Thinking the Unthinkable
Could the death of Heather Heyer really be a shot heard ‘round the world, though no shot was fired? Will history someday class her death with that of Archduke Ferdinand, or Ensign Robert Munroe? Is our nation, long considered the world’s most stable democracy, really now at risk for civil war?
This week The New Yorker ran an article asking that question. The author consulted a number of experts on civil wars around the globe. A panel of such experts predicted last March that the US faces a 35% chance of experiencing civil war in the coming decade. Experts on the panel made individual predictions as low as 5% and as high as 95%. They also made a number observations about the conditions leading to civil wars today. These include:
- Populace is intensely polarized
- Press coverage is divisive and polarized
- Congress and the judiciary are ineffective
- Political parties weaken and divide
- Political leadership rejects accountability
- People embrace violence as a political solution.
When Ken Buck deplores the incapacity of the Republican Party in his Denver Post op-ed, he sounds righteous, as though he is not responsible, as though he’s above the fray. But 2018 hopeful Chase Kohne disagrees. Read his opinion piece in Colorado Politics. Buck, says Kohne, “is holding a smoking gun.”
So there we find three of the New Yorker’s preconditions for civil war already. Buck points out the disintegration of the Republican Party and the impotence of Congress, but he doesn’t take responsibility for his part in the process. In reality he is as guilty Goldwater; he cares more about his own ideology than his constituents. He prefers to live in his bubble and reject accountability than to face the reality that the vast majority of CD4 is hurt, not helped, by his actions.
WTF Ally and 2014 CD4 Democratic Candidate Vic Meyers emphasizes this. “The GOP is dying like a heroin addict,” wrote Vic. “They’ve been injecting divisiveness and racism and fear into their campaigns so long that they’ve become dependent upon it and they can’t function as a party without it.” The Republican party created the division of the electorate that places the United States at risk for civil war. That very tactic has now caused the demise of the Party as an effective political power, and Buck’s a party to it.
President Trump is a major user of the tactic of poisoned propaganda. He did not create the divided press. But Trump has become a master exploiter of that division, playing the outlets one against the other, and applying the epithet “Fake News” to any channel, paper, or reporter whose coverage he doesn’t like. Certainly it is his exploitation of the use of violence during his political campaign that emboldened the hate groups. So the leadership now in power, the Republican Party and Donald Trump, together have created and do exploit the conditions that now place us at risk of civil war.
We must not tolerate our leaders when they incite division and use violence to their own advantage. They are not yet strong enough to disenfranchise us. We can vote them out. It is our duty as responsible citizens to do so.
What more can we, as responsible citizens, do to avoid the calamity of civil war? We are doing it now, when we model the best of America. It is easy to hate a stranger and hard to hate a neighbor. When our neighbors think differently from us, welcome them anyway. Nobody wants a war but the haters. We can choose not to hate. Choose now.
Originally published in The Weathervane No 13 on August 17, 2017. [Subscribe]
