The American Foreign Policy said that the outbreak of a civil war in the country was until recently a thing of the past and an impossible scenario for many, but the escalation of extremism and right-wing violence and the events of the Capitol raised the alarm about the possibility of sliding back into internal rivalry.
In an article by international politics researcher Monica Duffy Toft, the magazine stated that what makes it even more frustrating is that the country's civil war had never ended in some way, but was, in fact, strengthened.
The researcher emphasized that despite President Joe Biden's control of the reins, the events - which have occurred recently - made the risk of widespread political violence painfully clear.
She believes that the civil wars that have occurred in several regions of the world - including the United States - may be unique in terms of the causes of their outbreak or the ways in which they escalated into violence or their intensity declined, but they all share three main features that are now available in the American interior.
The first feature: most civil wars often follow chronologically a previous conflict, such as a past civil war or a highly politicized or significantly distorted memory of a previous civil conflict, and it is not necessary in this case that the warring parties nor the issues of dispute are the same in either case.
Often a charismatic leader paves the way to ignite war by publishing his account of past glories or humiliations that fit his ideology and political ambitions, or he benefits from the masses' ignorance of history.
The second feature: that the national identity is divided on very sensitive grounds such as race, religion, or social classes, as there are fault lines and causes of division within each country, but some of them are deeper and more influential than the other.
Internal divisions
Also, divisions that may seem simple at first may be exploited by local or foreign parties seeking to redistribute centers of wealth or power, as happened, for example, by the former Soviet Union, which successfully devoted large resources to destabilizing the United States and its allies from other democratic countries only from During the strengthening of existing divisions.
As for the third feature, without which the former workers alone (previous conflict and deep divisions) cannot ignite the fire of civil war, it is the necessity for a shift within society from tribalism to sectarianism.
Tribalism here means that people begin to seriously question whether the rest of the existing groups within the country actually put the public interest at the center of their concerns. In sectarian environments, economic, social and political elites, and those who represent them, begin to believe that anyone who disagrees with him is evil and works diligently to destroy society .
It is very difficult - the magazine concludes - for one not to see this dynamic clearly evident in the American party scene, where lawmakers from the Republican Party began to question and accuse colleagues from within the party of weakness and disloyalty to former President Donald Trump.