October 25. 2021

By David Jay Morris

Civil War.

Seems like those two words are on everyone’s lips these days, but a few short years ago, that wasn’t the case. 

A handful of people were ahead of their time. Carl Bernstein warned that we had entered a “new cold civil war”  and Robin Wright wrote a prescient article in The New Yorker in 2017 titled, “Is America headed for a new kind of civil war?”  

For the most part, however, the mainstream media mainly chose to ignore the issue. And when comedian Bill Maher kept harping on about a “slow-motion coup d’état,” everyone just rolled their eyes.

Not any more.

Nowadays, it seems like every other pundit on MSNBC is warning that our nation is well and truly at a crisis point, one which could easily end in the death of American democracy. 

One of the best expressions of this line of thought (and a much-needed kick in the behind for the business-as-usual crowd in the Democratic Party) was Brookings Institution senior fellow, Robert Kagan’s September essay in the Washington Post called, “Our constitutional crisis is already here.”  

Kagan opened the piece with the cheery words:

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.

Scared?

Then how do you feel about a poll reported in the Washington Examiner showing that some 71% of Republicans believe that a civil war is coming.

And that was from last January.

Does anyone seriously think the number would be any smaller now?

Take a look at some of the words being written by people on the MAGA side:

It is only a matter of time before there is a second Civil War…. Violence may be necessary to restore our freedoms…. if Biden continues down the path he and his handlers are on, nothing can stop him short of a revolution. – Is America Headed Toward a Second Civil War? by Dr. Rich Swier

Almost everything that Democrats do is something against the other half of this nation. For five years, the left has stopped at nothing to go after seventy-five-million voters that do not agree with them…. These people from the left are going to spark another American Civil War…. Let us disband the union peacefully and go our own ways before the left turns this into a shooting war. - Democrats Hell Bent on Starting Another Civil War by C. Rich.

And let’s not forget the recent report from a Trump rally in Iowa by MSNBC's Gary Grumbach in which he quoted “former guy” fan Lori Levi as saying:

We're not going to take it anymore. I see a civil war coming. I do. I see civil war coming.

Listening to this and all his own recent rhetoric, instead of “Make America Great Again – Again,” perhaps the former president ought to be saying, “Make America’s Civil War War Again.”

After all, does human nature…especially extremist human nature…ever really change?

In his famous poem, “The Second Coming,” written in 1919, shortly after World War I, at the height of the Spanish Flu pandemic and just before the Irish Civil War really heated up, poet William Butler Yeats said:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

Sound familiar?

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th assault on the Capitol, it briefly appeared that Republican lawmakers might finally have gotten a much-needed wake up call.  Had they at last recognized that the oaths they had taken were to the U.S. Constitution and not to a megalomaniacal would-be king hell-bent on ruling forever?

It looked like the Democrats – all the Democrats - really understood the gravity of the moment and were finally ready to take off the gloves and fight.

As if.

Now, the only real question seemed to be when our Fort Sumpter moment will occur. 

The Confederate shelling of that Federal stronghold in Charleston Harbor marked the start of full-scale hostilities in Civil War 1.0.

Will there be a similar inflection point in CW 2.0?

At what point will the cannonballs start to fly?

What will be the trigger that signals the Boogaloo believer wing of the Trump cult to take out their AR-15s and start pulling the triggers?

Where will the rank-and-file police and military personnel stand when they do?

Yeats closed his 1919 poem with the words,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Back then, who could have imagined it would happen not in the so-called holy land, but right here in the good-ol’ US of A?

And that the name of the beast would be Donald Trump?