Civil Unrest next level or the beginning of the failure of our democracy

Snubbing Trump bigots does not equal a civil war. Just sayin.

Yes, and no. While it’s true that some families were divided and members fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, it was still a territorial war, North vs. South. A Conservative vs. Liberal Civil War today would literally be fought between neighbors, as in picking up your shotgun and going next door in your subdivision and shooting your actual neighbor. That is not going to happen. Even in Conservative bastion states like Texas and Indiana, you still have places like Austin and Indianapolis. There are zero boundary lines and no discernible “front” in such a war, which makes it far less likely to happen.

I agree completely, hence the question.

I think the thinking that we are near a civil war or that Trump is Hitler and the brown shirts will soon be knocking on doors is ridiculous.

It’s crazy talk people.

First they came for the immigrants, and I said nothing.

Next they came for the Boomers, and I said “Aw man, I liked Scuzz. Now I am sad.”

;-)

Yeah, it is. But is that how it happens?

Look at today’s Supreme Court decision on the travel ban. They voted 5-4 in favor of the ban. However, at the same time, they explicitly struck down an old ruling (extremely rare as I understand it) from the case Korematsu v. US. In that case, the court ruled that an executive order from WWII that put Japanese Americans into internment camps was constitutional.

Could it be that the court was concerned that the President might decide to intern all Muslims for security reasons? What sort of response do you think that might have created?

I think that perhaps we’ve become complacent, in thinking that any comparison to truly horrific historical figures is always hyperbole.

Let me be extremely clear here:
Our current President intentionally separated children from their parents, and put them into concentration camps, with the declared purpose of using this as a tactic to terrorize immigrants coming to our country.

That is not hyperbole. That is a thing which actually happened.

We are no longer in the world that we previously considered normal. Things are different now. This is not a thing which would have even been considered within the realm of possibility a few years ago.

It’s the problem of the boiling frog.

He just said the other day that he wants to suspend due process in the case of migrants, which would mean ICE could pretty much detain anyone they wanted without the issue being taken before a judge.

He has expressed admiration for dictators far more than democrats (small ‘d’), he has repeatedly called the news media the ‘enemy of the people,’ and the leitmotif, the pedal point, the very background hum of his entire administration, indeed his entire political persona, is racebaiting and fear mongering. (I mean, he first got his base interested by saying ‘that black guy shouldn’t be in the White House because he’s not a Real American’.)

What many of us are contending with is a conflict between two sides of our brain. One side feels, as you do, that any Godwinning is likely to be hyperbole, things have been bad in the past ('68, for example), and so on. Yes, Presidents have been compared to Hitler before (all of them, probably). The other side wonders: when does the frog know it’s boiling? Can it ever know except in retrospect? And isn’t our supreme patriotic duty, as Americans, to be ever vigilant against authoritarianism when it rears its head? And if this isn’t what incipient (as opposed to completed) authoritarianism looks like, in the context of American society, then what will it look like? And will we recognize it then?

The mind leaps to the Hitler analogy not because we all love paranoid delusion but because what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 constitutes the single greatest political lesson in the history of our species, and we are mandated by our consciences never to forget it, never to ignore it.

As to the Civil War question, I think there are some significant differences between now and 1860. Most importantly IMO, in 1860 what was at issue was an immense financial interest. Slaveowners stood to be ruined if they gave up their ‘property’ and they perceived a powerful groundswell moving in that direction. Although there are financial issues at stake now, more in the other direction (the less-propertied in danger of being gouged by the more-propertied), it’s a much more complex and nuanced situation.

Also, of course, in 1860 the business of raising a competitive army was not so complicated. The U.S. standing army was tiny and both sides relied upon state-run levies – essentially militias folded into a larger organization – to build their military power. A gathering of states could relatively easily field twenty thousand men armed with muskets and a few cannon. In this age of laser guided missiles, aircraft carriers, and whatnot, to say nothing of the vastly stronger permanent standing army the U.S. has, I don’t really see how the military situation would work out. A Civil War 2.0 would probably look more like Syria – one side hanging on to the bulk of the military expertise/hardware, the other side wielding K-mart semiautomatic rifles and relying on manpower/willpower to run down the clock. It would be very ugly and incredibly violent. I’m not sure that many current Americans, nor even the MAGA-heads for all they like to wave their guns around, are up for that.

Amen, I get not wanting to believe that we could fall so far. On the other hand, when you look at it with objectively its startling how far things have unraveled in such a short amount of time.

I think you insult the Jewish experience in WW2 by calling the kids in cages a “concentration camp” and thus comparing Trump to Hitler.

It’s so much worse than that.

If you suspend due process for migrants, you suspend due process FOR EVERYONE. Because there’s no way you can prove that you aren’t a migrant.

Hey, guess what! ICE says you’re an illegal immigrant. Out you go! Oh, what’s that? You’re a citizen? Well since you don’t get a court date, there’s no chance for you to ever prove that. They can do whatever they want.

That’s the whole POINT of due process. If you remove it, then an ICE agent can do literally anything they want to you, and you have no recourse. There’s nothing you can do, at all.

Concentration camps go back to the Boer War – they are literally places where you concentrate people. The Nazis took it to the next level of horribleness with death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz II Birkenau.

The analogy might be a stretch even so, but it’s not like you need gas chambers in there to make it valid.

They didn’t START by murdering all the jews in camps.

As I said, “anyone they wanted.”

We will defeat Trump with hyperbole. Go us.

It’s really really really important to keep this top of mind at all times. Read about 1936, for example. The Nuremburg Laws had been passed but the concept of death camps was years away except maybe in the minds of Hitler and Heydrich and Himmler and a few others. (And guys like Eichmann were busily trying to solve the Jewish Question by forcing emigration, not by killing Jews.) Meanwhile Hitler was making nice with the international community and putting on a big show at the Olympics.

The problem with Trump is that his presence is so cognitively destabilizing that it’s hard to know when you’re using hyperbole and when you’re actually under-reporting the awfulness.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.” – George Motherfucking Orwell

When does it get to the point where you start thinking that it’s a problem?

There was a book in the 80s:

I love this question. If we shouldn’t be concerned or alarmed now, when in your mind should we be? Id like to see if I think its reasonable, or fits better defining ‘we’re already cooked’ analogy.