The Peril of Civil Breakdown

Two years ago, when the US was still convulsed by January 6, we suggested that the possibility of spiraling violence verging on civil war warranted serious consideration.¹ It remains imprudent to dismiss it. MAGA fever has hardly broken, and Donald Trump is in a very tight race for the presidency with Vice President Kamala Harris. Whoever wins the popular vote, the election will almost certainly be close in the Electoral College, as the 2016 and 2020 elections were. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes electoral vote certification less vulnerable to manipulation, although Democrats continue to worry that Republicans will attempt to obstruct it. A Harris victory will undoubtedly elicit fierce legal challenges from Trump, and his supporters, with his encouragement, may resort to escalating force to try to secure their political objectives.

In its annual threat assessment for 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated:

We are particularly concerned about a confluence of factors this year, including violent extremist responses to domestic sociopolitical developments—especially the 2024 election cycle—and international events that domestic and foreign violent extremists likely will use to justify or encourage attacks.

Furthermore, some Republican and Democratic members of Congress are worried that mass-casualty political violence could disrupt government continuity, and some are proposing a constitutional amendment to address the problem. While there are reasons to believe that the moment of maximum danger from Trumpism has passed, that relatively few far-right activists are willing to resort to arms, and that disparate local eruptions of violence would not escalate into large-scale civil breakdown, there are also reasons to doubt such optimistic assessments.

Today the US political situation radiates civil instability. Extremism stoked on the Internet has generated the kind of stark disengagement with opposing positions that is conducive to violence. Virulent groups are gaining traction by voicing intense hostility to a federal government perceived as heavy-handed and excessively protective of minorities—an attitude that has coursed through some parts of America for decades, just beneath the surface. Its roots reach back to the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, and it has been nourished by the Lost Cause myth, the lingering effects of Jim Crow, and a persistent strain of white supremacy. White Christians’ feelings of cultural besiegement and of a need to forcefully reassert their political power have sharpened racism and xenophobia and unequivocally correlate with support for Trump, political violence in general, and the January 6 assault in particular. It is worth considering, however speculatively, that myths comparable to those prevalent in America fueled right-wing opposition to the Weimar Republic, and that by the early 1930s a majority of Germans effectively supported extremist parties on the right or left, and centrist parties had been co-opted.² Unlike post–World War I Germany, the United States has not just lost a devastating war and is not plagued by a valueless currency, but a similar politics of cultural despair seems to have consumed the Republican Party.

Surges in violent nativism are nothing new in the United States, and events that occurred decades ago are still potent accelerants. Perhaps the most angrily remembered one is the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ fifty-one-day militarized siege and eventual “dynamic entry,” involving sixteen tanks, of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Eighty-two members of the Christian sect—which sanctioned polygamy and pedophilia and financed its community by selling weapons at gun shows—and four federal agents were killed. The episode reinforced paranoid fears on the right that the federal government would ban privately held guns, prompting mainstream figures like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the radio personality Rush Limbaugh to cryptically urge rebellion against the Clinton administration. Militias burgeoned. On the second anniversary of Waco, Timothy McVeigh, a disaffected army veteran enamored of the white power movement, detonated a “retaliatory” truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.³ A crackdown deterred further attacks, and after September 11 jihadist threats crowded out concerns about domestic extremism. Yet as national politics have become more contentious, the mythic appeal of Waco and Oklahoma City has increased. Trump chose Waco for his first major rally after announcing his candidacy for the presidency in 2023, casting the 2024 election as “the final battle.”

More than a quarter of Republicans claim to believe that violence will be necessary to prevent racial and cultural degradation. How many would really resort to arms and what exactly would make them shoot remain unclear. In a July 2022 poll conducted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, 28 percent of all voters—including 37 percent of gun owners, about 35 percent of Republicans, and roughly 35 percent of independents—agreed that “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.” These numbers were probably rather soft. Asking more specific questions in a June 2024 survey, the political scientist Robert Pape determined that 10 percent of those polled—a third of them gun owners—considered the use of force justified to prevent Trump from becoming president, while 7 percent, half of them gun owners, supported the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency.

Americans bought sixty million guns between 2020 and 2022, in each of those three years exceeding gun sales for any other year in the twenty-first century. In 2022, 42 percent of American adults lived in households with firearms, up from 32 percent in 2010. The Covid pandemic appears to have stimulated fearful insularity and the impulse to purchase guns. The National Rifle Association has encouraged armed paranoia—for instance, in a tweet featuring a woman holding a rifle and admonishing those storing food that they’d also better stockpile weapons to defend it. Right-wing individuals possess a substantial majority of privately owned guns in America and are far more likely than left-wingers to commit violent extremist acts. Yet half of first-time buyers during this period were women, nearly half were people of color, and all were mainly driven by the expectation of civil breakdown, which gun ownership itself tends to bolster. The popularity of guns, the Second Amendment absolutism of most conservatives, and the political efficacy of the gun lobby have made meaningful gun control difficult if not impossible to achieve.

The FBI recorded an increase in hate crimes of 11.6 percent in 2021 over 2020, with African Americans the most frequently targeted and attacks on Jews and LGBTQ people climbing. They may be bellwethers of broader social and political regression in the United States.

Accordingly ominous survey results can’t be shrugged off as armchair bravado. Legal reforms and heavy penalties prompted by January 6 might discourage the halfhearted from engaging in violent actions, but their longer-term deterrent effects are unclear. A swift and effective response can sometimes nip an insurgency in the bud, but it can also lead fence-sitters to pick up guns, follow true believers underground, and adopt better security and a more resolutely military approach. (Northern Ireland is one resonant example.) After January 6 the FBI and the Department of Justice mainly targeted participants who were easy to identify and locate because they gleefully committed crimes in front of cameras while talking to one another nonstop on social media and communications platforms. It is easy to decapitate a resistance movement when it sticks its head above the parapet. And some current militia leaders, like American Patriots Three Percent’s Scot Seddon, appear to be eccentric, inept charlatans.

Far-right leaders may have learned from their slipshod operational security on January 6, however. Within a few days of the Capitol breach, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes acknowledged that a successful revolution required rebels to stockpile weapons and cover their tracks. American militias tend to act according to the theory of “leaderless resistance,” whereby relatively small, dispersed groups or individuals mount rebellions independently, but January 6 suggested that they could make pragmatic adjustments toward organized insurrection, spurred by Trump’s dog whistle.

The number of those who are willing to take up arms against the US government or on behalf of an authoritarian leader may seem relatively low. But the challenges for law enforcement are considerable. The post–January 6 mobilization did not result in a revision of the priorities and practices of US domestic law enforcement agencies in order to marginalize and contain the militia movement. Since the September 11 attacks, enhancements to the US counterterrorism apparatus—including the Transportation Security Administration, the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and various amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—have effectively addressed jihadist threats. But the political constraints on fixing problems that contributed to September 11 were minimal: the attacks shocked all Americans, highlighted the need for better counterterrorism, and produced a broad consensus on how to achieve it.

As appalling as January 6 was to most Americans, it was not, as the terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins has put it, the universally “galvanizing event” that September 11 was. Many Republicans refuse to see January 6 even as a contravention of American constitutional democracy, let alone as an insurrection, characterizing it as essentially an exercise of free speech that got a little out of hand. The extreme view that the January 6 protesters were acting in support of a legitimately elected president who was fraudulently denied his victory is a minority one. But a Christian nationalism that embraces white identity and conspiracy theories as well as religious fervor readily accommodates the boys-will-be-boys-for-the-cause gloss.

The far-right movement in the United States remains broad-based. Yet there is no federal agency truly in charge of domestic counterterrorism. Such agencies exist in many European countries that have experienced sustained violent extremism, notably France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Several factors may make establishing one in the United States infeasible. One is mainstream political leaders’ willingness to valorize right-wing vigilantism, which—unlike polarization, identity politics, attacks on democratic norms, disinformation, and conspiracy theories—is something new in recent American politics. Because casting vigilantes as swashbuckling heroes seems to appeal to voters, it is difficult to wean politicians off such cynical practices. The celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2021 acquittal for shooting two unarmed antiracist protesters dead in Wisconsin—epitomized by Idaho’s Bonneville County Republican Central Committee’s auctioning of a trip to a shooting range with him and an AR–15-style rifle that he signed—is a particularly egregious example.

More substantially, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have moved toward institutionalizing vigilantism by mustering state militias to target migrants, and the “Texas Tactical Border Force” has already been brutally deployed at Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. In New York, Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman, a vocal Trump ally, is recruiting citizens with gun permits to become “provisional emergency special deputy sheriffs” to preserve public order in a crisis, vaguely defined. Vigilante sponsorship has even reached the federal level: starting in New York in 2017, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) discreetly trained civilian volunteers in the use of surveillance techniques and firearms to help federal officers impose immigration laws. How active the program remains is unclear. As the Philadelphia Inquirer national columnist Will Bunch reflected in an article about the Texas and Florida militias:

I think sometimes our imagination is stymied by images of blue-and-gray-clad troops lined up in rows at Manassas. That’s not happening again. Instead, a second American War Between the States looks a lot like the bloodstained barbed wire of Eagle Pass: leaders of a growing rebellion against federal authority unleashing their own militias on The Other, who today is a brown-skinned pregnant teen fleeing despair in Central America, and who tomorrow could be anyone who speaks up in dissent.⁴

Despite these trends, and federal agencies’ assessment that domestic extremism now poses the biggest nonstate threat to national security, the term “domestic terrorism” is politically toxic to most congressional Republicans. As a result the federal strategy for countering it is poorly organized. Training in this area, funded by the DHS, does not focus on crucial underpinnings like white supremacy and replacement theory; it seems almost surreal that a DHS/FBI document defining categories of domestic extremism does not even mention these terms. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), established in 2004 primarily to address transnational Islamist threats and relatively insulated from direct political pressure, would be a logical coordinator of federal law enforcement agencies charged with a variety of counterterrorism missions, but the NCTC and the DHS lack full access to FBI files. By default this makes the FBI, despite its historical difficulties in reconciling intelligence and investigatory functions, primarily responsible for producing strategic intelligence on domestic terrorism for the US government.

The NCTC has no explicit domestic counterterrorism remit, and it is barred from producing polished intelligence on domestic terrorist groups unless they have operational transnational links. Usually they don’t. The closest connections are between domestic and foreign white supremacist groups—which the January 6th Committee’s investigation illuminated—and those are mainly online and insufficiently substantial to warrant NCTC involvement. Right-wing American militias—the most severe threat—tend to be built from the bottom up, from visceral personal preferences that only later are distilled into ideological stances (for instance, anti-vaxxers pressured to get shots might become antigovernment activists).

Federalism itself also impedes counterterrorism coordination, which is spotty between federal agencies and their state and local counterparts. While US agencies have the intelligence collection capabilities to map right-wing groups, for constitutional reasons they can’t easily use them domestically. State and local authorities could mitigate the problem, but they are not legally required to report to federal authorities, which therefore must importune their cooperation. And in nonfederal agencies one often finds lower threat perceptions, incompatible interpretations of their legal obligations, and adverse conceptions of the role of government. In March the Idaho state legislature barely rejected—the vote was tied—two bills that would have removed the state ban on private armed militias and excluded solely American groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations from the state’s statutory definition of “domestic terrorism.” A county law enforcement official might not regard a passionately antigovernment gun owner as a potential threat or even as ideologically suspect. A local police officer could consider the state government the highest authority to which he or she is answerable. Most state and local officers worry about employee grievances, which can result in mass-casualty events, and welcome intelligence about them, but many shrug off even extreme ideological complaints. Federal agencies are thus hobbled by the scarcity of effective interlocutors. As a result they do not really know how many domestic terrorist crimes or plots have arisen. They have tried to ameliorate the problem by noting cases that have a domestic extremist nexus, but that still leaves significant uncertainty about the scale and dimensions of the problem.

Outright infiltration is a third vulnerability. Disaffected law enforcement officers can be susceptible to right-wing extremism. Former FBI special agent Jared L. Wise was charged with several misdemeanors in connection with January 6, and three FBI special agents’ security clearances were suspended because of their apparent sympathies with the insurrectionists. Shane Lamond, a lieutenant in the Washington, D.C., police department who headed its intelligence unit, has been charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly warning Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio that he was about to be arrested before January 6 and lying about it to investigators. “Anti-federalist” elected law enforcement officials at the county and local level constitute a more substantial systemic weakness. A penetrating recent study by the political scientists Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman found that groups like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters had successfully targeted elected county sheriffs for recruitment as so-called constitutional sheriffs, focusing on their tendency to hold “mythological views of their interpositional authority.” Constitutional sheriffs, of which there are many, not only tend to let cases with connections to domestic terrorism slide but also engage in rhetoric and activities that encourage it.

Former and active-duty military personnel—particularly those who consider the country unappreciative of their sacrifices—are similarly susceptible to militia recruitment; nearly two hundred people with military backgrounds have been charged with crimes in connection with January 6. When Trump contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy American soldiers in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the US military leadership stoutly resisted him. Were the military to overcome its reservations—which are based on constitutional doctrine and institutional culture—and enter the domestic fray, the right-wing tilt of some enlisted members and officers could induce them to execute a far-right Republican’s order to put down left-wing activism with extreme prejudice or to ignore a Democratic commander-in-chief’s order to thwart a right-wing extremist revolt. Despite the increased risk of large-scale domestic terrorism, then, US national security policy should continue to strongly discourage deploying the active-duty military for domestic counterterrorism purposes. A comprehensive law enforcement approach treating far-right extremism essentially as a criminal problem is the appropriate one.

It may not be enough, given the resistance of state and local authorities. Counterradicalization through civic education could in theory reduce extremism: particularly on the right, extremist inclinations tend to feed on exaggerated “metaperceptions” about the other side’s appetite for violence that education can moderate. But such efforts are notoriously difficult to mobilize on a society-wide basis, especially where—as in the United States—politics are already very polarized and antigovernment biases are entrenched in many locales. A kind of Catch-22 kicks in: widespread radicalization necessitates effective counterradicalization but may also render it impracticable. An alternative remedy would be the establishment of an American agency with a comprehensive domestic security remit, akin to MI5 in the United Kingdom, that is authorized to collect intelligence on and run operations against suspected extremists. It would probably take the bureaucratic form of an empowered DHS more tightly coordinated with the NCTC. The constitutional impediments are not insuperable, as analogous ones were not after September 11. Due process concerns, for instance, might be addressed through special tribunals similar to the existing Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act courts. But there is a risk that such an agency would be politically weaponized, especially by a Republican administration against Democrats and left-of-center activists.

This leads to the question of what might ensue from a Trump victory in November. He and his allies have portrayed the two assassination attempts against him as a kind of deification by martyrdom, while also feeding conspiracy theories that identify his political opponents on the left as their orchestrators, even though there is no evidence for this. Harris’s nomination has challenged Trump to improvise, since he expected to be facing a faltering President Joe Biden. His desperation has brought out ugly misogynistic and racist tendencies; some Trump supporters, including Republican members of Congress, have labeled her a DEI candidate, and he has baselessly questioned her Blackness.

Such reactions put independent and moderate Republican support for Trump at risk. But his bloody ear and raised fist after the July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania were potent inspiration to extreme-right activists. The policy mechanism for mobilizing them is well known, having migrated from his executive order creating an expansive category of unprotected federal employees, known as “Schedule F,” at the end of his presidential term (though it was revoked by Biden) to his present campaign’s Agenda47 platform and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. In essence, he would substantially replace the professional, nonpartisan civil service with militant loyalists and then use them to target his political enemies.

His response to Black Lives Matter protests sent an ominous signal of how a second Trump administration might proceed free of institutional guardrails such as a professionalized federal bureaucracy. When senior civilian and military officials balked at his first resort to the military, Trump, with the support of Attorney General William Barr, issued an executive order, based on the DHS’s narrow statutory mandate for protecting federal property and personnel, that authorized the agency to muster a kind of praetorian guard for repelling protesters and imposing his personal law-and-order agenda. The DHS came up with the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT), staffed it with personnel drawn from myriad federal agencies (some untrained for urban law enforcement), and dispatched hundreds of them to quell the protests in at least eight American cities—some in unmarked vehicles and wearing combat fatigues with obscured insignia, and some enlisted from private military companies.

Possible provocations for a newly elected Trump to assert autocratic authority are easy to picture. Mass protests could erupt over a federal program of mass deportation or a renewed tolerance for racially tinged law enforcement excesses. Effectively shielded by the Supreme Court from criminal liability, Trump would have the license to try whatever he wanted through established bureaucratic channels, subject only to weakened structural and political checks. It is well short of outlandish to imagine him designating antifa activists as terrorists, invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law, selectively suspending constitutional protections, and having opposition figures charged with sedition—all of which he contemplated in 2020 and supporters like Steve Bannon, retired general Mike Flynn, and Roger Stone have broadly advocated. Last November Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution published an op-ed in The Washington Post urgently alerting Americans to the possibility of a Trump dictatorship. Senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s running mate, sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggesting that Kagan be charged with insurrection or conspiracy. Today’s puerile political pandering could easily become tomorrow’s administrative reality.

If Trump returns to office, his lack of any concern about reelection would amplify his penchant for autocracy and his zeal to leave an irreversible legacy. He would likely avoid appointing cautious “adults in the room” like James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and even William Barr to important positions and turn instead to unquestioning and unqualified toadies like Kash Patel. And Trump would undoubtedly try to top-load the military with generals and admirals keener on his ideas than General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom he suggested ought to be executed for allegedly betraying him. Were that effort to fail—and even if it didn’t—Trump might tacitly greenlight militia groups to act on his behalf. This would be perfectly in line with his broader encouragement of right-wing vigilantism. His exhortation to the Proud Boys in September 2020 to “stand back and stand by” turned out to be a call to arms that was met on January 6.

Indications that Trump’s mental faculties are declining and his rhetorical impulsiveness increasing sharpen concerns about incitements to political violence that a second term could bring. Recently his verbal attacks on trial judges in the cases against him prompted followers to urge on social media that the judges be beaten, tortured, and killed. Sympathetic state and local law enforcement officials would be more emboldened to look the other way or, worse, collude with them. Support for a violent response from the left would rise significantly, as it did among Democrats when Republicans claimed that Biden’s victory was fraudulent, diminishing only after efforts to overturn it had clearly failed. The possibility of retaliation from the left evokes the scenario contemplated in Alex Garland’s recent film Civil War: abject societal breakdown followed by counterrevolution by centrist insurgents against a fascist dictator.

The United States is not as combustible as Weimar Germany, and US militia groups do not appear to be strongly networked. Whether they will ever encompass more than the amateurish and collectively inept members who have filled their ranks thus far is entirely speculative. Radicalized Republicans ultimately may be too dispersed to mount a concerted rebellion, and Trump may be incapable of transforming them into a unified operational force. Lone actors still appear to perpetrate most domestic extremist operations. Yet the MAGA movement’s grievances are so widely shared that it amounts to a nascent insurgency, and gaps in domestic counterterrorism arrangements leave space for it to flourish and evolve. Attacks on individual political figures have increased, as have those on law enforcement personnel. Federal officials are concerned about “targeted violence”—such as the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville in August 2017—that may not immediately rise to the level of terrorism but eventually could.

Large-scale civil collapse need not involve orchestrated mass effort. Purposeful militias aren’t required, only acts of violence by small numbers of people that may originate spontaneously but, fueled by cycles of retaliation, develop their own momentum and shape. A critical enabler is the availability of high-powered mass-casualty weapons like AR-
15s, which can kill many more people more quickly than rifles used for hunting or handguns purchased for home or personal protection.

If just one far-right activist decided to take such a weapon and strafe a political event or a demonstration, killing dozens or even hundreds, it could spark a wider escalation of political violence. This past summer the nationwide unrest in the United Kingdom, prompted by the stabbing murders of three young children in Southport by a culprit mistakenly identified as an immigrant on social media, indicated how powerful a provocation a single act of shocking violence, inevitably amplified by online propaganda, can be. Right-wing violence could encourage some on the American left, though it is less prone to political violence, to strike back. A contagion of localized tit-for-tat violence could produce mass abdications on the part of local law enforcement. Even a liberal American president would be forced to respond with the kind of federal means—mobilized law enforcement, increased surveillance, restrictions on movement—that would further turbocharge the far right. Unrest could conceivably exceed the territorial sweep of federal authorities, giving rise to potentially expanding pockets of US territory under the control of extremists. Such enclaves arose during the run-up to the Civil War, in “Bleeding Kansas” and elsewhere.

Presidential elections are won or lost in the center, and moderates and independents seem increasingly alert to Trump’s perniciousness. The former president’s fraught legal situation compels him to attack the legitimacy of a wider and wider swath of American institutions—officials and legislatures as well as courts—further degrading American democracy. The rhetoric of his campaign has been grossly autocratic and anticonstitutional, and he has demonstrated clear intent to rally willing Republican state election officials to improperly refuse to certify the vote regardless of the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislature” theory, which purportedly justified such an effort. A plausible chain of events could lead to nationwide civil conflict: Harris wins both a popular and an Electoral College majority, state officials and Congress refuse to certify the results, Trump claims victory, Harris appeals to the US Supreme Court, the conservative majority turns her down, the decision goes to the House, it votes Harris or Trump in, and spontaneous outbreaks of local unrest ensue.

It is reasonable to hope that moderates and independents will have had enough of Trump in November, emulating British and French voters who rebuffed right-wing candidates earlier this year. A clear rejection of Trumpism might deflate the MAGA movement for a while. But if Trump loses narrowly and declares himself the winner, rallying dispersed local groups prone to violent resistance to install him in office, orderly de-escalation could prove impossible. If he wins, his march to autocratic coercion may be unstoppable, and it would inspire burgeoning resistance from the left. The historian David Blight has observed that tipping points can only be determined in retrospect, and he isolates Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided by the Supreme Court in 1857, as the point of no return in the run-up to the Civil War. When historians look back on this traumatic era of American politics, they will probably assess the 2024 election—not January 6—as the event that foreswore or foretold the collapse of the American republic.

—October 10, 2024