Sorry, Democrats: Civil War isn’t likely — even if you’re trying to provoke one

[Valin]

NY Post

Steven Hayward

Jan. 7 2022

Let’s set the scene: American democracy is said to be under threat from a political party that questions the legitimacy and outcome of a presidential election, that incites and justifies lawless “insurrectionist” actions and undermines American democratic institutions and processes, threatening the continued existence of the Constitution itself. If this state of affairs continues unabated, experts claim, the United States might well lapse into a second Civil War, as argued in Barbara F. Walter’s new book “How Civil Wars Start.”

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Let’s do the checklist. A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll in 2017 found that 67% of Democrats and 69% of Hillary Clinton voters said Donald Trump was not a legitimately elected president, and Hillary herself told CBS News that Trump was not a “legitimate president” because he stole the 2016 election. Three years of contentious and debilitating investigations into what we now know was a phony Democrat-created story followed. But now that Republicans make similar claims about an anomalous election, liberals have caught a case of the vapors and say it is a “threat to democracy.”

(Snip)

If you think that you are on “the side of history” but events don’t cooperate with this lazy progressive narrative, you will be pitched into an existential crisis. This outlook cannot abide the fact that we have lived in a 50/50 nation for nearly 30 years now and are likely to continue to be closely divided for a long time to come. Progressive leftists cannot understand or accept this (or any) level of dissent.

(Snip)

It is more likely that Americans will continue the accelerating process of self-sorting. Americans are moving in large numbers to states more congenial to their political and social views (mostly from blue to red states) or forming enclaves within red and blue states.

Some of the ideological divides can be ameliorated by reinvigorating federalism: Let Vermont be Vermont, and let Idaho be Idaho. The possibility of “terrorist acts” that Walter predicts would be diminished substantially through reinvigorated federalism.

Of course we know who is against this: the very same people warning of a civil war. If a new civil war does come, it will be on account of the intransigence of the same party that started the first one.