensure that you don't leave the Union,
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all the Confederate states had to do was to bring those militias together, and they had a ready-made conventional military
that it wasn't crazy to think could take on the US military.
That is simply not the case today.
The US military has over 2 million soldiers that it could have under arms. It can transport them within 24 hours anywhere in the country.
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It would be insane today to think that you could take on the US military.
So if a war happens, another war, or let's call it major or sustained violence happens here in the United States,
it's going to look like most civil wars, especially most 21st century civil wars, and that's going to be an insurgency.
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They're going to use guerrilla warfare, and the targets are for the most part going to be civilians.
Terrorism is the method of choice for groups that are taking on powerful, rich states.
It's what the IRA did in Northern Ireland against the British government.
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It's what the Tamil Tigers did against the Indian government. That is the norm.
If it happens here, it would be a series of attacks directed at the opposition, whoever is in power that you don't want to be in power.
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It would be with people who support the federal government, judges, law enforcement agents who are enforcing the law.
It would be election officials who are running elections and adhering to the rule of law.
But it would also be minority groups.
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The groups that have been targeted over the last 15 years are overwhelmingly African Americans, Jews, Latinos, LBGTQ people.
It's those individuals that, to a subset of the American population, are seen as threats to the future identity of the United States, but also as threats to the group that has dominated American politics since the very beginning, but demographically is in decline.
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That is white. There's a subset of the population. Let me take a step back.
If you look at the data about who tends to start these wars, most people think it's the people who have the most grievances.
The people who are really downtrodden or the people who are heavily repressed, no, they don't have any ability to rebel. People who tend to start these sorts of violence campaigns are the groups that had been politically and economically dominant and are in decline.
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So they're the ones who really feel the loss of status. They're the ones who tend to have the means and the power to organize. They're the ones who oftentimes just don't go down without a fight.
Thank you. And I guess I will resist asking you if you can see any groups like that emerging at this point.
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Yeah, I mean, I think this white supremacy problem, I find it interesting. You guys all probably remember the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when you had all these mostly young men with torches.
It was really the first time that movement came out sort of boldly and proudly out in the open.
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But what's so surprising for me is that if you study violent extremism and you study domestic terrorism, we've been seeing these groups grow and consistently grow, and we've been seeing the attacks increase.
And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans wanted to talk about it. In fact, it was just a civil servant. I think he worked in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.
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It was in 2019 who just spent a lot of time online in chat rooms and just monitoring the growth of white supremacist movements online.
And he wrote a report, a very detailed, very high quality report. And I think it was out in public for about a week.
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And the Obama administration pulled it and suppressed it because there was immediately an outcry from the Republican Party.
One of the findings was that actually a fair percentage of returning soldiers from the Middle Eastern wars, and when I say fairly large, I'm talking about 14 percent, were either ex-law enforcement officials or active law enforcement officials.
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So there was an outcry that this wasn't fair to them. And the Democrats also got a lot of heat because white voters are important in winning elections.
And we're going to see that in a couple of weeks. They're probably going to decide this election. And neither party wanted to take any risk of alienating them.
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And so this really detailed information about what was happening underneath the surface here in the United States was suppressed.
So I don't even remember what your question was.
I think I said I wasn't going to ask.
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You know, it's one of the real challenges that we have is overcoming the misinformation on social media, some of it spread by very prominent people, creating doubt and distrust appears to be easy to accomplish.
The use of political violence and the spread of misinformation are two significant threats to our democracy today. How do these elements contribute to the rise of anocracies?
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And what can be done to counteract their influence in the U.S.?
So researchers like me don't like to state anything unless there's evidence and data to back it up.
So I cannot say for certain that there is a causal connection between the rise of social media and various features of social media platforms like the share button and the reshare button,
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and a whole host of negative societal outcomes that we've been seeing over the last 15 years.
The reason I can't say that with any confidence is because none of the tech companies will release their data,
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and they're not releasing their data because they know that it would be a goldmine to actually determining what affects algorithms that are designed to disproportionately favor information
that taps into your deepest emotions, fear, threat, anger, what effects that has on a whole host of things from rise in political violence to a rise in teenage suicide to a rise in depression, etc., etc., etc.
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But we're starting to get all sorts of information that, in fact, there's almost certainly a causal link. I don't know how many of you followed Francis Hogan.
She was an employee with Facebook, and I think it was in 2020 or 2022. She handed over tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal and to Congress and to various outlets.
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And it was documents that revealed the findings that Facebook's own internal research team had found were the causal effects of its social media and its algorithms on various outcomes.
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And it confirmed everything we're sort of suspecting. So what people like me are concluding is we believe that the rise of social media was an accelerant.
And I'll give you just two examples. Beginning in 1946, the end of World War II, till 2010, if you look to the graph of the number of democratic countries around the world, if you go actually, let's go back to 1900, there were almost none.
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Autocracy was the norm. Most governments were autocratic governments. Democracy was really, really rare. But if you look at the graph, there were some dips after World War II, there was another dip.
But there were basically three big waves of democratization, so that by 2010, and especially after the fall of Soviet Union, there was so many countries becoming democratic that there was a bit of arrogance amongst those who studied democracies.
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We kind of thought, oh, all we have to do is wait, and eventually the whole world would become democratic. And we were super excited about that because full, healthy democracies actually don't go to war with each other.
So in our mind, we're like, oh, if the whole world is democratic, then we won't have any more war. And that's what we want. We'll have world peace.
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In 2010, it stopped, and it reversed. And every single year since 2010, the number of democracies around the world has declined, and it's showing no signs of stopping.
And what's different about this reversal, one is how sustained it is, but for the very first time, it includes the oldest, most stalwart democracies, the UK, the United States, Sweden.
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Sweden now has one of its biggest parties in parliament is a neo-nazi party. They only recently outlawed that members couldn't come to their Thursday meetings and SS uniforms.
It's one of the biggest parties in the Swedish parliament. Like, this is, it kind of blows the mind. So people have been trying to figure out the timing. Why is this happening now?
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And the closest we can get to it is that it tracks with the rise of internet around the world, and in particular social media, and the ability, the share button, essentially the share button, which allows certain messages to go viral and spread almost instantaneously to millions of people.
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And the reason we think it's that way is that the last region on the globe to have this reversal was Africa. Africa, which is a continent that has been notoriously resistant to sustained democratization.
Africa continued to democratize until 2019. 2019, it hit its peak, and that's when Africa also began to reverse. Africa was also the last region on the planet to have significant internet penetration.
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So it seems to track with that. And then this, you know, why are we suddenly having the rise of hyper nationalist parties, not just here in the United States, but everywhere, everywhere.
South America and in South Asia, in Central and Western Europe. Why is that happening now? And again, we suspect it's because the social media is essentially a backdoor way for enemies of democracy.
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If they want to sow division, to begin to undercut trust in democracy, but also to begin to sow societal division. And for those of you who are interested in the subject, I'm going to recommend a book that it's almost hard to believe when you read it, but it is absolutely true.
It's called This is Not Propaganda. And it's written by a guy named Peter Pomerance, and he's Russian. He's a reporter. He now lives in the United States.
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But what the book does is it outlines Putin's decision starting in 2010. Putin, of course, came from a background of the KGB, and he's a master propagandist, and he understood, he saw the value of social media to attack wealthy liberal democracies, which he couldn't really attack any other way because Russia is a poor country.
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And he saw that they were vulnerable in this way. And starting in 2010, he set up an entire system designed to do nothing, but 24-7 just inject misinformation and disinformation into Western societies in order just to weaken them.
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And he has been successful to a certain degree. So social, again, if I had a wish list of what could we do to strengthen democracy in the short term, to reduce societal hate and division, it would be just to regulate the algorithms,
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not the content, just to regulate the algorithms. Because if you look at a whole series of negative trends from violence to hate crimes, to, you know, depression, to political polarization,
it all, it is all going in tandem with the use and dependence on social media and social media as the main source of news and information for populations around the globe.
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Okay, well, I think you started answering my next question. And that is, between government and non-governmental agencies, what reforms are needed and what reforms could work?
So I was just at an event with Steve Levitsky. He wrote How Democracies Die, which is a fabulous book. And he talked about how we really need to, America's democracy has a whole series of really undemocratic features that places like Norway and New Zealand
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and places we all admire for their democracy just don't have. And it would be, you know, the ability to gerrymander and the Electoral College. And his recommendation was, you know, we know what those undemocratic features are.
We should eliminate them. We should, you know, take America's democracy to the same level as these other healthy democracies. The problem is, first of all, that would take a really long time.
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Our institutions are no healthier today than they were in December of 2020. There have been no reforms, no improvements. So I don't know what's going to incentivize the two parties to be able to do it in the near future.
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So to me, the single easiest thing would be to regulate the algorithms. And let me even make it more precise. So we're facing an election in a couple of weeks.
There's, it's going to be a bumpy road after the election. What could we do to sort of just stabilize things a bit, regardless of who wins or who loses? So two things, which are super easy.
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First of all, the five biggest tech companies of the world are all American companies. So they're all here, subject to American law. So, so, but let's just say, okay, we're not going to try to regulate them.
And we don't have the time anyway. The two simplest things would be if the if Facebook and Google simply enforced their existing content moderation policy policies that exist on the books already, if they simply just enforce their own policies, which they don't.
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And if they don't want to do that, and I, and I had one thing that I could ask for it would be for Facebook to eliminate its reshare button temporarily. That's it.
Like just suspend the reshare button for three months. That's it. You can put it back. But what that means, it immediately makes it impossible or very difficult for anything to go viral.
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That that means so who knows what's going to be put online in the time around the election, but we'll know that it won't suddenly get an audience of tens of millions of people. Just that just temporarily suspend the reshare button.
Well, yeah, I'm okay with that now because I did have one of my posts on Twitter shared 27,000 times.
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Okay, two proposed bills will help safeguard our democracy. How do you see the current debates around the freedom to vote act and the John Lewis voting rights advancement act, fitting into the broader struggle against anocracy.
And can you draw parallels between these modern efforts and historical battles over voting rights.
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You know, those are great. I'll just say they're great. We shouldn't even be discussing them because it's taking us. Those bills are bringing us back to where we used to be so voting voting rights have been
some voting rights have been rescinded by depending on the state, but pretty much across the board. We're we're we've been in a period of time where it's becoming harder to register to vote for the most part in many states harder to vote.
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And, and these two bills are designed to make it easier. But like, this just seems so obvious, right? Like, why wouldn't we want to make voting easier? We should, you know, we should absolutely make sure that there's no shenanigans that, you know, dead people and
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eligible people are put on the voting rolls. But but that's that's such a teeny tiny percentage. And it's being used as an excuse to purge real voters and to close polling stations and to limit access.
So these two bills are at the very minimum, even just trying to get us back to where we were five years ago, 10 years ago. And it's, it's just, it's sad that that's where we are. We are today, we're just trying to get back to where we were in in the recent past, we're
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we're not even trying to make make things better.
I think you might appreciate that I've been criticized for saying that part of my job has become protecting democracy. People are arguing that we are republic. It's frustrating to me that people don't seem to understand what constitutes democracy.
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You know, another thing that that I think we need to be become more and more aware of is the number of people who are choosing to be party not designated or independence becoming the largest party.
And according to my understanding of history, our founding fathers didn't want a party system. When parties emerged, the first two were Democrat and Wig. The Wig party later transformed into the Republican Party.
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So what are the challenges we face? What gives you hope for the future of democracy, both in the United States and around the world? How can we draw on historical lessons as well as current efforts to strengthen democratic institutions to build a more resilient future?
Oh gosh, there's so much there. So one of the things most people don't know is how most immigrants, naturalized Americans are voting. And this would be mostly Latinos and Asians.
(44:03):
They are heavily gravitating towards the towards being independent. And it's not people think about independence as they're kind of halfway between Democrats and Republicans.
And they don't see themselves as being in between Democrats and Republicans. They just don't really understand. They're just like, I don't really get who the Republicans are, who the Democrats are, and I just want to kind of, you know, be independent.
(44:35):
So there's this huge opportunity there for both parties to appeal to these new voters, to help educate these new voters about what it means to be an American and to be democratic.
And in the process, create parties that really do represent what America is and what America is becoming. And maybe in the process, sort of pull people back towards the center where, you know, America, for most of its history,
(45:19):
most Americans were, we call them the median voter, they're smack in the middle, you know, and both parties would go into the middle to try to appeal to the median voter.
And one of the criticisms used to be that the parties really weren't that different from each other because they're all going essentially for the same moderate voter.
(45:41):
And that's just not where we are right now. Both parties have moved more to their extremes. And that's really not healthy. It's not healthy for the country. It's not healthy for governing and getting things done.
And perhaps, you know, having these new voters who don't have the same history, who don't, you know, feel like, you know, they have to vote Democrat because their parents voted Democrat or Republican because their parents voted Republican,
(46:15):
where they can actually choose where they want to be, will maybe bring it together. And then really, the hope I have is, like, is these types of events.
There's so many people around the world who care deeply about this country, love this country, and want this country to succeed, and want Americans to come together and are doing everything they can.
(46:46):
And they're, you know, and they're not giving up. And I just don't see Americans giving up, giving up on our democracy, giving up on each other, giving up on trying to figure out how we're going to take this big, unwieldy democracy
and become the world's first truly multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. That's never been done before. We're going to be the first country to do that. The rest are going to follow.
(47:17):
Canada's going to be next, followed by Australia and New Zealand. So, like, we again have to, I think, show the world how this is done.
And I think we have the, I don't know, the gumption. It's such an old term. But we have the fire and the gumption and the desire and the energy to do that.
(47:44):
That's what gives me hope. I don't see us giving up.
Isn't she terrific?
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,
(00:04):
presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a special conversation with author and professor Barbara F. Walter.
Walter is one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism, and domestic terrorism,
and the author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.
This conversation was recorded in Chandler, Arizona in October 2024,
(00:28):
and was moderated by Maricopa County Supervisor Jack Sellers.
Okay, I have some questions.
First, we'll be understanding conflict and predicting civil war.
In 2017, you served on the CIA's Political Instability Task Force,
(00:49):
which developed a model to predict which countries were susceptible to civil war.
How can we predict political instability and which countries will experience violence?
Easy answer.
Yes, and I'm going to start with a kind of a fun story, which I rarely tell.
I don't know why I feel like telling it tonight.
(01:10):
Maybe something a little bit different.
I'd been studying civil wars for almost 30 years by the time 2017 came around,
and I was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and I had volunteered to be the discussant
on a bunch of graduate student papers at a panel at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning.
(01:34):
This is the worst thing you could possibly volunteer for.
It's thankless. It's an enormous amount of work.
There was three people in the audience.
It had taken me all day to read and comment on the papers.
I remember thinking, these are young scholars, and they really deserve to have some feedback.
(02:02):
Anyway, we had the panel, and I knew two of the three people in the audience,
and the third person I didn't, and she came up to me afterwards,
and she said her name, and she said, I'm the head of the Political Instability Task Force.
Would you like to join?
(02:23):
And I remember thinking, wow, this is bizarre.
So she came to check this out, and I guess I passed the test.
But there really is a thing that the CIA runs.
It's been around since 1994. You can Google it.
There's a Wikipedia page. Everything that I did was, or the Task Force does, is unclassified.
(02:48):
They use the same data sets that are publicly available, and that eggheads like me use.
But one of the goals of the Task Force was to come up with a model that would help the U.S. government predict
what countries around the world were likely to experience political instability and or political violence
(03:10):
within the next two years.
So they really wanted to know, okay, if there's countries that are starting to unravel, tell us now.
I assume so that the government could do something about it.
So when the Task Force was made up of two types of people, half were academics and researchers like myself,
half were data analysts who worked for the agency,
(03:33):
and when the data analysts started putting together the model, they said,
tell us everything that could possibly even, you know, vaguely lead a country down a path towards violence.
And they're like, it doesn't, you know, you don't have to be sure.
Just give us anything that you have a hunch might matter.
And we gave them 38 different factors.
(03:57):
And some of them seemed obvious to us if a country was poor.
If a country had a lot of ethnic and religious diversity.
If it had a group that the government heavily discriminated against.
These all seemed like things that would be more likely to lead to violence than peace.
(04:18):
So the data analysts took these factors and they went away.
And when they came back, they said that only two factors were highly predictive,
and they were not the ones that we had expected.
The first was something that we called anocracy.
That was just one of many, many, many different measures of democracy that exist out there.
(04:43):
Anocracy is just a measure of whether a country is a partial democracy,
or you can think of it as a partial democracy, partial autocracy.
It's neither fully democratic, but it's not fully autocratic.
It turns out that healthy, strong liberal democracies.
(05:05):
So think about Denmark and Canada, Australia, Switzerland,
almost never experience political instability and violence.
It also turns out that hardcore autocracies, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, North Korea,
they also don't experience a lot of political violence.
If political violence happens, it happens in this middle zone.
(05:29):
And in fact, if you were to graph it with the x-axis being violence,
the y-axis being whether you're really autocratic or really democratic,
this is what violence looked like.
It's really low and all the violence happens in the middle.
So it's definitely not a place that you want to be.
(05:51):
It's especially dangerous if you're kind of moving into that zone rapidly.
So you're either trying to democratize really rapidly,
think about what Yugoslavia tried to do in the 1990s,
or you're going in the opposite direction and you're backsliding quite rapidly.
Think about Ukraine starting in the 2018s,
(06:17):
or probably what's happening in Venezuela right now.
So if you're rapidly becoming less democratic or more democratic
and you're in this middle zone, that's where violence tends to occur.
The second factor was whether citizens in those partial democracies
(06:39):
had organized their political parties mainly around race, religion, or ethnicity
rather than ideology.
So instead of joining a political party because you were ideologically conservative
or ideologically liberal, or you were a tried and true capitalist
or a tried and true communist, those are big ideological differences.
(07:03):
You're joining a political party because you're white or black,
Muslim or Hindu Serb or Croat.
You see India now, it has the Hindu-Muslim split.
And if a country had those two features, it was a partial democracy
with these identity-based parties, the task force considered it at high risk
(07:28):
of political instability or violence within the next two years.
And we put it on a watch list, we called it the watch list,
and we sent it to the White House.
So we, and the model when it was first created was about 80% predictive.
It was really, really good.
(07:50):
That's since declined to about 70%, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out
why that's the case, but that's still highly predictive,
simply with those two factors.
So I could talk about how this applies to the US.
I believe people are interested in that.
(08:11):
Yes, please.
People always comment that they're just like, you seem like you're a happy person,
and it's really disarming that you say these terrible things
and while you're kind of smiling.
And I want to apologize for that, but I am truly a very optimistic person
and a happy person.
(08:33):
I think that's why I can tolerate maybe studying something like this,
but to get to the United States.
So the CIA is legally not allowed to monitor what happens in the United States
or monitor its citizens.
That's exactly the way it should be.
So for the five years that I served on the task force,
(08:57):
we never ever talked about the United States from 2017 to 2022.
Not a word about the United States.
It really was quite astounding.
And it has to be that way.
But I was watching, I'm a private citizen, I was watching what was happening in the United States.
(09:21):
I knew the data, I knew the model.
I had access to what America's anocracy score, and I could see it going down.
I had access to the data about how racially and religiously divided our parties had become.
And that's when I decided to write this book.
(09:44):
I just thought, you know, this information should be in the hands of the American public so that we're prepared.
You know, when I started writing the book, it was absolutely inconceivable to most Americans
that we could ever have real sustained violence here in this country,
(10:06):
or even that our democracy was seriously in decline.
You know, Americans didn't want to talk about the fact that, you know, we had a violent extremism problem.
Domestic terrorism has been increasing for 15 years in this country.
Nobody wanted to talk about it.
They didn't want to acknowledge that we had a white nationalism problem.
(10:27):
You know, 75% of domestic terror incidents over the last 15 years have been perpetuated by white nationalist groups.
75%. Nobody wanted to talk about that.
And then one of the things that most people didn't know was that our democracy starting in 2016 based on the CIA's measure that it used in the model,
(10:51):
which was not data that it had collected.
This, a nonprofit group, had collected the anocracy data.
It also showed that the United States' democracy had been downgraded.
So let me quickly give you a sense.
The center for, how do I want to put this?
(11:14):
Every single country every year is graded based on how autocratic and how democratic it is.
It goes from negative 10 to positive 10.
Negative 10 is you're really autocratic.
You do not want to be in that group.
Positive 10 is you're really democratic.
That's definitely where you want to be.
And that's where the United States was for many, many years.
(11:39):
In 2016, the Center for Systemic Peace, which grades each country every year, downgraded the United States from plus 10 to plus 9.
And the reason was that international election monitors deemed the 2016 election free but not entirely fair.
(12:01):
There was some voter suppression, but mostly because our own intelligence agencies had found that the Russians had in fact meddled in that election.
So we got dinged.
We got dinged from a positive 10 to a positive 9.
In 2019, we were downgraded a second time to positive 7.
(12:25):
And the reason for that is that we had an executive branch that was refusing to comply with requests for information and refusing to acknowledge subpoenas from the legislative branch.
Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's a big deal because the main check on executive power, the main check to keep our president from becoming a king,
(12:49):
which is what our founding fathers desperately wanted to avoid, was having a legislative branch that was equally powerful and will and had the tools to contain a president.
But if you have a president who's essentially thumbing their nose at that, it's indicating that power has shifted.
(13:10):
And we have been, the executive branch of the United States has been becoming more powerful over the last few decades.
It's not a recent phenomenon.
And then we were downgraded a third and final time at the end of 2020 because the first time in American history, we had a sitting president who refused to accept the results of an election and was actively attempting to overturn those results.
(13:39):
So by December of 2020, for the first time since 1800, the United States was officially in the anocracy zone.
So that was the first thing.
So then the question is, okay, what about our political parties?
And our political parties, it used to be as recently as 2008.
(14:02):
If you were to walk down the street and you would see somebody like me, a white woman, it would be hard for you to guess.
What my party affiliation would be.
Like if you were a betting person, it would be basically be a coin toss, whether I was a Republican or a Democrat.
Whites were basically evenly split between the two parties.
And that was mostly because the white working class was solidly Democratic.
(14:28):
That began to shift in 2008.
And the white working class began to gravitate towards the Republican Party.
The Republican Party today, until even recently, it was as much as 90% white in a country that is multi-ethnic and multi-religious.
(14:49):
If you look on the other side, over 90% of African Americans vote for the Democratic Party.
A large majority of Asians and Latinos vote for the Democratic Party.
Most atheists and Jews and Muslims vote for the Democratic Party.
So the very best predictor of whether you're a Republican today, number one is are you white?
(15:14):
And number two is if you're evangelical Christian.
So that, by the definition of the task force, is becoming close to identity-based parties.
I suspect that if we had been allowed to include the United States in our model and in our observation,
(15:37):
that we likely would have put the U.S. on the watch list in December of 2020.
And again, that means that you're at high risk of political violence and instability within two years.
And of course, just a couple of weeks later, January 6th occurred.
So this is something that our government monitors this all around the world.
(16:01):
And I think we as Americans, we pride ourselves in believing that we have the world's oldest democracy.
We are a leader of the free world.
We've known nothing but democracy here, at least most of us, if we're white, have known nothing but democracy.
(16:22):
And the reality is, is that it has been eroding over the last few years.
And we are behaving like a lot of other countries that have experienced Democratic backsliding
or have experienced a synocracy zone with these identity-based parties.
And you're starting to see the same types of instability and the same types of violence
(16:47):
that we were seeing, for example, in the former Yugoslavia or that we were seeing in countries
in the months leading up to more sustained violence.
Thank you. And you probably have figured out that she makes a moderator's job very easy
because she just answered question two by me just saying, yes, please.
(17:11):
Okay. America has already experienced a civil war.
How can Americans better understand this history and respond to threats of an internal conflict in the 21st century?
Yeah. So there's a thing called the conflict trap.
(17:35):
That's actually a term conflict scholars use.
It means a little over 30% of countries that experience one civil war will experience a second and possibly a third civil war.
There's a very high recidivism rate in countries that have experienced one.
(17:57):
We, of course, had this one of the most brutal civil wars that any country has experienced.
And I think one of the reasons why Americans have a really hard time wrapping their mind around the possibility
of a second civil war is that they're thinking of an 1860s version of a civil war.
(18:22):
They're thinking, wow, is a big portion of the country going to secede?
Are we going to have these two big armies, really well equipped, strong, trained armies meeting each other in the battlefield?
And the answer is absolutely not. That was such an odd civil war even for the 1860s.
(18:47):
And just as a little aside, because this is history that most people don't get,
the reason that will never happen again is because the US military in 1860 was actually not particularly strong.
It had about 16,000 soldiers under arms, and most of those soldiers were stationed out west to put down Indian uprisings.
(19:12):
So it was distracted. And the Confederate states were actually quite strong militarily because they had active and well-trained and well-equipped militias.
They were actually called the Minutemen as a tip to the hat of the Revolutionary War.
(19:33):
And these militias existed throughout the Confederate states because they were there to put down slave uprisings.
So when the 11 Confederate states decided that they were going to secede, and when Lincoln basically said,
no, you're not, we're going to fight you to ensure that you don't leave the Union,
(19:57):
all the Confederate states had to do was to bring those militias together, and they had a ready-made conventional military
that it wasn't crazy to think could take on the US military.
That is simply not the case today.
The US military has over 2 million soldiers that it could have under arms. It can transport them within 24 hours anywhere in the country.
(20:27):
It would be insane today to think that you could take on the US military.
So if a war happens, another war, or let's call it major or sustained violence happens here in the United States,
it's going to look like most civil wars, especially most 21st century civil wars, and that's going to be an insurgency.
(20:51):
They're going to use guerrilla warfare, and the targets are for the most part going to be civilians.
Terrorism is the method of choice for groups that are taking on powerful, rich states.
It's what the IRA did in Northern Ireland against the British government.
(21:16):
It's what the Tamil Tigers did against the Indian government. That is the norm.
If it happens here, it would be a series of attacks directed at the opposition, whoever is in power that you don't want to be in power.
(21:45):
It would be with people who support the federal government, judges, law enforcement agents who are enforcing the law.
It would be election officials who are running elections and adhering to the rule of law.
But it would also be minority groups.
(22:08):
The groups that have been targeted over the last 15 years are overwhelmingly African Americans, Jews, Latinos, LBGTQ people.
It's those individuals that, to a subset of the American population, are seen as threats to the future identity of the United States, but also as threats to the group that has dominated American politics since the very beginning, but demographically is in decline.
(22:46):
That is white. There's a subset of the population. Let me take a step back.
If you look at the data about who tends to start these wars, most people think it's the people who have the most grievances.
The people who are really downtrodden or the people who are heavily repressed, no, they don't have any ability to rebel. People who tend to start these sorts of violence campaigns are the groups that had been politically and economically dominant and are in decline.
(23:24):
So they're the ones who really feel the loss of status. They're the ones who tend to have the means and the power to organize. They're the ones who oftentimes just don't go down without a fight.
Thank you. And I guess I will resist asking you if you can see any groups like that emerging at this point.
(23:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think this white supremacy problem, I find it interesting. You guys all probably remember the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when you had all these mostly young men with torches.
It was really the first time that movement came out sort of boldly and proudly out in the open.
(24:25):
But what's so surprising for me is that if you study violent extremism and you study domestic terrorism, we've been seeing these groups grow and consistently grow, and we've been seeing the attacks increase.
And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans wanted to talk about it. In fact, it was just a civil servant. I think he worked in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.
(24:59):
It was in 2019 who just spent a lot of time online in chat rooms and just monitoring the growth of white supremacist movements online.
And he wrote a report, a very detailed, very high quality report. And I think it was out in public for about a week.
(25:29):
And the Obama administration pulled it and suppressed it because there was immediately an outcry from the Republican Party.
One of the findings was that actually a fair percentage of returning soldiers from the Middle Eastern wars, and when I say fairly large, I'm talking about 14 percent, were either ex-law enforcement officials or active law enforcement officials.
(26:02):
So there was an outcry that this wasn't fair to them. And the Democrats also got a lot of heat because white voters are important in winning elections.
And we're going to see that in a couple of weeks. They're probably going to decide this election. And neither party wanted to take any risk of alienating them.
(26:32):
And so this really detailed information about what was happening underneath the surface here in the United States was suppressed.
So I don't even remember what your question was.
I think I said I wasn't going to ask.
(26:53):
You know, it's one of the real challenges that we have is overcoming the misinformation on social media, some of it spread by very prominent people, creating doubt and distrust appears to be easy to accomplish.
The use of political violence and the spread of misinformation are two significant threats to our democracy today. How do these elements contribute to the rise of anocracies?
(27:22):
And what can be done to counteract their influence in the U.S.?
So researchers like me don't like to state anything unless there's evidence and data to back it up.
So I cannot say for certain that there is a causal connection between the rise of social media and various features of social media platforms like the share button and the reshare button,
(27:52):
and a whole host of negative societal outcomes that we've been seeing over the last 15 years.
The reason I can't say that with any confidence is because none of the tech companies will release their data,
(28:14):
and they're not releasing their data because they know that it would be a goldmine to actually determining what affects algorithms that are designed to disproportionately favor information
that taps into your deepest emotions, fear, threat, anger, what effects that has on a whole host of things from rise in political violence to a rise in teenage suicide to a rise in depression, etc., etc., etc.
(28:47):
But we're starting to get all sorts of information that, in fact, there's almost certainly a causal link. I don't know how many of you followed Francis Hogan.
She was an employee with Facebook, and I think it was in 2020 or 2022. She handed over tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal and to Congress and to various outlets.
(29:22):
And it was documents that revealed the findings that Facebook's own internal research team had found were the causal effects of its social media and its algorithms on various outcomes.
(29:45):
And it confirmed everything we're sort of suspecting. So what people like me are concluding is we believe that the rise of social media was an accelerant.
And I'll give you just two examples. Beginning in 1946, the end of World War II, till 2010, if you look to the graph of the number of democratic countries around the world, if you go actually, let's go back to 1900, there were almost none.
(30:21):
Autocracy was the norm. Most governments were autocratic governments. Democracy was really, really rare. But if you look at the graph, there were some dips after World War II, there was another dip.
But there were basically three big waves of democratization, so that by 2010, and especially after the fall of Soviet Union, there was so many countries becoming democratic that there was a bit of arrogance amongst those who studied democracies.
(30:57):
We kind of thought, oh, all we have to do is wait, and eventually the whole world would become democratic. And we were super excited about that because full, healthy democracies actually don't go to war with each other.
So in our mind, we're like, oh, if the whole world is democratic, then we won't have any more war. And that's what we want. We'll have world peace.
(31:21):
In 2010, it stopped, and it reversed. And every single year since 2010, the number of democracies around the world has declined, and it's showing no signs of stopping.
And what's different about this reversal, one is how sustained it is, but for the very first time, it includes the oldest, most stalwart democracies, the UK, the United States, Sweden.
(31:54):
Sweden now has one of its biggest parties in parliament is a neo-nazi party. They only recently outlawed that members couldn't come to their Thursday meetings and SS uniforms.
It's one of the biggest parties in the Swedish parliament. Like, this is, it kind of blows the mind. So people have been trying to figure out the timing. Why is this happening now?
(32:20):
And the closest we can get to it is that it tracks with the rise of internet around the world, and in particular social media, and the ability, the share button, essentially the share button, which allows certain messages to go viral and spread almost instantaneously to millions of people.
(32:49):
And the reason we think it's that way is that the last region on the globe to have this reversal was Africa. Africa, which is a continent that has been notoriously resistant to sustained democratization.
Africa continued to democratize until 2019. 2019, it hit its peak, and that's when Africa also began to reverse. Africa was also the last region on the planet to have significant internet penetration.
(33:23):
So it seems to track with that. And then this, you know, why are we suddenly having the rise of hyper nationalist parties, not just here in the United States, but everywhere, everywhere.
South America and in South Asia, in Central and Western Europe. Why is that happening now? And again, we suspect it's because the social media is essentially a backdoor way for enemies of democracy.
(34:04):
If they want to sow division, to begin to undercut trust in democracy, but also to begin to sow societal division. And for those of you who are interested in the subject, I'm going to recommend a book that it's almost hard to believe when you read it, but it is absolutely true.
It's called This is Not Propaganda. And it's written by a guy named Peter Pomerance, and he's Russian. He's a reporter. He now lives in the United States.
(34:35):
But what the book does is it outlines Putin's decision starting in 2010. Putin, of course, came from a background of the KGB, and he's a master propagandist, and he understood, he saw the value of social media to attack wealthy liberal democracies, which he couldn't really attack any other way because Russia is a poor country.
(35:04):
And he saw that they were vulnerable in this way. And starting in 2010, he set up an entire system designed to do nothing, but 24-7 just inject misinformation and disinformation into Western societies in order just to weaken them.
(35:31):
And he has been successful to a certain degree. So social, again, if I had a wish list of what could we do to strengthen democracy in the short term, to reduce societal hate and division, it would be just to regulate the algorithms,
(35:58):
not the content, just to regulate the algorithms. Because if you look at a whole series of negative trends from violence to hate crimes, to, you know, depression, to political polarization,
it all, it is all going in tandem with the use and dependence on social media and social media as the main source of news and information for populations around the globe.
(36:36):
Okay, well, I think you started answering my next question. And that is, between government and non-governmental agencies, what reforms are needed and what reforms could work?
So I was just at an event with Steve Levitsky. He wrote How Democracies Die, which is a fabulous book. And he talked about how we really need to, America's democracy has a whole series of really undemocratic features that places like Norway and New Zealand
(37:16):
and places we all admire for their democracy just don't have. And it would be, you know, the ability to gerrymander and the Electoral College. And his recommendation was, you know, we know what those undemocratic features are.
We should eliminate them. We should, you know, take America's democracy to the same level as these other healthy democracies. The problem is, first of all, that would take a really long time.
(37:51):
Our institutions are no healthier today than they were in December of 2020. There have been no reforms, no improvements. So I don't know what's going to incentivize the two parties to be able to do it in the near future.
(38:14):
So to me, the single easiest thing would be to regulate the algorithms. And let me even make it more precise. So we're facing an election in a couple of weeks.
There's, it's going to be a bumpy road after the election. What could we do to sort of just stabilize things a bit, regardless of who wins or who loses? So two things, which are super easy.
(38:48):
First of all, the five biggest tech companies of the world are all American companies. So they're all here, subject to American law. So, so, but let's just say, okay, we're not going to try to regulate them.
And we don't have the time anyway. The two simplest things would be if the if Facebook and Google simply enforced their existing content moderation policy policies that exist on the books already, if they simply just enforce their own policies, which they don't.
(39:27):
And if they don't want to do that, and I, and I had one thing that I could ask for it would be for Facebook to eliminate its reshare button temporarily. That's it.
Like just suspend the reshare button for three months. That's it. You can put it back. But what that means, it immediately makes it impossible or very difficult for anything to go viral.
(39:57):
That that means so who knows what's going to be put online in the time around the election, but we'll know that it won't suddenly get an audience of tens of millions of people. Just that just temporarily suspend the reshare button.
Well, yeah, I'm okay with that now because I did have one of my posts on Twitter shared 27,000 times.
(40:26):
Okay, two proposed bills will help safeguard our democracy. How do you see the current debates around the freedom to vote act and the John Lewis voting rights advancement act, fitting into the broader struggle against anocracy.
And can you draw parallels between these modern efforts and historical battles over voting rights.
(40:48):
You know, those are great. I'll just say they're great. We shouldn't even be discussing them because it's taking us. Those bills are bringing us back to where we used to be so voting voting rights have been
some voting rights have been rescinded by depending on the state, but pretty much across the board. We're we're we've been in a period of time where it's becoming harder to register to vote for the most part in many states harder to vote.
(41:27):
And, and these two bills are designed to make it easier. But like, this just seems so obvious, right? Like, why wouldn't we want to make voting easier? We should, you know, we should absolutely make sure that there's no shenanigans that, you know, dead people and
(41:51):
eligible people are put on the voting rolls. But but that's that's such a teeny tiny percentage. And it's being used as an excuse to purge real voters and to close polling stations and to limit access.
So these two bills are at the very minimum, even just trying to get us back to where we were five years ago, 10 years ago. And it's, it's just, it's sad that that's where we are. We are today, we're just trying to get back to where we were in in the recent past, we're
(42:29):
we're not even trying to make make things better.
I think you might appreciate that I've been criticized for saying that part of my job has become protecting democracy. People are arguing that we are republic. It's frustrating to me that people don't seem to understand what constitutes democracy.
(42:55):
You know, another thing that that I think we need to be become more and more aware of is the number of people who are choosing to be party not designated or independence becoming the largest party.
And according to my understanding of history, our founding fathers didn't want a party system. When parties emerged, the first two were Democrat and Wig. The Wig party later transformed into the Republican Party.
(43:28):
So what are the challenges we face? What gives you hope for the future of democracy, both in the United States and around the world? How can we draw on historical lessons as well as current efforts to strengthen democratic institutions to build a more resilient future?
Oh gosh, there's so much there. So one of the things most people don't know is how most immigrants, naturalized Americans are voting. And this would be mostly Latinos and Asians.
(44:03):
They are heavily gravitating towards the towards being independent. And it's not people think about independence as they're kind of halfway between Democrats and Republicans.
And they don't see themselves as being in between Democrats and Republicans. They just don't really understand. They're just like, I don't really get who the Republicans are, who the Democrats are, and I just want to kind of, you know, be independent.
(44:35):
So there's this huge opportunity there for both parties to appeal to these new voters, to help educate these new voters about what it means to be an American and to be democratic.
And in the process, create parties that really do represent what America is and what America is becoming. And maybe in the process, sort of pull people back towards the center where, you know, America, for most of its history,
(45:19):
most Americans were, we call them the median voter, they're smack in the middle, you know, and both parties would go into the middle to try to appeal to the median voter.
And one of the criticisms used to be that the parties really weren't that different from each other because they're all going essentially for the same moderate voter.
(45:41):
And that's just not where we are right now. Both parties have moved more to their extremes. And that's really not healthy. It's not healthy for the country. It's not healthy for governing and getting things done.
And perhaps, you know, having these new voters who don't have the same history, who don't, you know, feel like, you know, they have to vote Democrat because their parents voted Democrat or Republican because their parents voted Republican,
(46:15):
where they can actually choose where they want to be, will maybe bring it together. And then really, the hope I have is, like, is these types of events.
There's so many people around the world who care deeply about this country, love this country, and want this country to succeed, and want Americans to come together and are doing everything they can.
(46:46):
And they're, you know, and they're not giving up. And I just don't see Americans giving up, giving up on our democracy, giving up on each other, giving up on trying to figure out how we're going to take this big, unwieldy democracy
and become the world's first truly multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. That's never been done before. We're going to be the first country to do that. The rest are going to follow.
(47:17):
Canada's going to be next, followed by Australia and New Zealand. So, like, we again have to, I think, show the world how this is done.
And I think we have the, I don't know, the gumption. It's such an old term. But we have the fire and the gumption and the desire and the energy to do that.
(47:44):
That's what gives me hope. I don't see us giving up.
Isn't she terrific?
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