The Brussels Horizon Podcast aired an episode in April titled “The Coming ‘Civil War’ with David Betz.” A widely published Professor of War at King’s College London, Betz warns of the retribalization of Western societies. Mass migration and elite overreach, he argues, have created powder kegs of discontent awaiting the next spark of outrage: a horrific knifing or car-ramming or perhaps an exceptionally unjust judicial ruling. Citing multiple scholarly studies, Betz makes the case that the chances of civil war in the West erupting within the next five years—beginning with civil disturbances comparable with old-style peasant revolts—exceed 50 percent.
Betz blames this dangerous situation on the widespread collapse of functional politics in European and Anglophone nations. Formerly dominant majorities in these countries believe that they are governed by people who are actively opposed to their national and personal interests and who have effectively closed all avenues of peaceful political amelioration. As Betz sees it, these beliefs—including the conviction that voting doesn’t matter, which he calls the most commonly expressed political view in the Western world—are empirically justified. Western elites—political, military, and corporate leaders as well as civil servants, academics, and the media—constitute an “anywhere class,” at home in any major global city, from Tokyo to London. They have become radically divorced from the “somewhere class”: the swath of citizens who still embrace traditional ways and institutions and cherish local attachments. Schooled by their mentors and professors to disdain thick social bonds and loyalties, Betz argues, the post-national, global power elite cares for human beings only in the abstract. Exclusively attentive to “human rights,” an ever-expanding list of ultimately unsatisfiable wishes, these elites have encouraged mass migration from immiserated and chaotic societies, whose peoples are untrained in the foundational values of Western civilization.
It’s hard to deny that the elites seem to have little interest in promoting the welfare of individual nations. Joe Biden’s destabilizing open-borders policy was either a cynical electoral strategy or multiculturalism run amok. Betz cites current U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s preference for Davos, where the World Economic Forum meets, over the parliamentary halls of Westminster, which Starmer dismissed as “just a tribal shouting place.” And the European Union has been aptly described by Christopher Caldwell as “a machine for grinding up systems of national self-rule.”
No less damaging for the stability of Western democracies is the perception that elites have changed long-standing rules of the political and legal game to defeat nationalist and anti-immigrant candidates and parties. Recent examples include the CIA’s collusion with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign to discredit (falsely) the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation; the judicial cancellation last December of the first round of Romania’s presidential election (also on the grounds of alleged Russian interference); a French court’s decision to bar Marine Le Pen, chief of the front-running National Rally party, from running in the 2027 presidential election; and ongoing attempts by Germany to ban the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the nation’s largest opposition party.
The foregoing are examples of “managed democracy” or “inverted totalitarianism”: the tacit manipulation by multiple parties, including the media and the judiciary, of supposedly democratic elections and processes. The American media routinely describe MAGA loyalists, the Romanian opposition, France’s National Rally, and Germany’s AfD as “far right,” dutifully suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, and failed to question the Biden campaign’s and the intelligence community’s claims of Russian disinformation. Similarly, American judges have ruled that deportations of criminal illegal migrants, along with Donald Trump’s executive order establishing universal voter ID requirements—both backed by supermajorities of American citizens—are unconstitutional.
These efforts seem increasingly desperate. As Betz observes, massive digital connectivity, which allows information that would otherwise be downplayed or suppressed to reach huge audiences, has rendered the techniques of managed democracy increasingly ineffective. A right-wing candidate just won a resounding victory in a rerun of the first round of presidential elections in Romania. In the U.S., tried-and-true means of political manipulation are harder to pull off. Americans have been incensed to learn that illegal aliens enjoy welfare programs costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually, and the Trump administration is scrutinizing the use of federal funds for overtly partisan purposes.
Facing such pushback, elites appear intent on redoubling hardball tactics. In a recent “Call to Action” letter, former State Department grandees—including National Security Advisors Susan Rice and Anthony Lake and dozens of U.S. ambassadors—warn that Americans cannot wait for elections: a crisis of democracy, precipitated by Trump, requires us to “mobilize” and “defend our way of life.” And in an article that asks whether we are already in a “soft” civil war, Matt Taibbi notes that Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker recently labeled Republicans “tyrants and traitors,” called for “mobilization” and “mass protests,” and urged Democrats to “step out of your comfort zone and step out into the streets” and “fight, fight, fight.”
These rallying cries will find receptive audiences. The West suffers from a problem endemic to capitalism, which economist Joseph Schumpeter identified more than 80 years ago: the overproduction of credentialed elites—in some countries up to 25 percent of the population, Betz estimates—who cannot secure the positions of power and influence they feel they’ve earned. Having turned against the status quo in the name of “justice,” they idolize agents of violence who battle “oppression” and “exploitation,” such as Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Most recently, the assassination of Charlie Kirk was celebrated in some quarters as striking a blow against right-wing “hatred.”
The most unsettling part of Betz’s analysis is not just that current conditions in the West suggest the likelihood of metastasizing civil unrest. It is his calculation of the odds of this outcome. Relying in part on Barbara F. Walter’s 2022 book How Civil Wars Start, Betz estimates that in a country where the primary conditions of violent upheaval are present, the chances of it breaking out in any given year are 4 percent. He believes these conditions exist in at least ten Western countries, which means—if the figure of 4 percent is correct—there is an 87 percent chance of civil war in at least one Western country in the next five years.
Betz believes that Britain and France are most at risk, followed by Germany and the United States. Serious disorder or violence in these countries is most likely to break out in cities with the potential to become “feral,” where conditions favor criminal gangs and terrorist organizations: cities with bankrupt or fiscally compromised governments, endemic corruption, crumbling infrastructure, unreliable basic services, and “no-go zones,” where the rule of law is effectively unenforceable. It’s not hard to come up with cities—such as Birmingham in the U.K.—that meet these criteria.
Of course, in a traditional sense, “civil war” implies warring armies, a prospect that, in Western democracies, appears inconceivable outside of some science fiction-like scenario. Betz’s warning seems more descriptive of widespread civil unrest—a grim enough prospect, to be sure, especially with the rising incidence of politically motivated violence in the United States. But even if his “civil war” admonition is more figurative than literal, its plausibility is concerning.
What is to be done? We can’t prevent violent social combustion without cutting off the supply of emotional oxygen that fuels it. That will require broad reform across multiple institutions, especially government, the media, and academia. However one regards Betz’s forecasting, we’d be wise to get started on that effort.
Photo: Karina Brady / 500px via Getty Images
