I’ve already had a discussion on my feeling on this, that the partisan rhetoric on both sides is heading us head long into this abyss. I get the point that there are a lot of the elements on the right that are more out of synch with reality. However, there are groups in the left equally out of synch with reality, which the right trout out as to why the left is delusional. Now I’m seeing posts and articles and pundits increasingly talking about the upcoming civil war.
And many more. How do we unring this bell, and return a more civil discourse (before real blood begins to be spilt)?
Yes, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and turning away the Press Secretary from a restaurant all definitely deserve to be fitted with the same amount of gravitas in our national narratives.
We will never have Civil War 2.0. A civil war requires two armies operating in distinct regions, which isn’t going to happen.
It’s far more likely that widespread political unrest will manifest as worsening sporadic violence / domestic terrorism, similar to IRA-era Northern Ireland or Red Brigade-era Italy. When will that start? I think it already has.
Maybe another way to think about it is: what happens next? We’re already seeing massive, massive polarization, but usually just online. But what if this becomes commonplace in real life? What if it’s not just members of the administration who aren’t being served in certain restaurants, but anyone who admits to voting one way or the other?
Northern Ireland, during the troubles and probably still in certain parts of the country, had plenty of unionist pubs and republican pubs, and you went in one and not the other. Is America trending that way? It seems a stretch, doesn’t it? And yet…
Look, if you’re gonna split the Midwest then you need to keep Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan as a group, send the rest off on their own. If we do this, do it right which means ‘fuck off Indiana’.
Jersey and Pennsylvania are two very different places. The only way they would join together is because the mob in Jersey made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Did you read that Ezra Klein interview? It was ranging and nuanced and in-depth. I think you’ve completely undermined your argument by posting it:
We are living through a period of intense change. One thing it should require of us is humility about knowing what’s going on it. I really do not feel like I have a sure-footed sense of all of, but another thing I know this trite, but I do think one of the problems, one of the places, a worse version of the identity gets called up, and this is something where I do criticize some of the left for, that we do not have good structures right now for listening to things generously, and hearing when somebody is afraid if we don’t already like them.
A lot of times when people are afraid you wanna dismiss it, particularly be if you feel like they are the one … There is something here. There is a lot of … You’ve talked before on my podcast about how powerful a political motion shame is. I’ve been thinking a lot about how powerful an emotion fear is and it sounds like your conversation with Cooper touched on this, we are gonna have to figure out ways, particularly in social media platforms, that do not allow for a lot of nuance of navigating each other’s fear a lot better but I don’t know what they are.