A second US Civil War will not be fantasy football or Call of Duty. It won’t even be Jade Helm or the Turner Diaries even if Trump resembles Huey Long, Buzz Windrip, or Willie Stark.
“Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
-JD Vance on Trump in 2016
“I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people.”
-JD Vance on Trump in 2021
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“There will be a Civil War if Trump is impeached!”
“There will be a Civil War if Trump is impeached a second time!”
“There will be a Civil War if the election is stolen from Trump!”
In the 21st century, during an ongoingculture warbetween American conservatives and liberals over opposing cultural, moral, and religious ideals, some political commentators have characterized the polarized political discourse as either an actual Second Civil War or a potential prelude for one. According to one 2018Rasmussenpoll, 31 percent of American voters feared that the intense partisanship following the2016 presidential electionand the victory ofDonald Trumpwould cause a Second Civil War within five years.[17]In 2019, the national bipartisan Battleground Civility Poll by theGeorgetown Institute of Politics and Public Servicerevealed that “the average voter believes the U.S. is two-thirds of the way to the edge of a civil war.”[18]
Keith Perry argues that the key weakness of the novel is not that he decks out U.S. politicians with sinister European touches, but that he finally conceives of fascism and totalitarianism in terms of traditional U.S. political models rather than seeing them as introducing a new kind of society and a new kind of regime.[10] Windrip is less a Nazi than a con-man-plus-Rotarian, a manipulator who knows how to appeal to people’s desperation, but neither he nor his followers are in the grip of the kind of world-transforming ideology like Hitler’s Nazism.[11] en.wikipedia.org/…
In the semi-satirical1935 political novel by American authorSinclair Lewis,It Can’t Happen Here, a second civil war breaks out due to thetyrannicalpolicies of fictional President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Published during the rise offascism in Europe, the novel describes the rise of Windrip, a politician who defeatsFranklin Delano Roosevelt(FDR) and is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and “traditional” values. After his election, Windrip takes complete control of the government and imposes aplutocratic/totalitarianrule with the help of a ruthlessparamilitaryforce, in the manner of Adolf Hitler and the SS. The novel’s plot centers on journalist Doremus Jessup’s opposition to the new regime and his subsequent struggle against it as part of a liberal rebellion. Reviewers at the time, and literary critics since, have emphasized the connection with Louisiana politicianHuey Long, who was preparing to run for president in the 1936 election when he was assassinated in 1935 just prior to the novel’s publication.
Today in 1861-during the #CivilWar-Confederate special commissioner Albert Pike completed treaties with the members of the Choctaw & Chickasaw tribes, giving the new #Confederacy allies in the #IndianTerritory. After the war was over, the U.S gov’t punished these tribes brutally. pic.twitter.com/JpW0gYawoU
Ahead of Biden’s speech tomorrow, @PressSec describes state election reforms as “the worst challenge to our democracy since the Civil War.”
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) July 12, 2021
Politifact: Some states haven’t passed new election reform since the Civil War, and the phrase “worst challenge” has different meanings. Rating: Mostly True.
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ARE YOU SITTING DOWN?
The DOJ–using the same rational they used to defend Trump in my case–may defend Trump in the Capitol Insurrection suit brought by the illustrious Representative @RepSwalwell
When Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the office of president upon the death of Abraham Lincoln in mid-April 1865, he initially incurred favor with Republican legislators in Congress, including those identified as “Radical Republicans,” by appointing the “Christian soldier” and Union Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard to head up the newly created Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (later just the Freedmen’s Bureau). Howard, to the satisfaction of Republicans of all stripes, immediately commenced distributing to the freedmen tracts of abandoned and confiscated Confederate lands.
(Andrew) Johnson received a less friendly response from members of Congress at the end of the following month when heissueda proclamation granting amnesty and pardon “to all persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion” (with some exceptions). Johnson then issued another proclamation subversive of the goals of Reconstruction, this one authorizing the appointment (by himself) of a civilian provisional governor for North Carolina, a policy that he then extended to other Southern states.
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Johnson’s plan, which the historian Allen C. Guelzo dubbed“self-reconstruction,”left it entirely to the states to write new constitutions and implement them as they saw fit. And soon enough, the Southern states began promulgating the infamous “Black codes,” deliberately designed to deny their newly freed slaves either the franchise or any path toward economic independence. The ultimate result of Johnson’s scheme would have been to create Southern state legislatures and state congressional delegations composed entirely of Southern Democrats, with nary a single representative from the Republican Party, white or Black.
Congress had been in recess while all this was transpiring, and when it convened in December 1865, it went right to work to counter Johnson’s edicts. It extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. Johnson vetoed the measure extending the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Bill. Congress overrode both vetoes. Meanwhile, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction issued a reportarguingthat Congress could not “be expected to recognize as valid the election of representatives from disorganized communities.”
“As if on cue,” Guelzo writes in his bookReconstruction: A Very Short Introduction, “white Southerners confirmed every bleak suspicion in the report with an eruption of race riots in Southern cities.”
In Memphis, working-class whites slaughtered 46 Black veterans and war fugitives and burned “every negro church and schoolhouse in the city” to the ground, according toaChicago Tribuneaccountof the riot. A gun battle in Norfolk during a freedmen’s parade produced two white and at least two Black casualties. There were bloody riots in Charleston. Next, riots swept through New Orleans. When Radical Republican sympathizers of both races proposed reassembling the original 1864 Louisiana state constitutional convention at the New Orleans Mechanics Institute on July 30, 1866, a crowd of white police and well-armed white civilian thugs confronted the would-be attendees with deadly violence, and before Gen. Phil Sheridan could arrive with troops to quell the disturbance, blood was running in the streets. It was,said Sheridan(no stranger to massacres), “No riot. It was an absolute massacre by the police.”
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Now, a little more than half a century after the bipartisan Civil Rights victories of the 1960s—the so-called Second Reconstruction—the two political parties have exchanged historic roles, and a white-supremacist, violence-prone, extremist Republican Party now threatens to undo not only those achievements, but the American democratic order itself. Their master plan for doing so involvescurtailing or eliminatingthe easiest and most accessible methods of voting. But the use of intimidation or outright violence, in view of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021—whose very purpose was to stop the counting of electoral votes—is not outside the boundaries of possibility, or even probability. The right-wing militia involved in that onslaught, by all accounts, stands ready and willing to act on behalf of authoritarian governance again. The concept of a new civil war is not, in fact, a purely notional or hypothetical one.
NEW: The U.S. Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt on January 6 was not part of a security detail for a specific member of Congress, a law enforcement source tells @CNN, knocking down a claim made by President Donald Trump over the weekend. Per @ZcohenCNN
This clip of Rep. Mo Brooks lying about the 2020 election at CPAC Dallas shows how Trumpers are just as radical as they were on January 6. These lies will be central to their campaigns in 2022 and beyond. pic.twitter.com/oD14g3bANw
So good. When Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Trump erupted in a fury and demanded that his aides call the Murdochs and pressure them to reverse it.
Conspiracy theories that Trump will somehow be reinstated as president have put the FBI on alert for the risk that the ex-president’s supporters might again resort to violence https://t.co/7W6ALaXdFi via @bpolitics
Marxists frequently call the Civil War a Second American Revolution as well, since it abolished an archaic mode of production (slavery) and heralded the triumph of capitalism, though the failure of Reconstruction was considered a setback to bourgeois-democratic gains.
