Posted on 11/08/2018 8:39:26 PM PST by blam
Strong rhetoric and violence on both sides of the political spectrum are reaching a fever pitch
Is the United States on the brink of a new civil war?
According to Newsweek magazine’s polling, a third of all Americans think such a conflict could break out within the next five years, with 10% thinking it “very likely to happen.” Plenty of experts agree. Back in March, State Department official Keith Mines told Foreign Policy magazine: “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” He rated the odds of a second American Civil War breaking out within the next 10-15 years at 60%.
October’s awful events — pipe bombs sent to leading Democratic politicians and supporters, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh — have only amplified these fears. “We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860,” my Stanford University colleague Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in the National Review.
The historian Niall Ferguson, another Stanford colleague, suggested in The Sunday Times of London that if someone were to design a “Civil War Clock” comparable to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” the designer would probably now be announcing that it is “two minutes to Fort Sumter.”
Ferguson himself is more upbeat, thinking that “the time on the civil war Doomsday Clock looks more like 11.08 than 11.58.” It seems to me, though, that all these speculations are deeply misleading — so much so, in fact, that the main thing they illustrate is how not to use the past to understand the present.
Similarities, differences and broad patterns
There are certainly some striking similarities between the American political scene in the late 2010s and that of the late 1850s. Both periods saw extreme polarization over issues of intense economic and emotional importance.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
I wish I knew.
I feel it coming, though.
It’s palpable.
100%
How does Houston or Austin secede from Texas? How does Atlanta secede from Georgia?
You have 8?
Bttt.
5.56mm
Thank you
States can secede. They are sovereign. Cities cannot though I’d be more than happy to let Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties go their separate way from the rest of Florida. A lot of the rest of Florida’s other 64 counties would be willing to make that deal in a heartbeat.
windflier: "At the moment it looks like red MAGA hats vs. black bloc (Antifa).
We need better cover(s)....literally."
Naw… it'll be boys against the girls!
;-)
Everything depends on your definitions of "civil war", starting with Von Clausewitz: "War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
That means, likewise, we can say politics is a continuation of war by less violent means.
So there are many different types of civil war, each as different from another as, say, the Second World War and the Cold War.
Sure both were wars and both global, but very different situations.
Like a repeat of WWII, 1860s-type US Civil War is unlikely now in the extreme.
But just a little hyperbole & metaphor are needed to say we have long been in a Cold Civil War, or Civil Cold War if you prefer.
Remember, the Cold War saw years of regional hot flare-ups -- Korea, Vietnam & others -- along with guerilla wars, insurgencies, shifting alliances & strategic competition with nuclear weapons.
And where WWII lasted maybe 5-1/2 years, the Cold War lasted, was it 45 years?
Likewise Civil Cold War has sputtered on now for decades, sometimes hotter, others calmer, with shifting alliances and strategic competition for that elusive "permanent majority".
Anyway, the fundamental situation is revealed when you consider this fact: in 2018 the "progressive" Democrat Governor of New York was reelected by carrying just seven of 67 New York counties -- even New York's territory is 90% red, but ruled over by its top 10% of blue counties.
The 2016 electoral map, by counties, red=Trump, blue=Hillary
The divison today is nothing like 1860
Then it was geographic and focused on slavery and other economic issues and a certain level of rebellion against Lincoln’s further concentration of power in DC
That last part is somewhat concurrent
Today though it’s ideology and largely racial and demographic
Yes some minorities are on our side but at most one third of Latinos and 10 percent of blacks and Asians and maybe 25 percent of Jews
Most Rightists are White and Christian at least from birth
This is more like the Spanish civil war
Exactly
do not think that a civle war will break out....republicans tend to respect the rule of law they are the one who own guns and are trained to use them. they also gravitate to jobs in the military. they dominate civilian jobs that are are first responders like ambulance driver, fire department and police. where most law abiding liberals have disarmed them selves work mostly in academia, entertainment industry and white collar tech jobs....this is a over simplification but this leads me to believe that the libral left is just incapable of participating in a armed conflict but believe that the very people they despise will fight this future armed conflict or them not realizing in any armed ibserection they will not be on the side of a libral.
For us to squash the left we may have to literally kills tens of millions to bring the rest to heel
Are folks prepared for that?
I’m not I readily admit.
Our war would make Rwanda and Biafra and Zanzibar and the Congo look like a skirmish
The left has done to this country’s youth exactly what the Arabs and Iranians did to the Palestinians. They have fed them a steady diet of libel and disinformation and are slowly
turning them into living suicide bombs.
And like the Palestinians, it is not enough for those so radicalized to have their own state in which t mind their own affairs, they must replace the one that exists and drive its inhabitants into the sea.
We could win by chasing the Hollywood crowd out of the country, forcing Starbucks to close and shut down CNN. Everything would fall into place after that.
The leftist elite do have the drug cartels and their minions...
how much discipline and training do most people working for the cartels have. cant see them as a fighting force in great numbers
The pink one on the left looks like a girlie man.
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