Talk of civil war is in the air: Googling “Second U.S. Civil War” yields 879 million hits. Most of the entries end in a question mark, others warn of preconditions leading to civil war, while some openly welcome it. Television and podcasts these days regularly feature Civil War documentaries and dramas. It’s a subject the mainstream media routinely discusses. Recently, Robert Kagan’s sobering assessment of the prospect of civil war in the Washington Post generated considerable attention in the press:
Excerpt:
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.
Robert Kagan “Our constitutional Crisis is already here” Washington Post 9/23/21
Political stress is at an all-time high. We are at pre–Civil War levels of animosity, according to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, and Jack Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University, who study sources of unrest and political conflict. They developed a statistic—the political stress index—that incorporates income and wealth inequality, wage stagnation, national debt, competition between elites, distrust in government, social mobility, tax rates, urban density, demographics, and other factors that lead to instability and conflict. Goldstone’s prior work with the Political Instability Task Force predicted civil wars and democratic collapses in developing countries with about 80 percent accuracy over two-year periods. They both believe that the United States is now ripe for political violence on a scale not seen since what Turchin calls the first Civil War.
Andrew Yang. Forward (p. 250). Crown. Kindle Edition
In September of 2020, Salon featured an interview with Richard Kreitner, journalist, historian and a contributing writer to The Nation, on his new book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union– arguing that secession remains a possible solution to America’s dilemma.
A surprisingly high percentage of the electorate seems to accept secession as the appropriate remedy for the division now afflicting the country: “Roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union” according to a recent survey by the University of Virginia’s Robert Sabato. The last time states seceded in 1860-1861, General William Tecumseh Sherman addressed the issue succinctly: “Secession is treason, is war.” Whether secession means war or war means secession remain open questions today.
Several online platforms, notably Facebook and Instagram (owned by Facebook), have promoted the online presence of war-minded extremist groups by activating algorithms calculated to fuel anger, hate, violence, divisiveness on which these groups thrive. Faced with blowback from the press, government and the public, these platforms have tightened enforcement of community standards. Facebook regularly reports on its website how the company “addresses movements and organizations tied to violence,” citing the number of militarized social movements it has identified (nearly 900) and the removal of thousands of pages, groups, events, profiles and accounts. However, internal documents publicized during recent testimony before Congress and Parliament in the U.K. by whistleblower Frances Haugen (the “Facebook Papers”) reveal the inadequacy of Facebook’s expanded “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy” against well-armed, militarized social movements and violence-inducing conspiracy networks, such as QAnon.
Then as now, people on both sides talked about the prospect of war cavalierly. In the run-up to the Civil War, South Carolinian fire-eaters proclaimed all the blood to be shed in a civil war would barely fill a lady’s thimble. President Lincoln, calling for a mobilization of troops with only 90-day enlistments, thought a show of force would suffice to bring secession-minded states back into the fold. Sherman said, “You might as well try to put out a house on fire with a squirt gun.” New recruits on both sides marched off to war in a celebratory mood, singing songs to the accompaniment of brass bands and cheering crowds. General Sherman was among the few who presciently foresaw the looming disaster, exclaiming, “The country will be drenched in blood. . . it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Few could imagine the Civil War’s eventual toll of more than 600,000 casualties, the present-day equivalent of 6 million killed, wounded, and missing in 4 years of conflict during which Vicksburg, Atlanta, Columbia and Richmond were razed by fire and artillery.
Today’s fire-eaters, like Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, welcome the prospect of civil war. “We are angry. … There is an atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over. There is a craving to return to an age of violence. We want a war,” he wrote in anticipation of the violent Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally on August 12, 2017. The “Boogaloo Bois Movement,” a network of anti-government, right-wing extremists supporting any action calculated to speed up a civil war in the U.S., have a strong presence online and are gaining members, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The Technology Transparency Project’s latest research, conducted in March 2021 reports that in these groups there are tens of thousands of well-armed members planning for an uprising against the government. There’s even a term to describe such groups: “accelerationists.”
To make matters worse, a strong current of religious evangelism infuses the extreme right to the point where “Evangelical” is becoming another word for Republican. “White evangelicalism has never been more politically unified than it is right now. In the 1970s, only 40 percent of white weekly churchgoing evangelicals identified as Republicans; in the most recent data, that number has risen to an all-time high of 70 percent.” The Republican Party, traditionally the party of the rich and corporations, has cleverly positioned itself as the party of mainly white, disaffected blue-collar workers by campaigning on wedge issues in the culture wars: abortion; guns; religion and more recently “election integrity;” “critical race theory;” and parental rights over education, masks, and vaccines. These issues gain Republicans a loyal blue-collar, evangelical base and cost rich Republican donors nothing while providing a smokescreen for their self-serving Reaganite agenda: tax cuts, “conservative” judges, deregulation, and lucrative military contracts, sold to their credulous constituents as “job creators.”
I say “to make matters worse” because history clearly demonstrates the dangers of combining religion and political power. The danger exists because each religion, by its very nature, sees itself as the sole exponent of divine truth. Therefore, religious doctrines competing with a politically empowered religion are seen as contradicting the “revealed word of God,” blasphemous, heretical, the work of the devil or the Antichrist and, therefore, deserving of suppression by force, if necessary. Give a religion access to the forces of government and it will promptly use that force to suppress competing religions. The more dogmatic and uncompromising the competing religions, the greater the force likely to be educed. The founders prioritized the 1st Amendment Establishment Clause placing it right up front to prevent such outcomes by denying political power to any religion, in effect, separating Church and State.
To be continued in Part 2