The Guardian: The Next U.S. Civil War Is Already Here – We Just Refuse To See It

There is a major contradiction in this argument:

1. The United States is already in Civil War 2
2. “Extremism” has gone mainstream
3. The Right is poised to use violence and secession to get its way
4. The U.S. Constitution is strangling “our democracy”
5. Wokeism is marginalizing the Left
6. The United States is on the verge of a democratic collapse and the Left has to take implausible and extreme measures – nuking the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, packing the Senate with new states, shredding the antique Constitution – to save “our democracy”

If the immediate future is looking so rosy for the Right, why would they need to secede or engage in violence? Wouldn’t it just be easier for them to engage in politics and vote and win? If we are on the cusp of a democratic collapse like during the Redemption movement when a combination of favorable Supreme Court decisions, White appeasement politics and voter suppression was used to strangle the Republican Party in the South for generations, why would that necessarily lead to a civil war?

The Guardian:

“Nobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.

On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons. …

The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating …

What the American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment. …”

As many historians have correctly pointed out, American politics was bitterly polarized in the late 19th century. Gridlock was the norm. There was far more political violence than there is today. Misery was at an all time high. Elections were existential battles between the two parties which did nothing with power. Turnout in American elections has only recently returned to this level.

As we entered the last populist vs. progressive era, America was similarly at a low point, but then a sudden reversal happened. This period of American history is known as the “Nadir of the Negro.” The landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson came down in 1896. Voter suppression became the norm in the South. The North gave up on Reconstruction when the Force Act of 1890 was filibustered to death in the Senate. Congressman George White of North Carolina gave his farewell address in 1901 and blacks disappeared from Congress. White Americans reconciled and the country moved forward again.

In an amazing article written for The Atlantic Monthly in 1901 from the perspective of an old man looking back on the mistakes of his youth when he was woke on race, Daniel Henry Chamberlain explained to the elite Northern audience of his day, Why Reconstruction Failed:

“The overthrow of Republican or negro rule in South Carolina in 1876 was root-and-branch work. The fabric so long and laboriously built up fell in a day. Where was fancied to be strength was found only weakness. The vauntings were turned to cringing of terror. Poltroons and perjurers made haste to confess; robbers came forward to disgorge, intent only on personal safety; and the world saw an old phenemonon repeated – the essential and ineradicable cowardice and servility of conscious wrongdoers. The avalanche caught the innocent with the guilty, the patriot and reformer with the corruptionist, the bribe giver and bride taker. It could not be otherwise; it has never been otherwise in such convulsions.…=

The designed plan of this paper does not extend to any discussion of the always grave topic of the negro race in South Carolina and the South. It has abundantly appeared in what has already been written that that race was used as the tool of heartless partisan leaders. As in all such cases, the tool was cast aside when its use ended. We can look on the picture, – the negro enslaved by physical chains for two centuries and a half, then bodily lifted into freedom by hands other than his own, next mercilessly exploited for the benefit of a political party, and heartlessly abandoned when the scheme had failed – what heart of stone, we say, would not be touched by these undeserved miseries, these woeful misfortunes, of the negro of the United States?

What had the negro to show after 1876 for his sufferings? Merely the paper right to vote, – a right which he had no earthly power or capacity to use or to defend; while, with smug faces, with hypocritic sighs and upturned eyeballs, the soi-disant philanthropists and charitymongers of the North looked on the negro from afar, giving him only an occasional charge to still stand by the grand old party that had set him free!

To all who feel a real solicitude for the welfare of the Southern negro, it ought to be said that the conditions of his welfare lie in reversing at all points the spirit and policy of reconstruction which brought on him this Iliad of woes. Philanthropy without wisdom is always dangerous. Disregard of actual conditions is never wise. The negro depends for his welfare, not on the North, but on the South; not on strangers, however friendly or sympathetic in bestowing bounty, but on his own white neighbors and employers. Whatever can be done to promote good relations between him and his neighbors will well be done; whatever is done which tends otherwise will be ill done. By industry and thrift the negro can secure all he needs, both of livelihood and of education; whatever is given him gratuitously promotes idleness and unthrift. With all emphasis let it be said and known – and the writer’s knowledge confirms the saying, as will like knowledge acquired by any honest and clear-sighted person – that the negro at the South is not, in the mass or individually, the proper object of charity.

And of his education let a word be said. Education is, no one disputes or doubts, essential to the welfare of a free and self governing community. The negro in his present situation is not an exception to the rule. But what sort of education does he need? Primarily, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of one thousand, he does not need, in any proper sense of the words, literacy, scientific, or what is called higher education. It is not too much to say that, up to this time, a great amount of money and effort has been worse than wasted on such education, or attempts at such education, of the negro. To an appreciable extent, it has been a positive evil to him. Give him, or rather stimulate him to provide for himself, education suited to his condition: to wit, abundant training in the three R’s; and after that, skill in handicraft, in simple manual labor of all kinds, which it is his lot to do – lot fixed not by us, but by powers above us. If there be aspiring spirits in the race, capable of better things, this is the soil from which they may rise, rather than from hotheads of forcing grounds – the so-called negro colleges and universities now existing in the south. Beyond this, let the negro be taught, early and late, in schools and everywhere, thrift, pecuniary prudence and foresight, the duty, the foremost duty, of getting homes, property, land, or whatever constitutes wealth in his community. Above all things, let him be taught that his so-called rights depend on himself alone. Tell him, compel him by iteration to know, that no race or people has ever yet long had freedom unless it was won and kept by itself; won and kept by courage, by intelligence, by vigilance, by prudence. Having done this, let Northern purses be closed; let sympathy and bounty be bestowed, if anywhere, upon the far less favored toilers nearer home, and leave the negro to work out his own welfare, unhelped and unhindered. If these simple methods are adopted and rigorously observed, the Negro problem out our South will flow toward solution, and the flood of ills flowing from reconstruction as imposed from without will at last be stayed; and they can be stayed in no other ways. Constitutional limits of aid by legislation have already been reached and overpassed. Rights, to be secure, must, in the last resort, rest on stronger supports than constitutions, statutes, or enrolled parchments. Self-government under constitutions presupposes a firm determination, and mental, moral and physical capacity, ready and equal to the defense of rights. Neither the negro nor the white man can have them on other terms.”

Maybe the country is approaching a similar turning point.

The Democrats would be electorally better off giving up on racial, cultural and gender extremism and pivoting to other issues. Wokeism is a massive albatross that alienates White voters. It isn’t worth the backlash. Nobody on either side wants a Civil War II and all of these insane and admittedly self-marginalizing cultural causes that progressive activists are pushing aren’t worth one.

Would the Progressive Era in American politics have happened without Plessy, the abandonment of Reconstruction and the voter suppression that followed?