The United States is an ‘Anocracy’

‘How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them’ by Barbara F. Walter

Barbara F. Walter’s new book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them discusses the polity score used by the Polity Project at the Center for Systemic Peace. That index runs on “a fully autocratic to fully democratic scale of –10 to +10.”

Countries in the middle range of –5 to +5 are “anocratic.” That’s an academic neologism for Welp with a capital W. It means the country is neither-autocratic-nor-democratic.

That doesn’t mean it’s a zone in which nothing interesting happens. It’s the zone that’s at greatest risk for civil war, because, in such countries, no autocrat has enough power to keep dissent under his boot or to crack down on rogue violence, but neither do democratic means of airing complaints and resolving differences have sufficient power to accomplish anything.

That’s where the United States is right now.

The United States had rated a full democratic +10 on the polity index since the civil rights advancements of the 1960s and Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. After the 2016 election, however, it dropped to a +8, given that “election rules had been changed as a result of partisan interests, and voting rights were not guaranteed for all citizens” and Russia interfered in the election, Walter explains. It dropped to +7 when Trump did not cooperate with the first impeachment inquiry. On January 6, 2021, the nation dropped to +5 (anocracy).

Shorthand: The United States dropped from +10 to +5 within five years because of Trump.

“No Republican president in the past fifty years had ever pursued such an openly racist platform,” Walter writes.

The polity index can be calculated retrospectively, and still, this is “the first time in more than two hundred years” that the United States has rated so low. It is “no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy” because it is not currently a democracy. It is an anocracy.

‘The Ten Stages of Genocide’

Classification and symbolization are two early stages of ethnic cleansing, according to Gregory Stanton’s model, and the United States has experienced these, Walter argues. “Members of America’s far-right faction have appropriated symbols — think of the now ubiquitous Confederate flag, the orange hats of the Proud…