It's funny sometimes the way history echoes and rhymes. Today's two 'sides' are basically the same two sides we've always had, they've never gotten along, ever; they didn't get along when the country was founded and we had to create the Senate in order to coax them into a bitter and unhappy marriage, forfeiting the integrity of our republic in the process.
They didn't get along in the 1860's when the industrial north came to be so utterly dominant that even the south's scheme for minority rule would be insufficient to sustain slavery. And it came to blows, and the south fought for a hopeless and evil cause-- whether you believe that cause was slavery or states rights-- still evil either way, because for the south states rights meant disproportionate representation and minority rule, using the Senate as a tool for functional disenfranchisement, as it's used today.
The thing that seems to echo is something that happened in 1859, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. John Brown was not a smart man, a suicidal religious fanatic, and probably a prolific masturbater, he rounded up a gang of rabble to raid a US federal armory, seeking to use the weapons stored there to arm Southern slaves and start a mass slave uprising. The entire plan was half-baked from start to end in ways I won't go into detail on, but--
It was a desperate, immoral, and fanatical act that was done with
good intentions. What essentially amounted to an attack on the federal government, was eventually
celebrated in the North, and was such a shock to the South that it kicked off the formation of organized local militias that would go on to be the backbone of the Confederacy just a few years later.
I think if both the right and left continue down this path toward a
warlike footing, basically a focus on total vanquishing of the other side, across all spheres-- political, social, economic-- then we're not very far from a crisis somewhere close in scale to the Civil War. And it would be nothing like the Civil War, it wouldn't be country vs. country, army vs army, the US isn't set up like that anymore. I feel like it'd be just a shitload of violence and chaos.
Honestly my preference at this point is what we should have done all along. The US should not be one nation, it should be at least two. Liberal, cosmopolitan, urban areas... this country would look like Germany, dense, highly industrialized. Then conservative, more rural and heartland areas... this country would look more like a conservative version of Canada or Australia, lower density, greater proportion of resource extraction and agriculture.
It has been almost 300 years and this experiment has not worked lol. The right and left have, and always have had, wholly incompatible visions for virtually everything and have constantly undermined each other. In fact they've only been able to coexist in a single country because of ridiculous, bogus compromises like the Senate. Oh no, we won't be #1 top dog superpower! Who gives a fuck, we have our own continent, and we're about to get shitcanned by an Asian coalition anyway.
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]