(Bloomberg) -- The US trails only Turkey and Russia among the world’s biggest economies likeliest to see violent political turmoil in the next year, according to a Bloomberg Economics analysis that tries to capture an uneasy national mood after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
The chance of open civil unrest in the next year is low — just 2.9% — but is third highest among the Group of 20 major economies, according to the analysis. The risk in the US is more than double for nations such as Canada, Germany and Australia that are considered America’s democratic peers.
The analysis adapts an approach developed by the US government’s Political Instability Task Force to measure the risk of violent internal conflict. It seeks to put a number to trends that have provoked fears of unrest in the years since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
That mood found expression in recent pop culture offerings such as the 2024 movie “Civil War” about a collapse of the US government and was fanned in the days after Trump was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet in July.
Politicians have also fueled the fire. Days before a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, the leader of the conservative Heritage Foundation said a “second American Revolution” will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” And an Ohio state senator told a rally weeks later that ‘it’s going to take a civil war to save the country” if Trump loses. He later apologized.
The analysis found the erosion of democratic institutions and rise of factional grievances in the US have “significantly elevated the risk of internal armed conflict.”
“Predictions for rare events like internal conflict come with a high degree of uncertainty attached,” wrote Bloomberg Economics analyst Nick Hallmark. “Still, we think the model is a useful way of putting an analytic framework around rising risks in the US — and the results are far from reassuring,” he added.
That tracks with recent polling. The latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing state voters shows half of respondents expect some sort of violence related to the election.
The Bloomberg Economics model is based on a methodology created by the Political Instability Task Force, which looked to identify factors that might make a country vulnerable to internal strife.
The model focuses on two variables. It considers whether a country is a democracy, an autocracy, or an anocracy — a middle ground where weak institutions let grievance breed and go unresolved. A 2020 Polity Score analysis put the US on the edge of anocracy.
The second is a measure of factionalism, using the Fragile States Index, that looks at differences between social groups, as well as within institutions and politics. The US scored closer to Indonesia rather than high-income democracies Canada and Japan.
The BE analysis defines conflict as between two non-government actors or the government and a non-government actor that results in at least 25 deaths. Political violence that meets the model’s criteria includes the June 2023 Wagner Group rebellion in Russia and the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot does not.
Monty G. Marshall, the director of the Center for Systemic Peace, a Colorado-based research organization, said the US is primed for conflict by the level of political rhetoric, the lack of respect between political leaders and the easy availability of guns, all supercharged by fast and efficient communication links.
“Usually what we see with these types of civil warfare type engagements, they start out with very small-level attacks by isolated individuals,” said Marshall, who has been a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency. “With the communication available through the Internet, these things can escalate quite swiftly.”
In the US, “as far as armed conflict against the government or governing authorities, it’s been quite a long time, so I think people find it hard to imagine,” Marshall said. “But it depends on what you’re trying to imagine.”
The US hasn’t yet felt some of the worst economic costs suffered by unstable countries, such as higher borrowing costs, lower investments and slower growth. But “if institutional decline continues and political violence rises,” Hallmark wrote, “then US economic out-performance, low borrowing costs for the Treasury, and even the dollar’s reserve-currency status can’t be taken for granted.”
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