.ZeeshanAleem: As the U.S. is racked by increasing levels of violent protests and threats, a political scientist explains what's driving it and whether civil war is a possibility.
found that close to half of Americans believed a future civil war is likely.
We tend to think about violence as things like militias taking over statehouses. But what we've also seen is on an individual voter level, there is an increasing acceptance of political violence. The other thing that's happened is that the parties have become much more socially distant from each other. So the racial and religious divide between the parties has increased substantially between the 1970s and today, with Republicans becoming increasingly white and Christian and rural and male.
In terms of the manifestation of violence, one of the main differences is that the right is much more armed than the left, and increasingly so starting after the election of Barack Obama, when there was a run on gun purchases. An armed confrontation is, as I said earlier, much more dangerous than an unarmed political protest. And what we see in practice is that while Democrats and Republicans might approve of using violence to achieve political goals, they seem to be meaning different things.
Race seems to always be a factor in our party politics. What is different now versus when the parties rearranged themselves in response to the fight over civil rights and Black liberation in the middle of the 20th century?One way to think about it is to look back at the post-Reconstruction era, when effectively what happened was the two parties agreed to just throw Black Americans under the bus and remove most of their rights, especially in the South.
It’s really only been since the, you know, the late 1990s, early 2000s and certainly after the Obama presidency that it has become fully reorganized, where now the parties differ completely. That's good and bad. The good part is that we now have an entire political party that is pushing generally toward more equality, which is unprecedented in American history. But the bad part is that we have an entire political party that's resisting that.
And that's not going to make every one of them go out and be violent, but it might change the social dynamic in the social network of a person who is generally more inclined toward violence.
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