Between democracy and autocracy is an anocracy, defined by political scientists as a country that has elements of both forms of government — usually one that's on the way up to becoming a full democracy or on the way down to full autocracy. This messy middle is the state when civil wars are most likely to start and the one that requires the most diligence from that country's citizens to prevent a civil war from breaking out.
Barbara F. Walter, author of "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them," has spent decades studying civil wars around the world and working with other political scientists to quantify how strong democracy is in a given country. She joins us this week to discuss those findings, how the democratic health of the United States has shifted over the past decade, and more.
Walter is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy & Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and completed post docs at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and the War and Peace Institute at Columbia University.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Barbara F. Walter, who is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, the Rohr Chair in Pacific International Relations and author of the book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. So Barbara talks in her book about all of the academic work that she and many other scholars have done in this area of civil war and ethnic conflict. But she's also advised the US government on some of these areas served on task forces and these kinds of things. So it's interesting to have someone with us this week who can speak to it, both from an academic perspective, and from a more practical policy oriented perspective as well.
Candis Watts Smith
When I was an undergrad, I took a class by this political scientist, Stephen Wilkinson, on ethnic conflict. And the first case that he gave us, was Wilmington, 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina had a race massacre and a local coup. And it arose because white Democrats were displeased with the emergence of a multiracial party, and the kind of notion of a multiracial democracy. And you know, that was actually my first time and I'm from North Carolina hearing about that. And he wanted us to know that America is not exceptional, and confronting issues that we tend to think about and study over there in other parts of the world. You know, Rwanda was also one of our cases, India was also one of our cases, we had a number, but we started focusing on the US. And so one of the things I think is really important about what Barbara Walter is doing here is she's synthesizing tons of data, historical data, all sorts of measures and of democracy, thinking about it from various sides to say, Well, what do we know about the run up to civil war? And these kinds of conflicts that we tend to think are over there?
Chris Beem
The only thing I want to mention there is that I think it's relevant that your professor was talking about 1898. Because I think Walter goes to great pains to say that the American Civil War, ie, you know, Grant, Lee, you know, uniforms, flags, all that is incredibly unusual for a civil war. And so when you talk about what's at risk, either here or anywhere else, that's not what's at risk, that hardly ever happens. So what does happen is this ratcheting up of violence, where you have insurgent groups that randomly use terrorism, or you know, other kinds of hit and run tactics, to wreck the status quo, to erect a sense of social cohesion, social calm, and so that's what's at risk here. And it's confusing, because Americans have this dominant metaphor, right? That's this is how we think of civil war. And that's not what she's talking about.
Candis Watts Smith
I think those nuances are really important because it expands our understanding, and our imagination of what's possible. When we focus on the kind of history textbook, images of soldiers in one color uniform versus another. We miss out on what actually happened in dozens of countries around the world over time. And so I think even the kind of idea that we don't really kind of put into context, what it means to have what seems like random acts of violence, or what we might call lone wolf attacks, that actually, when you zoom out and what she's done, and dozens of other political scientists, the work that she shows is that those lone wolf for you know, lone wolf attacks, for example, are often in coordination with others. So I guess I just wanted to say that this piece, this work, this book really helps us to be attuned to the multiple ways that democracies in decline or autocracies moving toward democracy can be prone to violence and that violence could be understood as civil war and not necessarily, you know, one army versus another.
Chris Beem
Yeah, that's right. And you know, you're boatload of data. I think, you know, I actually said this when I introduced her that this is one of the best arguments for quantitative Political Science that I've read in a while, because it's not, it's the objective here is to produce a series of hypotheses in the forms of variables, and then test those hypotheses against the data. And she has a big N, as they say, numbers in terms of what those features are. And as a result of all that number crunching and all those specific experiences of civil war, she ends up with basically two features that are common to all of them. And those are, you know, once you see that it's hard a not to think, Oh, well, that gives us a strategy for addressing it. And also to see that there's something concerning about where we are right now. Right.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah. And those two factors are inaccuracy and fractionalization,
Chris Beem
Which both sound complicated, but they're not complicated. I mean, there are features of a democracy there, you know, civil rights including, the, you know, the first amendment say, and there's a rule of law and equality under law, right. So we apply the law fairly, and equitably, you know, justice is blind. And there's also this kind of idea that the elections are free and fair, right. These are all things that are democracy, that are definitional, of a democracy. And if you don't quite have that, if your civil rights are not entirely complete, if the rule of law is not completely equitable, you know, if you have people who not only have doubts, but express doubts about election, then it's just you don't have a democracy merely right. You have something in the middle?
Jenna Spinelle
Well, and I don't want to get too far ahead of Barbara's argument. I think she does a good job of laying out both the definition of an autocracy and some of those examples, and also this scale you were talking about, of how political scientists and others have attempted to quantify, you know how democratic or non democratic a country is. So we'll talk all about that in the interview. So let's get to it.
Jenna Spinelle
Barbara Walter, welcome to democracy works. Thanks for joining us today.
Barbara Walter
It's great to be here, Jenna.
Jenna Spinelle
So I learned so much from reading your book and your other work. So lots to get to today, I want to maybe start with some historical background and context, I think will help set the stage for something about civil wars, you talk about in your book, the love affair with democracy that went from World War Two through the Iraq War rally. So I wonder if you could say more about that period, and maybe how it informs the way that we think about civil wars today.
Barbara Walter
So there's this interesting correlation that most people don't know about. And it's a correlation between the rise of democracy and the rise of civil wars. If you look back into, you know, pre 1900s, democracy was actually a very rare form of government. People generally didn't rule themselves throughout history that began to change, especially after World War Two countries were getting richer citizens were demanding more rights and freedoms. And they wanted to have a say, in ruling themselves. And so as states became independent, that's what form of government they tended to want as they began to reform. That's what they were moving towards. And as this was happening, you started to see more and more civil wars breakout. So that got people thinking, Is there something that's related to democratization or democracy, per se, that's leading to violence? And it turns out, not really, but maybe something and it turns out that civil wars rarely happen in almost never happened in full unhealthy democracy. So think about the Denmark's in the Canada's and the Switzerland's of the world. They also rarely happen in full autocracies. So think about the North Korea's the Saudi Arabia is the Bahrain's, they happen in the middle. And we call those types of governments inaccuracies.
Jenna Spinelle
Which was a new term for Yeah, I hadn't heard that before reading your book.
Barbara Walter
It's funny. Just before the book came out, I sent it around to some of my friends who were civil war experts had them read it. And one of the most famous professors, he's at Stanford, he said, you know, he's like, you know, Barb, I agree with everything, but nothing's new. You know, we've known about an anocracy for 30 years for 30 years. And I was like, Yeah, we the handful of maybe 30, Civil War experts, but the rest of the world doesn't know about this relationship. And so one of the things that we've been trying to figure out is it what is it about anocracy that make them particularly violent, prone? We don't really know. But we have a very strong hunch. Yeah.
Jenna Spinelle
And can you Tell us what an anocracy is for listeners whom that term might also be.?
Barbara Walter
So an anocracy is just a fancy political science term for a partial democracy. It's a government that's neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. It's something in between. So if you think about a country where they hold elections, and those elections can be free and fair, the citizens of that country go out to vote, they're very enthusiastic about voting. Think about Hungary. This is what happens in Hungary. But whoever is elected, basically has very, very few constraints on what he or she can do. Orban basically rules the way he wants to in Hungary, the opposition tries to depose them, they are never successful. And in part because he controls the state media, he basically fixes the system so that no other party can be competitive. That's an inaccuracy.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, it has made inroads to university as well, and all those kinds of things. And so you also you highlight the work that the scholarly community has done to quantify all of this. Yeah, I believe it's a 20 point scale, if I do my math correctly, the polity score. Yeah. Tell us what that is, and how that maps on to those categories you were describing?
Barbara Walter
Yeah. So there are numerous really high quality data sets that include everything you'd ever want to know about civil wars, who starts them when they start, how long they last, whether they ended negotiated settlements, what are they fighting over. So we have all of this really rich data at our fingertips. One of the measures that people use when they look to see whether a country is in an autocracy or not, is a dataset called the polity five dataset, it comes out of a nonprofit located in Virginia called the Center for systemic peace, it has a website, all of all of these data are publicly available, you can go Google it, you can download it, you could use it, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool how much information we have, every year, the people at polity analyze every single country around the world, and they assign that country a score between negative 10 and positive 10. And negative 10 means that it is the most autocratic type of government positive 10, the most democratic type of government, but you could be a negative, he could be a five, you could be a positive eight, and that way they can see and we any, the public can see what direction countries are going, are they? Are they stable at a 10? Are they sliding down the scale? So is their democracy becoming weaker? Is their democracy becoming stronger? So it's very informative?
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And I know, some of our listeners are very kind of invested in the democracy space, whether as, as academics, and maybe work for democracy focus organization. So I'm gonna ask you a bit of a nerd question. Yeah. So that polity score, like how does that track with reports that Freedom House and V dam, like, are all of these things roughly trending in the same direction? Or are there disparities between them? And if so, how important are those just yeah,
Barbara Walter
There's at least four or five major data sets on democracy. And your listeners might ask, Well, why would we need that many. And we do need that many, because each one of them measures democracy slightly differently. And they measure it based on what features of democracy they're most interested in one of the datasets. So let me name them it the polity I just talked about, you talked about Freedom House, you talked about V dam, which stands for varieties of democracy that's housed in Sweden, there's the Economist Intelligence Unit, which is done by the magazine, The Economist, when there's maybe a fifth one that I'm not remembering right now. But those are really the four big ones, your listeners probably hear most about Freedom House, journalists like to go to Freedom House and talk about, you know, if they've suddenly mentioned, oh, the United States has dropped on the Freedom House ranking. Freedom House is interested in a very, very particular very particular elements of democracy. It cares about individual rights and freedoms period. It wants to know how strong freedom of the press is in a country, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, that's what it focuses on. polity doesn't include any measures of freedom of the press, and freedom of religion and things like that. It's not interested in that element of democracy. It's interested instead, on the democratic institutions, how strong are those democratic institutions, and it's particularly interested in the democratic institutions that constrain and restrain executive power. So in some ways, one way to think about this is when the Founding Fathers formed America's democracy, one of the The things they were most worried about was that a king would emerge here in the United States, many of them had left England because of the oppressiveness of the monarchy, and they want to make sure that didn't happen. If that were to happen in the United States, it was most likely to come out of the White House, and it will be the president basically grabbing power and making himself king. So they thought a lot about how to put in place checks and balances, institutional constraints that would make that very hard to do. That's what polity focuses on varieties of democracy. They do what they say they do. They're like, You know what, no, democracy is the same. Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Australia. Each has its unique form of democracy. And they were interested in whether a particular type of democracy was better on a host of different outcomes. So were was a particular type of democracy more peaceful, more prosperous, more fair towards its citizens. And so it went even deeper into looking at the nuances of different types of democracy. So that's probably more nerdy. And then you want to
Jenna Spinelle
Our show has been called jarringly academics. Oh, yeah, I can do that. So returning back to the Civil War, so how do you map that polity data on to you know, how you assess the notion of civil war, and you'll how likely it is or is not to happen in a place.
Barbara Walter
So in the book, one of the things that I present are the results of a number of quantitative studies. I basic, and I don't talk about it that way. But I basically say, here's what we know, from 30 years of high quality academic studies on this subject. And one of the most robust findings from the quantitative literature is that inaccuracies are at higher risk of civil war than other types of governments that comes probably, you know, somebody look up is a fantastic scholar, he's at the University of Essex, his name is Christian Gleditsch. She's done a lot of this, the heavy lifting on an autocracy, but there are others as well. And they basically, were looking at studies that explain the outbreak of we call it armed conflict armed conflict. And you start with theories, and you think, okay, what are all the possible factors that could lead a country towards civil war? Is it poverty? Is it income inequality? Is it how ethnically and religiously heterogeneous a country is? Is that the type of government that's in power, and you then include in your model variables on that get at these concepts? And so if you think it's the type of government that's in power, the way people started was, well, we'll just throw in a variable is the government democratic? That's really, really rough, because we know there are lots of different types of democracy. Well, and then they said, Well, we have this measure, and na cracy. Is it an inaccuracy and the very early studies that use these rough measures found that again, and again and again, inaccuracy kept coming up. And so that's how we found out then one of the things that happened in 2017, was I was asked to join this task force run by the US government called the political instability Task Force, one of the jobs of the task force is to come up with a predictive model to help our government predict what countries around the world are going to potentially experience ethnic conflict and civil war. And that task force was made up of experts on civil war and conflict. And data analysts and the data analysts were in charge of creating this predictive model. And they also began to look at all of these different variables they played with the data they're trying to figure out, okay, what set of variables best predicts civil war? And they found that in fact, only two were highly predictive. Right. They also found an autocracy was the most important one. So that's how we began to see that there is something going on here. So let me circle back to your very first question, this seeming correlation between the rise of democracy and the rise of civil war. Democratization is not bad, right? We now live in a world where almost 60% of countries are democracies. And we know that people who live in democracies on almost every measure live a higher quality of life, this is a very good thing. But what we now understand that when you go from an authoritarian regime to a democratic regime, you don't go directly from one to the other. It's a slow progressive process. And you almost always go through this middle zone. So what was happening in you know, after World War Two too, as the number of countries were democratizing, we were seeing more and more countries become inaccuracies for a period of time. And that's where the instability and violence tends to occur,
Jenna Spinelle
And it also happens in reverse, right? We saw countries that were more stable democracies, like the U.S. and Hungary and so many other places in Ukraine or Ukraine. Yeah, I want to come back to that. But there's also this like democratic decay that happens to where people were countries go the other way. And I think that you argue that the US in certain places are sort of, in the other part of that an autocracy like on the way down on on the way out,
Barbara Walter
Yes, so that's a relatively new phenomenon. The number of democracies around the world were increasing fairly consistently until about 2010 2010, was peak democracy in the world. Since 2010. The number of democracies around the world has been declining almost every year. That's troubling, it's even more troubling, because the declines are also happening in the most the oldest, the most stalwart democracies, the democracies, we never thought would see decline. The UK has declined. For example, if you look at the measures by the variety of of democracy data set, every single democracy of Western Europe has declined over the last 10 years. And the United States, of course, is also has also been declining. That's really troubling. And so we know what happens when you democratize and you go into a becoming an autocracy, we've watched lots and lots of countries experiencing that. We're now only beginning to see what happens case by case when you're coming from the other direction.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and the other another interesting point, not the other, you make many interesting points about what's going on. But the so you also talk about, you know, America, as the first democracy, the first kind of Western democracy, they will have, at some point down the line, a majority, non white population. And you alluded to earlier the kind of tensions that arise and how conflicts between ethnic groups lead to civil war. So how are you thinking about that aspect of things in this kind of Americas date as an inaccuracy like, how am I the eventual shift to online majority impact that?
Barbara Walter
Yeah, I'm going to try to answer that in two parts. So I talked about how the model that our government uses had two factors that were highly predictive of civil wars. The first was an autocracy. The second was whether citizens and countries that are inaccuracies had organized themselves into political parties based on identity rather than ideology. So rather than joining a political party, because you're a conservative, or a liberal, Communist or Capitalist, you're joining a political party because you're black or white, Muslim, or Christian, Serb or Croat. If a country had these two features, so its government was in an autocracy, and it had these very strong racially, ethnically, or religiously based parties. The taskforce considered it at high risk of civil war, or ethnic conflict, and it put it on a watch list. Okay, so we know those two features. The second important point to make is that we actually know who tends to start civil wars. And it's not the people who most of us think it's not the poorest or the weakest groups. It's actually the groups that had once been politically dominant and are in decline. Now, that's sort of background to answering your question, which is this demographic transition that the United States is facing, the group that's in that had been politically dominant in this country and is in decline are white, predominantly male, predominantly Christians, the United States from our inception has been dominated by that demographic, and they have been losing status, their status was extremely high. It was privileged compared to everybody else, but they perceive it as if they are in fact in decline. So if you think back to January 6, and you if you remember videos from that day, the people who stormed the US Capitol, they walked down the mall, they were not trying to hide, they didn't have masks on they were taking videotapes. They were videotaping themselves with their phones, they believed they were patriots, that they were doing the right thing and that it was their duty, actually, to take back their country. That is the kind of the perfect visual of the types of groups who feel justified in turning to violence. If they are losing power, the demographic change the US is in the midst of this great transformation where we're going to go from a country tree whose population is majority way to a country whose population is majority non white, this is going to happen around 2045. We are the first country, white majority country to go through this, but the other ones are likely to follow Canada is probably going to be next followed by New Zealand and eventually, the countries of Western Europe, that's especially likely to be true with climate change, because climate change is going to disproportionately affect the countries of the global south people who live in those countries who are going to now be experiencing droughts and extreme weather are going to do, what any of us would do is we're going to pack up and they're going to move some place more hospitable. And many of them are going to move to the wealthier democratic countries of the North. So that's the big transformation. And groups like the proud boys, white supremacist groups of which there are an increasing number in the United States find this deeply, deeply threatening, and they feel that it is their responsibility to try to stop it. So again, if you remember scenes from the Charlottesville rally, when you had all of those young white men holding torches, and coming together, one of their chants was, we will not be replaced, we will not be replaced. And that is a direct reference to the changing demographics in the United States. And it directly reveals their sense of threat and their sense of loss and their sense of resentment.
Jenna Spinelle
I wonder if you could talk about the difference between polarization and factionalization? I think that the terms are sometimes confused, yes, a one when they mean the other.
Barbara Walter
Yeah, so they're absolutely not the same thing. You could have a United States that is highly polarized, which we were in the 1960s. And that does not put a country at higher risk of civil war. Polarization refers to ideological divisions. So think about the 60s where you had it, you know, people were really divided. And back then, you know, whites were heavily divided, based on whether they were liberal, or whether they were conservative, whether they were pro Vietnam War, whether they were anti Vietnam war, they were divided over the issues, whether you should be, you know, taxed, and we should build a strong social safety net, or whether you should have less regulation and lower taxes. So people are fighting over the issues. When you have an ethnically factionalized country, they are dividing themselves purely by their identity. So if you look today, the Democratic African Americans, Latinos, Muslim Jews, atheists vote predominantly for the Democratic Party, if you look at the Republican party, the Republican Party is almost 80%, white, and heavily Christian, in a country that's multi ethnic, multi religious and multi racial. So whites now weights, there are about 40% of whites vote for the Democrat, I don't know exactly the number but vote for the Democratic Party. But you have a large percentage, for example of the white working class that used to for many years voted solidly democratic, because the Democratic Party provided more social services for them and their economic policy was more beneficial. Starting in 2008. They've gravitated towards the Republican Party, even though the policies of the Republican Party their economic policies do not benefit those groups. If you think about that, you know, the state of Tennessee that's rejecting federal aid for Medicaid. Right? Who are the beneficiaries of Medicaid? It's in Tennessee, it's, you know, one of the constituents for that is the white working class, like why would you support a party that's undercutting economic policies that benefit you? They're doing it because they're choosing their identity over their economic interests.
Jenna Spinelle
So as we think about you mentioned, you know, America is solidly and inaccuracy we're also moving along through the six stages of extremism.
Barbara Walter
Yeah, this is an important point. So we were officially classified as an anocracy in December of 2020. That happened after the sitting President refused to accept the results of election and tried to overturn them. But when Trump did peacefully leave office, and we had a new administration, and that new administration, has been honoring the rule of law and clearly supports democracy. Our score was raised we went from a positive five to a positive eight, we're not back at 10. This happened after the after the bulk of the original book came out so the paperbacks coming out this month and it will have updated data and so we've kind of dodged a bullet but a really important point to make is our democracy score improve not because any of our democratic institutions were strengthened, our institutions are as weak today, as they were on January 21, there have been no reforms of the system. Since Biden came into office, the only reason we're a little bit unsteady or ground, is because we have an individual who honors democracy. Boy, you know, that means that we're putting a lot of, you know, we're asking that individual to hold up democracy. And if somebody else is elected, who doesn't want democracy, our system is still vulnerable to rapid backsliding?
Jenna Spinelle
And that actually gets to the kind of where do we go from here. So there are, as you may know, there are lots of different ideas about reforms and paths forward, you write about some of them on the kind of cultural side, you know, the work of Eric Liu and civic Saturdays and all those things. There's also myriad structural reform ideas out there, you know, getting rid of the Electoral College, increasing the size of the house, on, on and on. And so I guess, I wonder, like, how you think about, like the mix of those two things, or, you know, I mean, we need all of it right. But like, Everything can't be a priority at the same time. And so, are there examples from other countries that are instructive here about does the structure come first and the culture or vice versa? Or, you know, how we kind of think about the order of these?
Barbara Walter
I don't think at this point reform is going to come from the top down. The Democrats controlled all three branches of government and the first two years of Biden's administration, they were not able to push through a single reform, they simply don't have the votes. So that means that if there is going to be reform, it's going to have to happen from the bottom up. And by that I mean, citizens have to demand it, how to citizens demand it there, you know, the two big ways are first they go out to vote. And second, if they still aren't getting a reaction from their politicians, you engage in peaceful protests. Let's talk about the vote. Because I think that's where we are right now. America has low turnout relative to other democracies around the world. Think about, again, Tennessee, people think about Tennessee as a deep red state. While Tennessee is very conservative, it's always been conservative, it will always be conservative, we actually don't know. Because if you look at the primary elections in Tennessee, the turnout of eligible voters is about 20%. That means that about 80% of eligible voters and states, I'm just using Tennessee as an example, are sitting on the sidelines. So what we know about Tennessee, is that it's a non voting state. So imagine a scenario where a majority of those people who haven't participated in our democracy suddenly do go out to vote. Imagine if young people aged 18 to 25, who historically are the lowest voting group, they historically don't get involved. If they were suddenly to vote. We saw that in Wisconsin, I was asking about that. Yeah, if we suddenly saw a significantly higher percentage of the population voting and segments of the population, the younger generation in particular, whose preferences are quite different from the older generation, if their voice was suddenly heard, we would have a different makeup of people in Congress, in the house in the Senate, that means suddenly, we would almost certainly have a more moderate set of politicians in power. And they would have more incentives to work together to provide solutions that the median voter actually wants, and you might actually see change. So what happened in Wisconsin this week was really quite extraordinary. You saw the reaction of the younger generation, to attempts to restrict abortion rights, individual rights, they went out in droves. And you know, they elected somebody by an 11 point margin, this is an estate that usually the margin is, is is one point or less. It was a huge turnout. And so I think we're starting to see some of the groundswell of citizens saying Enough, enough, the extremists should not be running the show. The extremists should not be dictating policies that a majority of Americans don't want, and we're going to do something about it.
Jenna Spinelle
That is a great place to leave things. We'll link to your book in the show notes so people can get that new paperback edition and get the updated data. Thank you so much, Barbara.
Barbara Walter
It's my pleasure. Thank you, Jenna.
Candis Watts Smith
Thanks, Jenna. And thanks to Barbara too, for in a wonderful conversation again. I'm so glad that they had this conversation and part of one of the things that stood out to me and circling back to an earlier point that you made Chris is about The way that we can understand democracy as multi-dimensional, you know, there are all these kind of like measurements of democracy, and I can nerd out on measurement on any given day. So one of the things I think, that stood out to me in that part of the conversation was that she knows this kind of polity scale, which you made reference to earlier, this kind of plus 10, to negative 10. And she notes that, at the end of 2020, the United States was considered was evaluated as an an autocracy at plus five. But it returned quickly to plus eight, and now it's back at 10. But so here on this one dimension of democracy, things went down, and then they went back up. And so that seems all very good. But then there's this other part, which is the strength of our institutions, and none of the things that none of the things that we know as being detrimental to the quality of our democracy around institutions have changed. So for example, we still have no policy that really bans partisan gerrymandering, or we have no policy that makes sure that people can vote really easily, or we still have a Supreme Court that is running roughshod, over all sorts of things. So these are separate dimensions, of course, like if we, you know, so we can see a situation where, you know, maybe we have an authoritarian, but it could be that institutions hold them back, or vice versa, where we have weak institutions like we do now. So you know, I guess just to say that, on the one hand, we can say, Oh, great, like the United States, as part of the score is back at plus 10. On the other hand, we could see that one person could be at the helm of democratic backsliding or democratic renewal. Also, depending on the strength of our institutions, I mean, this, you know, again, speaks to the conversation that we're having around how democracies die, I just thought it was really helpful to just kind of be able to be more nuanced in our conversations around what we mean when we say we have a thriving democracy or not. So in addition to this democracy, and democracy dimension, this, you know, ingredient, let's say, ingredient and civil wars, there's also fractionalization, which we touched on briefly. And then there's one other ingredient, and maybe it's not an ingredient, but like maybe the way that the recipe is made if we were and that's an accelerant, right, that there are certain contexts that can produce the right temperature. I don't know, I'm going too far afield with this analogy. But I thought that this kind of business of accelerant was also really helpful to think about.
Chris Beem
No, I think the analogy is right on the money. I mean, an accelerant in chemistry is what makes the reaction happen faster and more powerfully, right. And so you have these two elements, the rationalization and the an autocracy. And then you add an accelerant, and almost invariably, not always, but almost invariably, that accelerant is an individual who sees that there is a political opportunity associated with ethnic umbrage ethnic unrest, ethnic identity, and then seizes, seize, and then seizes the opportunity that that moment represents. And I don't know how you make an argument that that isn't what Donald Trump did. And you know, there are myriad examples, right. I mean, in the book, I don't think it's in the interview, but she talks a lot about Slobodan Milosevic and how he saw the opportunity to continue his career being that he was a washed up communist in Yugoslavia, and saw that he could try to create this Serbian party, which he did, and which led to the civil war there. And, you know, Bolsonaro, , I mean Modi in India, you can go down the line of people who have, at least to say the very least, pushed this fractionalization in a way to serve their own political ends and increase their own political power.
Candis Watts Smith
And I think Barbara mentioned this is that the peak of democracy globally was like 20 years ago. And that over time, we've seen democratic backsliding across all sorts of place and all sorts of places, including Western Europe, and I say, including Western Europe, because that's just another place that we think are are kind of immune, right kind of done, yeah, immune to this business of civil war. But she notes, right? I mean, we know that democracy is fragile. And as places are seeing increase multiracial demographics, and people feeling like they are going to lose out because of that, we just kind of get this set of factors that when they're all mushed, together, can produce really bad outcomes. Unless, and that's why I was pointing to the thing about, you know, one dimension over the other unless there are people who are willing to forego conflict and compromise and suggest that we should move toward moderation, compromise, and not use violence as a means to get the things that you want or maintain the status quo.
Chris Beem
Right, I think that'd be kind of a good thing to kind of, you know, move towards a conclusion to talk about what she says about, you know, how you step back from these features, and how do you step back, therefore, from Civil War? And she talks a lot about in the book about South Africa, as a country that was absolutely poised, right. I mean, you know, you had all the features. And, and you had an accelerant, right. But they were able to step back. And I say this, because I was in South Africa before COVID. And, you know, I was in Johannesburg. And I just saw how thoughtful and deliberate that nation was at striving to create this new political reality. And I don't want to sugarcoat the difficulties, you know, I mean, I have eight languages, right. And their legacy of apartheid is older than ours, are newer than ours, I should say. But they also embraced the challenge and didn't minimize just how difficult it is to really move towards a genuine multi ethnic democracy. And if you're not doing it deliberately, thoughtfully, and really aggressively, it probably won't happen. Right. It's just too hard. And there are too many accelerants out there.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, one of the things I think that she notes, and just to reiterate, is the case of South Africa and having particular leaders is really important. Yes. But democracy sometimes delivers illiberal outcomes. And so one of the things that are two of the things that you point to is kind of bottom up mechanisms to have a coming to Jesus moment, I guess, right is voting and maybe peaceful protest. And hear I really appreciated her just kind of thinking out loud about what if we saw more people who have been sitting on the sidelines, vote. And I do want to say one thing about that is I can understand sometimes where people sit on the sidelines, where if you're in a gerrymandered district, and you know, you're not going to get what you want. Yeah, on some ways you might want to sit out, but you could also really present a problem to a candidate to say, Hey, if you aren't going to listen, then we can do something different here. But there's also an conversation that we had before, that there are other institutions that can be changed by people stepping up to vote, registering to vote, like changing juries. There are smaller elections that you can change at the local level. You can change school boards, you can change at the mayoral level. And those are things where, you know, most Americans lives are lived anyway. Right. Anyway. So I just say I thought it was really important for us to just kind of note that Sure, it's ideal to have leaders that know how to act. Right.
Chris Beem
Well, and just to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Yeah. And that's really where it starts. And, you know, I mean, you see some evidence of that, no matter you know, what your argument is, or you know, what your take on it is, I don't think there's a much different way to understand the results of the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin than exactly what you're saying, right? That this is people who are not accustomed to being part of the voting public, who wanted and needed to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo. You know, we talked about the 2008 election of Obama and Romney as being well you know, somebody when somebody loses you can have your preference but you Everything's gonna be okay. Well, if that's not the case, then that changes the equation for people to justify their own indifference. So I think you're seeing that. So, anyway, lots to think about here. Really impressive. And it's not a hard book, right? It's very accessible, so well worth your time.
Candis Watts Smith
With that. Let me just send our thanks again to Jenna for a wonderful interview and to barber Walter, for a wonderful book that I know our audience will enjoy reading or listening to like I did myself for democracy works. I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Chris Beem
And I'm Chris Beem. Thanks for listening.