Steve Scalise, House Minority Whip, said of Nancy Pelosi’s rush to get the impeachment that “they” seem to think there is a danger to “their way of life.” Right there, in that off-the-cuff moment, Scalise revealed the Republican/conservative vision of what American politics and the parties are all about: a way of life.
For the Republicans, it is Mayberry R.F.D. and The Dukes of Hazard, good ol’ boys, tow-headed youngsters goin’ afishin’ and everyone in church on Sunday. Blacks invisible and no Mexicans at all. You know, the real America, with real Americans running things.
There is an America like that. We have only to resurrect it and its name is the Confederate States of America. Someone is always shouting, “The South shall rise again!” Well, let it. Then the conservatives will have a place to go live where the laws reflect their religious doctrine and sins will all be both hidden and forgiven and they’ll just keep on asinnin’.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco elites can run the show up No’f and the CSA can recruit other states to join them, the fly-over country that fancies itself the frontier. It’s not just the TV sit-coms; I’ve seen a whole lot of old Westerns the last few months and it is very clear where these Republicans/conservatives get their ideas about what it is to be an American. About every other encounter includes a gun fight. As I think I wrote elsewhere, the OK Corral gunfight was remarkable because such gunfights were so rare….. and it was over the town ordinance prohibiting guns! According to Hollywood, when someone asked who was going to pay for the drinks and someone else said, “We’ll draw for it,” they meant quick draw.
This goes right along with a huge item I discovered and wrote up in my entry here, “Four Hundred Sixteen. Confirmed.” That was how many White (mostly) people – pioneers, mountain men, sod busters, settlers – died in the Indian Wars between 1849 and 1890, the height of those wars. How can that be when at least a dozen died in every cowboy and Indian movie I saw as a kid? But that made us think we had a real struggle on our hands, moving West. And those militias set up to fight the Indians back East and so many modern patriots invoke to sanction their weekend beer parties? They were there primarily to protect the good White people against slave uprisings. Their modern day counterparts are not militias aka National Guard but municipal, county, and state police forces.
Letting states secede might not be enough to avoid civil war. Wouldn’t we have to also allow conservative extremists in California to trade places with liberal extremists in Texas (for example). Where would you go if Arizona secedes?
Near the border where I could jump back and forth: the Altright on one side and the cartels on the other. I get automatic citizenship if I move to Italy.
Seriously, my point is to force people to face up to their rhetoric. I just read that a man who studied Gandhi and his movement came back to America and, as a Southern aristocrat, decided the place to apply Gandhian principles was to the race issue, so he enrolled in Howard U. law school. When his grandmother was told, she collapsed and was carried up the stairs screaming, “If God made them equal, I hate God, I hate God!”
That is the depth of the race division.
You and I probably quarrel over how deep that division or sense of division is among average Americans, esp White ones. To me, it is largely unconscious but definitely there ready to be activated by a strange TV show host like Zelensky. Scapegoating is a perennial recourse of scoundrels, mountebanks and politicians….. but I’m repeating myself.
IF, IF White Americans could divest themselves of their racism, conscious or unconscious, and look directly at the real cause of their misery (hint: it’s not Mexicans), we could do fine. But recall that even during the halcyon days of WW II there were race riots and other eruptions of this ugly idea of blood and soil, which I redefine as our soil and their blood.
Now, if you keep insisting on pestering me with pesky details such as just how a bifurcation of the nation would work, well then……. 🙂
p.s. I asked a lady who e-mailed me about reading my blog, one of the old moretprs folks, and I asked her what I could do to encourage folks who read me to respond to me, like you do. I did not get a response.
Not everyone has the impulsiveness that I do to throw “two cents” around. One version of a verse in the Proverbs of Solomon reads, “The fool has no interest in wisdom, but only in spouting his opinion.” Hopefully I don’t go to far in that direction.
If you want some other opinions on another US civil war, see
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166406/what-are-some-plausible-factors-and-societal-changes-that-could-result-in-a-mode
I noticed your responses on the site you referenced above. A couple of those suggestions seemed to be serious but the rest were just about beating their own horse… or however you say that. However, I find speculation like that interesting. Right now we are facing a possible Sanders nomination or a brokered convention. What bothers me, as I’ve written, is the way everyone likes to appear “balanced” and holler “a pox on both your houses.” I have a sneaking suspicion that those people have an issue that neither party addressed the way they wanted it addressed and they have given up on getting what they want. As I tell my Progressive friends, “Don’t forget, you live in a country of people who may not share your opinions and they vote.”