How Civil Wars Start

 How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter opens with a group of insurrectionists in Michigan planning to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Whitmer had been the subject of a kidnapping plot by a militia group calling themselves the Wolverine Watchmen.  I found out about this group from a Newsweek article that is referenced in the  Wolverine Watchmen link.  

By the way, Michigan, the home of the Wolverine Watchmen, is the state with the highest number of militia groups.  Having the highest number of militia groups is not a goal that any state should aspire to achieve.

                             

                                

It's been a couple of weeks since I read  How Civil Wars Start.   I knew that it would be a time consuming review to write.  I learned a great deal from this book--including that a country in the middle zone between democracy and autocracy is called an anocracy.

Athens, Greece is still often called "the cradle of democracy", but the patricians of the ancient Athenian upper class were more like an oligarchy.  Oligarchy means rule by a faction.  Both ancient and modern democracies have been divided by factions.  Factions can be corrosive for democracies.  I wouldn't recommend factionalization as a good strategy for a healthy democracy. 

Author Barbara F. Walter discusses ratings for countries.  Full democracies have a  +10 rating.  Full autocracies have a -10 rating.  Anocracies, in the middle ground, have ratings between -5 and +5.

The U.S. is considered a partial democracy because the right to vote has been limited in a number of states.  A partial democracy is vulnerable to civil war. The 19th century U.S. Civil War happened because we were a factionalized anocracy with a faction excluded from power--the Confederate South.  

As I went through my notes on this book, I discovered a reference to the Republic of Mindanao and Sulu.  Sulu wouldn't be the Star Trek Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu from the original series.  It would probably be the Sulu archipelago, a chain of islands in the southwestern Phillipines.

Walter explained how the last South African President of the apartheid era, F. W. de Klerk, avoided civil war by negotiating with Mandela.  It seems to me that if South Africa could do that, so could we.  After all, the U.S. isn't as close to the precipice of civil war as South Africa was then.