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From: ltlee1@hotmail.com (ltlee1)
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Subject: Re: DDD in the US
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 14:08:41 +0000
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Of course, one easy answer: American Democracy is in trouble.
In reality, the disappointment or discontent is so bad that many
Americans have a second civil war on their minds.

Ravi Agrawal of foreignpolicy.com asked Barbarw F. Walter, a expert of a
CIA task force specialized on political instability, on US political
instability including a second civil war.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/29/barbara-f-walter-civil-war-united-states/

Ms Barbara comes up with two factors which could be used to discriminate
healthy democracy from unhealthy, partial democracy.

"The first factor was something called anocracy. Anocracy is just a
fancy political science term for a partial democracy. It’s a country
that has elements of democracy, so elections are held and people vote.
But it also has elements of autocracy. It could be that only one party
ever competes in those elections. Or it could be like in Hungary today,
where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has such a hold on the media that he
is effectively able to harass the opposition so he wins every single
election, no matter what. That’s an anocracy. It’s somewhere in between
democracy and autocracy.

The second factor that mattered was whether political parties in those
partial democracies were mainly organized around race, religion, or
ethnicity and not around ideology. So these would be countries where,
instead of joining a political party because you were conservative or
liberal or communist or capitalist, you joined a party because it was
the party of Serbs or Croats or Muslims or Hutus or Tutsis. When a
country had these two features—a partial democracy with these
identity-based parties—it was at high risk of political instability and
political violence.

RA: Since this was a CIA task force, it was not measuring the United
States. At what point did you look at this checklist and wonder where
the United States falls on that spectrum?
...
The United States was downgraded a third time at the end of 2020. And by
December 2020, the United States was classified at positive five.
Positive five is in the anocracy zone. Anything between negative five
and positive five is an anocracy."

So, the US is rated by the CIA task force, not any foreign organizations
or foreign countries, as an anocracy. The article does not dwell in the
second factor which depends on to what degree the US is really a people.