Spiked: The Hysterical Fantasy of an Impending Civil War

It is Civil War 2 in the Acela Corridor.

Zaid Jilani makes some excellent points here:

Tablet Mag:

“The Democratic Party’s message ahead of the 2022 midterms appears to be simple: Vote for us or democracy gets it.

“I’m worried that if Republicans win in the midterm elections, that voting as we know it in this country will be gone,” warned California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell during a recent MSNBC appearance. “This is not only the most important election. If we don’t get it right, it could be the last election.”

Across the progressive Democratic messaging infrastructure, the party and movement have rebranded themselves as the protectors of the democratic ideal, which, in their telling, is on the verge of extinction. …

But if you sincerely value liberal democracy—not just majority rule but open debate and the protection of individual and minority rights—it can be hard not to notice the irony: A political movement that has worked so hard to censor and marginalize its opponents in virtually all institutions is claiming that it now represents the vanguard of democracy. …”

Now, Zaid isn’t White, but I think he gets it.

There is a peculiar type of White person who lives in our Eastern states who throughout American history have been known for their sanctimony, hypocrisy, hysteria, humorlessness, ruthlessness, arrogance, greed, intolerance, self-absorption, self-righteousness and self-aggrandizing zeal. They love to boss people around, surveil their neighbors and scold them for being immoral.

The true cause of the “Civil War” wasn’t slavery. It was them. Over 150 years later, we are back in the same place without slavery. We have a front row seat to seeing how that conflict came about. There is only so much shit from those people that the rest of the country is able to take.

Frank Furedi is nails it.

The elites are panicking about getting owned in the midterms because of Joe Biden’s terrible poll numbers. Joe’s agenda is going nowhere in the Senate. So, this is the self-serving narrative that they have rolled out. You have to vote for us because this will be the last election ever or something.

Spiked:

“The governing elites of the Anglo-American world are in the grip of hysteria.

Early symptoms of this hysteria were showing in their panicked response to the pandemic. However, since the turn of the year, these symptoms have developed into full-on delirium. …

Elite media outlets have been unable simply to reflect on the events of that day a year ago. Instead they have been indulging in endless speculation about the likelihood of a new civil war in America. The Guardian, in particular, has been full of such dystopian claims. ‘US could be under right-wing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns’, runs one headline. ‘America is now in fascism’s legal phase’, runs another. As one article in the same paper puts it, ‘There will be those who say that warning of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions.’

And it’s not just the Guardian indulging in feverish dreams of fascism and civil war. A piece in Politico asserts that ‘the Trump years… have awakened a conflict so profound that, as in the 1860s, democracy, constitutional order and union itself are in peril’. In the Washington Post, three retired American generals warn that ‘the military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection’. Even long before 6 January, a Vice article cited ‘several experts’ to back up the assertion that a ‘we’re already in the early stages of [a civil war], a period before large-scale political violence the CIA defines as an “incipient insurgency.”

Others are content merely to ask if a civil war is approaching. This is not an innocent question, however. It is a way of framing any challenge to the reigning political establishment as evidence of the approaching civil war.

The idea that America is facing a civil war is being most systematically and cynically elaborated by the New York Times. It presents the threat of insurgency as a permanent fact of life, the far-right Trumpist threat always at the gates.

The Times seems almost addicted to this fantasy of an impending civil war. On the very first day of this year, it issued an editorial statement declaring that ‘every day’ is now 6 January. …”

Every day is 1/6 now.

The elites are still suffering from post-traumatic 1/6 syndrome. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to them. It was like their own Pearl Harbor.

This is exactly right.

“The hysterical framing of the events of 6 January tells us very little about the attack on the Capitol. But it does say a lot about the disorientation of America’s ruling elites, and their greatest fear – the democratic will of the people. …”

The Huffington Post’s White House reporter, SV Dáte, tweeted that the three-hour-long riot at the Capitol was ‘1,000 per cent worse’ than 9/11. Harris and her media supporters not only misrepresent the events of 6 January 2021 – they also trivialise 9/11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. …”

The thing that the champions of “our democracy” are pearl clutching the most about is … losing power to Trumpists through democracy!

In this scenario, there isn’t a “civil war” or an “insurgency” or anything like that. There are no White Nationalists bombing state capitols like in some of the lurid fantasies that have been sweeping through the media. Instead, Joe Biden and the Democrats simply collapse due to inflation.

Ross Douthat is pushing back against the lunacy.

New York Times:

“How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by the political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and my colleague Michelle Goldberg all invoked Walter’s work in essays discussing the possibility that the United States stands on the edge of an abyss, with years of civil strife ahead. …

However, an overwhelming majority of people who hold those kinds of beliefs show no signs of being radicalized into actual violence. For all the talk of liberal “resistance” under Trump, the characteristic left-wing response to the Trump administration was not to join Antifa but to mobilize to elect Democrats; it took the weird conditions of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and the spark of the George Floyd killing, to transmute anti-Trumpism into national protests that actually turned violent.

Likewise, despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a “Hezbollah wing” of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Instead, Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office. …”

Things have actually been quiet lately.

This is what “watchdog organizations” and “extremism researchers” fear the most though – the “mainstreaming of hate” – due to the libs becoming so politically and culturally toxic that Trumpists waltz into power at the state and local level in Deep Red areas. Maybe it even gets to the point where they are governed by someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Note: Charlie Sykes is ready to prescribe four Sister Souljah moments.