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 ...
Alright, but sew a Stars & Bars patch on, so we know it's you ;-)
I would be honored.
Can you provide proper attribution and a link for the Stratfor article you just posted?
Thanks.
I expect the thugs on the left will begin killing people they hate, like the crap that goes on in third world countries. That will raise the stakes in this war of words to critical mass. After that, all bets are off.
Windflier wrote:
“”I have no idea how it would be fought. There are no blue and gray uniforms.”
Both sides will quickly adopt identifying insignia or uniforms, even before hostilities begin.”
Antifa (and fellow travelers) already have.
Trump is the only one I could even imagine accepting reality, and taking the risk involved to fight back, but he needs to step things up in the time he’s got left. We can talk tough, but without leadership and organization, we won’t stop anything from happening. We know the left will use extreme measures to destroy everything good this nation was built on, but most elected republicans are either weak, or just unable to accept the reality of what's happening in the country, and what it would take to stop it.
There are way too many conservatives who are too stupid to understand that there comes a time where you must suspend the constitution in order to try and save it. They will never accept that reality no matter how bad it gets, and will be screaming about what the Constitution says in the final days of the nation they gave up without a fight.
I feel like we're somewhere between 1916-1917, the eve of the Russian Revolution.
Psychopathic youth forming terrorist/anarchist gangs, frivolous upper & creative class, large restive underclass. The only thing, they won't have the military on their side.
God, please give us honorable commanders in chiefs.
I would not want a shooting civil war to decide it, but I would welcome the formation of the Conservative States of America. Then libs can name their nation whatever they want. I would predict the Progressive States of America.
Actually, in a real sense, there is geographic separation: rural/semi-rural vs the de facto city-states.
In some civil wars, there are no uniforms. At least not early on. Take a look at some of those.
That said, in the Western world, one group or another usually dons some sort of identifying clothing, as things go on, as it is not helpful to kill a lot of your own group.
There was no strict dividing line between north & south during the first civil war there were border states like Kentucky, Maryland & Missouri with divided loyalties even in solid confederate states there were areas loyal to the union Knoxville & the “kingdom of Jones” in Alabama. West Virginia actually became a state by succeeding from Virginia during the civil. In NYC during the civil war the Democratic Party machine Tammany hall organized the draft riots after Gettysburg to create a diversion to save the army of northern Virginia. If you look at the electoral map of the country in the 2016 election the country is definitely divided along geographical lines. With pro communist sentiment concentrated in the coastal areas. I don’t hesitate to called the Democratic Party the American communist party which it clearly is. The war probably will not have organized armies but will be fought asymmetrically & will probably have more foreign intervention the Chicom’s seemed poised to side with pro communist side. Russia might take advantage to take Alaska.
If I read his assumptions and conclusions correctly there would have been no war of independence.
Maybe the solution is for the largest cities to exist as semi-independent city-states. The citizens there cannot vote in state or federal elections, but they can have their own constitution and vote themselves all the dictators they like.
Such cities would be one-party states run by rich oligarchs, basically like now. They could do almost any progressive thing they wanted, short of executing political prisoners. Instead, they could exile their dissidents (we would thus get a stream of their best people). Meanwhile the worst people on our side would leave to get the free recreational drugs or whatever the Socialists promise. We could trade with the city-states and even have a common currency.
It will be like Northern Ireland, but instead of green and orange it will be red and blue.
The largest “blue” cities and their immediate surrounding blue or deep purple areas could be these city-states. There are some cities that are a mixture and there are smaller blue cities where this would not work.
I don’t think anyone should have dual citizenship in my proposed city-state and in the United States.
Peaceful separation is not possible. Progressives are like cancer, they just spread.
No problem!
:)
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