“… Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.” So said Abraham Lincoln on June 16, 1858
The layman may not know it, the history buff may not recognize it and the patriot may not want to believe it but we are facing the prospect of civil war once again in this country. There are two camps emerging in the United States; one that believes in rights for all, democracy and the process of free elections recognizing that they are run by humans thereby realizing those elections are not always perfectly flawless while also acknowledging the possibility that their side will sometimes lose an election or two and those who purport to be freedom loving patriots but who only seek to use the trappings of democracy to install autocracy or even dictatorship as the preferred form of government in this country.
Slavery was a burr under the saddle of the body politic from the time of our nation’s founding. At the time of the writing of our Constitution there was a tiny minority of people who felt slavery was wrong. They were like the PETA people of their time. Do-gooders and well-meaners but out-of-the-mainstreamers, crazy and wrong in the opinion of the vast majority. Fervent in their beliefs and passionate in their cause they campaigned for decades until the abolition of slavery was no longer a loopy, fringe, wooly-headed position but rather the moral high ground and a self-evident truth.
There are already some parallels between the run up to Lincoln’s Civil War and the next one of our own, for instance; the reemergence of partisan media as opposed to simply “the news”, political violence (the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks back then and the homicidal meme of Representative Paul Gosar advocating the murder of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today), the hardening of political positions and a refusal to compromise on anything, the 24/7/365 campaign cycle, and like the abolitionists of old worked until their view was the dominant one, we now have those who claim elections are rigged and autocracy is preferable to actual democracy and whose views are now becoming ascendant as a widely accepted version of recent events, etc.
There are those who say that the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a little misunderstanding, just some tourists who got a little rowdy, that’s all. Others say it was a deliberately seditious effort to overthrow the democratic processes of our great nation, an attempt to thwart the will of the people in an autocratic attempt to establish tyranny. We’ve compromised by calling it an “insurrection”.
Tim Snyder, Yale University Professor of American History and an expert in the rise of authoritarianism, points out there are several factors that came to the fore leading up to the American Civil War of 1861-1865 which are necessary before another civil war could occur. These factors include: polarization of the body politic, denial of objective reality, glorification of violence, loss in a belief of democracy, the belief in alternative realities and conspiracy theories. All of these are currently present in today’s political climate.
Clearly the country is polarized. We used to wear our political jerseys for a short period called election season then took them off for the good of the country during the rest of the time known as “governing”. There is no governing period any more. It’s constantly election season. Once a president of the opposite party is elected the other party does everything in their power to thwart that person and their policies as well as to pack the courts with judges of the opposite political persuasion. Cooperation with the opposite party is now treason. Compromise with the other party is now capitulation and the country suffers.
Obviously there is denial of objective reality; the 2020 election was free and fair. Of course there were errors, mix ups and even an occasional wrongdoing but there was no voter fraud like that claimed by former president Donald Trump and no mistakes or skullduggery that would have changed the outcome of any election up to and including the presidency. Several states held recounts and some states had more than one recount, most of them supervised by Republican Secretaries of State and all came back saying the original result was the correct, free and fair one.
There has been a glorification of political violence in this country. We see it on the Left with riots by Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement and on the Right culminating in the vicious attack on the Capitol on January 6th. A Washington Post poll found that 40% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats now feel that violent attacks on the government are sometimes justified. Another poll found that a majority of Republicans and 41% of Democrats think it is time for the country to split in two.
Americans don’t seem to believe in democracy anymore. Often now, politicians seeking office at all levels of government will question the integrity of an election before it even takes place, laying the groundwork for claiming the process was illegitimate should they ultimately lose that election. If the other side wins, or more accurately – if your side loses, then the automatic belief is that the election was rigged. The fact of the matter is sometimes your side loses even if your candidate was stellar, worked hard, ran well and was adequately funded. The old adage is true, “sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.”
There seems to be an awful lot of us who believe in conspiracy theories and alternative realities. The 2020 election was free and fair. If it wasn’t how do Republicans explain how they did so well down ballot? If nefarious Democrats were out to steal the election, why stop at the presidency? Why not a clean sweep? Instead, Republicans picked up seats in the House and would have held onto the Senate except for the fiction peddled by then President Trump that the presidential election was stolen which depressed Republican voter turnout in the runoff senatorial election in Georgia which cost the Republicans control of the US Senate.
The idea that the January 6th insurrection was just a bunch of happy go lucky tourists who got a little out of hand, the Tucker Carlson Fox News narrative, is a fairy tale. The suggestion that it was a carefully planned coordinated coup attempt is also outside the bounds of reason. However, it was an insurrection and a direct threat to democracy. Sticking our collective heads in the sand regarding the threats to our democratic way of life is no rational way to respond.
The QAnon conspiracy theory is this belief that somehow there is a large and monstrous satanic cannibalistic pedophile ring operating in Washington, D.C., which only Donald Trump could stop. QAnon claims that the reason for President Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election was that he got too close to apprehending all those responsible. That claim and conspiracy theory is patently ridiculous. It would be laughable except for the fact that so many people believe it.
The next civil war won’t involve two uniformed armies with more or less organized military maneuvers and tactics on opposite sides. Instead, it will look like the “troubles” that afflicted Northern Ireland for decades with its bombings, guerilla warfare, political assassinations and kidnappings. The United States is awash in firearms. Our next civil war will be a disorganized, generally decentralized effort of armed citizens individually or in small groups engaging in guerilla acts of terrorism and violence against those with whom they disagree politically.
Brian Broome said it best, “If the US should fall, America’s destruction will take place inside its own borders because we conflate being wrong with failing or losing. Our destruction will come from those of us who are so damned right all the time. The ones who refuse to listen, who will never even bother to consider other people’s viewpoints and who will protect their worldview with their lives.”
We’ve seen a microcosm of this in the protests full of intimidation and incivility in Mitchell over the common sense decision to require masks in school for the common good. We’ve seen it writ large on newscasts nearly every night in other parts of the country and on other issues. Democracy is a fragile thing. It takes all of us – being civil, tolerant, compromising, understanding and yes even losing an election now and again on occasion – to preserve it.