THE UNCIVIL CIVIL WAR OF 2024

As a high school and university history teacher, I taught the Civil War many times: the causes, the conflicts and the compromises. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Founders were forced to kick the slavery can down the road, leaving the issue for future generations to work out. The seventy-five years from 1787 to 1861, the giants of the age, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, William Lloyd Garrison, John Quincy Adams, Frederick Douglass, Steven Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, could not work it out. The violent leaders of slave rebellions, Nat Turner and John Brown, made the situation worse. The 3/5 compromise, the Missouri Compromise, popular sovereignty, the Compromise of 1850, and the Fugitive Slave Act, provided temporary respite. In 1858, Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court, had the last word on slavery, siding with the south in The Dred Scott case. Of course, that wasn’t the last word; the Civil War was the last word.

COULDN’T WRAP MY MIND AROUND IT

That’s history. That’s the way it was. However, one aspect of the Civil War I could never quite wrap my mind around was this: the visceral hatred that took the lives of 630,000 American boys, a number greater than all our other wars combined. Not only is the number itself staggering, but the carnage was done with cannon, rifles, and bayonets; death was dealt out at close range. The Civil war was more personal, more direct, more mano y mano. How could everyday people with a common heritage, language, religion, identity, and nationalistic pride massacre each other with such staggering bloodshed. Objectively, I understood the forces at work. Tribalism galvanizes in-group solidarity and out-group hostility. Subjectively, I didn’t feel it, I didn’t quite get it. Until now.

I’m beginning to sense what visceral hatred feels like. Books and mutterings about a coming civil war, are not uncommon; they are a clarion call – a warning of impending danger. A call to action. A wake-up call. All of this chatter does not bode well for compromise. I fear it’s not going to end well.

The issues of gun control, abortion, gender affirming care, school curriculums, boys identifying as girls in sports, and racism, are as angry and intransigent as the conflicts over slavery in the 1850’s. Each side sees the other, as not only a danger to democracy, but as inherently evil and worthy of destruction. A national Zogby poll in 2021, found that forty-six percent of Americans thought a future civil war was likely, while forty-three percent thought it unlikely. Eleven percent were not sure. A 2021 poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics found that a majority of Trump voters are ready to secede from the Union while forty-one percent of Biden voters feel it may be “time to split the country.” A particularly troubling finding was that almost ninety percent of voters on both sides agree that people like them won’t belong in America anymore if the “other side” has its way, and more than twenty percent say they “agree completely” that such is the case. Perhaps the most ominous indicator of all, was an NBC poll in November 2022, finding that “80% of voters in both parties think the other side is going to destroy America.”

These numbers indicate that the long-predicted “Crisis of 2020” has arrived. In his 2022 book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future,” Canadian novelist and journalist, Stephen Marche, wrote, “Each side accuses the other of hating America, which is only another way of saying that both hate what the other means by America.” He adds, “The background hum of hyper-partisanship, the rage and loathing of everyday American politics, generates a widespread tolerance for violence.”

The proliferation of so many books imagining another American Civil war, gives credence to its possibility.

The landslide win of Trump and the Republicans has not reduced the rancor and the divisions. If anything, it made it worse.

After the election, we learned that a FEMA official in hurricane ravaged Lake Placid Florida, directed aid workers to bypass homes with Trump signs on their lawns. The families in these homes no longer have homes. Like you and me, they have jobs, children, and mortgages to pay. The Mayor of Lake Placid, said, "It's unbelievable that we, as human beings can't come together and help our communities instead of destroying them.” In the current climate, it's not at all unbelievable.

Meanwhile, tough-talking Democrats are warning Trump supporters to prepare for battle.

Illinois Governor Pritzker, warned, “You come for my people, you come through me.”

New York Governor, Kathy Hucul, pulled no punches – “If you try to harm New Yorkers or roll back their rights, I will fight you every step of the way.”

California Governor, Gavin Newsome announced, “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle…let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law…our fight for freedom and opportunity endure…”

Newsom called for a special session of the state legislature to ‘protect’ California from Donald Trump on civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families, and “to safeguard California values.” (Whatever those are).

SAFE SPACES

Responding to the emotional turmoil university students suffered in response to the election, Georgetown University created a "self-care suite" to help them through these difficult times. Students at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy were reportedly offered treats like "milk and cookies" and "hot cocoa" as well as "Lego" toys and "Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises" to help them survive the trauma of The Second Coming of The Donald. Trump’s victory. Other universities cancelled classes and rescheduled exams.

The University of Puget Sound announced a full week of "self-care" for election recovery where students can stroll through a "walkable labyrinth" with "calming lighting and music;" "recharge" their mental health in an arts and crafts corner; or make a collage in a "supportive space for election processing." Other events on the week's schedule included "support spaces" exclusively for LGBTQ students and students of color to talk about their election anxiety. In addition, stressed- out snowflakes can, “Visit the Rotunda to spend some quality time with our favorite furry friends and some hot chocolate!”

Even the Babylon Bee could not have dreamed-up a better spoof.

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A SINGER SIDEBAR

The infantilization of college students is almost indistinguishable from the tactics of cults. Young people join cults to become children again. When one joins the cult of Reverend Moon's Unification Church, for example, they join a family and are christened with baby names. "Indeed," wrote Willa Appel in Cults in America, "potential converts are treated like indulged children: their hands are held, and they are plied with extra portions at meals, which often consist of 'kiddie' food — milk, cereal, cookies, and ice cream." It's not hard to understand the appeal of simulating childhood. When the adherent becomes a child, he is cared for and loved. Those in safe spaces are faux victims, trying to cope on the one hand, and empowered on the other. “I’ve been offended, so you’d better back off and genuflect before me.”

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Meanwhile, tears are flowing.

Late night host, Jimmy Kimmel cried when discussing the election results.

"Let's be honest, it was a terrible night last night,” Kimmel said. "It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hardworking immigrants who make this country go. It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him, and guess what, it was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too, you just don’t realize it yet."

Thanks, Jimmy, you just called the seventy-five million people who voted for Trump, idiots.

Rob Schneider responded, "You see, it’s easy for you and Oprah to lecture hard working American parents who both have to work to make ends meet and live paycheck to paycheck because you and Oprah are RICH, FLY PRIVATE PLANES and if food prices go up 26% it doesn’t affect you or YOUR Family at all. If the price of avocados went up to $5,000 dollars, you and Oprah would just eat five grand guacamole."

CONCLUSION

The election of Donald Trump did not end the rancor; it shined a light on the ever-deepening chasm. In 1881, sixteen years after the end of the Civil War, an unrepentant Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy said,

The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered on a new and enlarged arena.

Ditto for 2024