http://www.commdiginews.com/politics-2/standing-on-the-brink-of-americas-second-civil-war-53295/Standing on the brink of America’s second Civil War
by William Brute Bradford
Dec 5, 2015
Without a national commitment to limited government and civil discourse, we will find ourselves in the midst of a modern Civil War in America unless we take steps to avoid it
WASHINGTON, December 5, 2015 – Americans are split into two utterly opposed camps at odds over guns, gays, climate change, abortion, the welfare state, healthcare, free speech, and national security. In the media, on the streets, and in workplaces, conservatives and progressives battle over everything.
The bitterness of this internal division has threatened civil war since 1789, unleashed it once, and may do so again.
That the United States circa 2015 is in a state of pre-civil war should terrify all Americans. As Union General William T. Sherman, responsible for the deaths of at least 3% of his countrymen noted while blazing through Georgia in 1864, “War is hell.”
Thus, because civil wars are particularly hellacious, they are especially to be avoided. Ferocious civil wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen, and the 1990s-era wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, make clear what happens when a nation comes apart.
Brothers fight brothers, blood runs, things burn, and people die—by the millions.
Nearly a score of civil wars ongoing around worldwide attest that is clear that prudence surrenders to passion all too frequently.
Why?
Civil wars happen when three trends merge to create a perfect storm.
First, the impetus to civil war is ideological, not economic or territorial. A nation splits on the basis of deeply incompatible beliefs, values, and ideas about the relationship between the state and the people. There is a divide about how life, liberty and property should be resolved. There is a divide about who resolves conflicts and how.
Ideologically hostile “tribes” trapped within national boundaries find no zone of agreement and no modus vivendi that allow them to coexist.
Second, a nation lurching toward civil war has abandoned its formula for resolving disputes.
Many national constitutions limit governmental powers and delimit boundaries between public and private. People in well-governed republics can choose their versions of the good life within the private sphere.
Where issues are inherently public in nature and thus within governmental province, the constitution provides for the resolution of political and legal conflicts. When followed, constitutions remove many issues from public life, leaving individuals free to pursue happiness so long as that pursuit does not intrude on the rights of others.
And constitutions provide rules and principles for fairly and authoritatively resolving what disputes remain. Yet inhabitants of nations in cold civil wars no longer agree as to constitutional meanings and reject any limits upon government powers, or, worse, abandon constitutions to the passions of temporary political majorities—damning the rights of minorities in the process.
Third, both sides in pre-civil war mode see the other not merely as misguided but as evil, and view their ideas, and those who hold them, as beyond persuasion—fit solely for excommunication and even extermination.
All these preconditions currently exist in the U.S. of 2015.
Contemporary American conservatives revere the military, the police, the family, houses of worship, and gun ownership. They champion a limited federal government charged simply with the defense of life, liberty, and property against domestic and foreign threats. They reject taxing and spending to feed a welfare state.
Conservatives ground notions of the good life in traditional morality and demand government leave them, their values, and their wallets alone. President Thomas Jefferson best articulated conservative ideology when he opined that “that government is best which governs least[.]”
American progressives, in contrast, champion Planned Parenthood, ObamaCare, liberal academia, gay marriage, and activism against “climate change.”
For progressives, government is but an engine to promote “social justice” through wealth redistribution. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a 1944 State of the Union Address, articulated a progressive ideology that includes rights to employment, food, clothing, recreation, housing, medical care, retirement, education, and recreation.
Social welfare expenditures trump national security, and because combatting Islamist terrorism would take money away from transformative projects it cannot be acknowledged to exist. Further, gun control is needed to defang preemptively conservative opposition and the capacity to resist the taxes and regulations at the heart of the fundamentally transformative progressive project.
In short, progressives must tax and spend, while grabbing guns and civil liberties, to prevail.
This ideological divide maps across every issue facing Americans today—gun rights, ObamaCare, gay marriage, abortion, free speech, “climate change,” immigration, radical Islam, and so forth.
Conservatives and progressives could not agree as to a common core of facts and assumptions upon which to negotiate differences even if they were willing to try.
Worse, Americans have completely bifurcated on the subject of the Constitution, which for conservatives prohibits virtually all of what progressives intend.
The document is a series of “thou shalt nots” directed toward the government. Those “thou shall nots” protect your individual rights to life, liberty, property and, particularly through the Second Amendment, enable the people to resist tyranny.
For progressives, the Constitution is a fundamentally flawed anachronism that judges must interpret to allow the will of the masses (or even unelected judges) to fundamentally transform the nation. The tortured Supreme Court logic on ObamaCare and gay marriage and the reactions after the fact—despair on the part of conservatives, and a celebratory White House illuminated in the rainbow flag—illustrates just how divided Americans are over the meaning of the Constitution’s power over our laws and liberty.
Third, American progressives have ramped up their demonization of conservatives.
President Obama openly described Republicans as “the enemy” in campaigning for Hispanic votes, and in a recent Democratic presidential debate progressive candidate Hillary Clinton described Republicans—not radical Islam, not a nuclear Iran, not economic malaise, not dreaded diseases—as her primary foe.
Black Lives Matter openly calls for the murder of law enforcement officers. Progressive commentators’ smear Ben Carson in an attempt to destroy his candidacy rather than engage his message.
Champions of the Second Amendment are antigoverment “gun nuts” collectively responsible for shootings of innocents at abortion facilities.
Principled opponents of gay marriage are “homophobes” to be sued and jailed. Heralds of the threat of radical Islam imported under the guise of refugees are “Islamophobes scared of widows and orphans.”
Administrators whose sole crime is being white and insufficiently obeisant to sophomoric student radicals demanding “safe spaces” and insulation from critical thought are “racists” and to be fired immediately.
Global warming skeptics are thought criminals on moral par with Holocaust deniers. Social media battles waged by progressive character assassins against conservative academics and politicians approach cyberwarfare.
In 2015 the U.S. is $20 trillion in debt, under Islamist attack, and adrift from its political and moral traditions. It is not merely a country in steep military and economic decline. It is a republic in a cold civil war.
Every issue is contested by opposed camps who convert disagreements into hatred and enmity. Rule of the mob is replacing rule of law, and rather than look outward for enemies we turn inward.
ISIS has threatened to make U.S. streets run with blood. We may beat them to it, or at least help them prevail.
We must do three things right now to save our nation from civil war.
First, we voters and politicians alike, must recommit to the Jeffersonian principle of limited government. Not every problem is a government problem. Harnessing government to take resources from some to pay for entitlements that purchase the votes of the entitled is un-American and unaffordable for the masses.
Progressive ideology threatens the basic national compact. Attempts to fundamentally transform the nation through legislative or judicial activism inevitably fuel an ideological conflict that imperils the nation.
Second, the Constitution established a modus vivendi to allow conservatives and progressives to coexist but only if we read that document as the Founding Fathers intended it—as a series of “thou shalt nots” limiting government power.
Progressives can have their safe space to live their version of the good life in the private, but not in the public, sphere. They must stop trying to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
That very phrase declares ideological warfare and abandons the Constitution, laying down two of the three predicates for U.S. civil war.
Finally, Americans must (re)learn what the concept of “enemy” means. It isn’t an opposing political party.
Americans have lost the knowledge that those who fought in World War II possessed. Enemies are those who threaten the continued existence of the nation. Radical Islam is the enemy of the 21st century just as Nazism and Communism were the enemies of the 20th.
We must admit this and come together to defeat it.
In 1995, an ethnic Serb fighting on behalf of Croatia advised this author that as horrific as the civil war in Yugoslavia was, of the civil war he predicted for the U.S. He saw this nation far more ideologically divided and resource-rich than his own. For these reasons, our Second Civil War will be far more terrible and bloody, and make the world forget the Yugoslav Civil War.
Indeed, a second U.S. civil war that inflicted death on the scale of the first would kill ten million Americans.
Let’s prove our Yugoslavian friend wrong by committing to limited government, a traditional understanding of the Constitution, and a relearning of the concept of the “enemy.”
Only by doing so can we ensure that Americans never suffer the hell of civil war again.
