MAGA and Civil War
Every day, I find more things that remind me of early 1861. In his classic study, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861, David Potter could have been discussing now. “Each reacted to a distorted mental image of each other. The North to an image of a Southern world of lascivious and sadistic slave-drivers. The South to the image of a northern world of cunning Yankee traders and rabid abolitionists plotting slave insurrections… Ordinary, resolvable disputes were converted in to questions of principle involving rigid, unnegotiable dogma. Abstractions, such as the question of the legal status of slavery in areas where there were no slaves, and to which no one intended to take any, became points of honor and focuses of contention that rocked the government to its foundation…”
But the implied equivalence in Potter’s book ignores the fact that one side’s stereotype (“there’s a slave power that is seeking expansion and increased power”) was basically right while the other (“the North is full of abolitionists who are trying to destroy our way of life”) was ridiculously wrong. But, right or wrong, these perceptions influenced how the regions reacted.
A recent poll said that basically 70% of the adherents of each party thinks the other party is a threat to democracy. And, just like 1861, there’s one side that’s trying to mobilize their base to maximize turnout and the other getting itself wound up for insurrection. Having already decided that the traitors who made war against the United States on January 6 are actually heroes, they’ve also decided that revolution is patriotism. And, perhaps the most delusional thinking of a crowd that believes in stolen elections and pedophile rings and the imminent return of JFK, Jr., they actually believe that the Founders wrote the Second Amendment to make it easier for the mobs to cut their heads off.
The view of Representative Matt Gaetz that the Second Amendment “is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary” no longer is a fringe view in the Republican party. Another Republican congressman, Representative Chip Roy argues, the Second Amendment was “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.”
Some even use their worship of the Second Amendment to glorify violence and insurrection. Two weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection overran the U.S. Capitol, Representative Lauren Boebert declared that the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.”
Of course, we saw that attitude that the insurrectionists are really part of the law enforcement team here, on July 4, 2020, when local and national law enforcement officials banded together to thank the white supremacist goons for helping maintain order.
Let’s be clear: the Founding fathers did not write the Constitution as a suicide pact and they did not authorize militias for the purpose of rebelling against them. We still have a militia today and it’s called the National Guard, not the Oath Keepers.
One wild card in the mix is, we already know Trump has corrupted the Republican party, the Secret Service, and parts of the FBI. The scary question is, “How far has MAGA penetrated the armed forces?” We tend to take it for granted that all members of the military are here to serve their country and ignore how really extraordinary our tradition of an apolitical military is. In medieval England, the army came from the barons. Every battle, there would be the lineup at the start of the battle and then the wait to see whose side who was on. In Rome, more than half the emperor were bumped off by rival generals or by their own Praetorian Guards.
We are undoubtedly closer to armed conflict than at any time since 1861. In 1861, many of the senators and military officers resigning to join their states – including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee – did so with sorrow. Now, one party seems to be approaching it with glee.
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In case you missed it
Insurrectionists and the people running the country