Let’s Look at the New Civil War and How It Is Evolving

 You have probably noticed, as I have, the increasing talk about whether the intractable divisions within America are going to lead to a new civil war. However, war isn’t limited to armed conflict, and it’s time to recognize that we are already in a civil war and to consider how it might evolve over the coming months and years.

As I write this, Russian troops are encircling Ukraine. Cyber attacks have been launched and disinformation is a potent weapon of choice. The parallels with America seem obvious. American democracy is in the not-so-early stages of an “incursion” by anti-democratic forces that is a prelude to a complete takeover. We saw an early skirmish on Jan. 6, 2021, but there will likely be more violence as time progresses. Violence against others shows the rest of us what could happen if we resist non-violent attacks — that’s how terrorism works.

The new civil war is being waged on several levels. Politically, non-compliant Republicans are threatened with primary challenges by Trump-endorsed candidates. Members of his “base” reinforce the demands for compliance with death threats against them and their families.

Also on the political level is the “precinct strategy” of Steve Bannon, the former president’s close political adviser whom Trump pardoned of federal fraud charges. On his “War Room” podcast the night before the Jan. 6th insurrection, Bannon rallied his millions of listeners, saying, “We’re on the point of attack. All hell will break loose tomorrow.” As reported by Pro-Publica on Sept. 2, 2021, while the insurrection was happening, Bannon said, “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”

After that uprising failed to keep Trump in office, Bannon’s strategy evolved, producing results we can all see. To quote the ProPublica article, 

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

It’s called “asymmetrical warfare,” a term coined by Andrew J.R. Mack in a 1975 article, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars.” Disinformation, supercharged now by social media, was rendered mainstream if not invented by the Soviet KGB, which created a “special disinformation office” in 1923. Disinformation, such as "the big lie" and “critical race theory,” is a primary tool of the forces within the Republican Party which want to supplant our liberal democratic heritage with an autocracy rooted in racism and white supremacy. 

There are enough Americans with expressed and unexpressed racial animus to provide a boots-on-the-ground army to intimidate and, if necessary, attack opponents in a guerrilla war against the rest of us. The anti-racism movement has only empowered and inflamed those elements of our society.

Democracy worked fine for those forces when they were in the majority, but as America diversifies and they find themselves unable to win free and fair elections, stronger measures are needed, starting with voter suppression.

Of course, ultimately a war requires arms, and the rightwing forces are well armed, as the rest of us are keenly aware. The majority of weapons, especially assault rifles, are in the hands of the right wing and its militias, making verbal threats a highly effective weapon.  Brandishing arms often suffices. Although we could see assassinations and other violence, this may be a war which the right wing wins without much armed conflict.

Death threats and threats against their families have been highly effective at getting non-compliant school board members, election workers and elected officials to cut and run, surrendering our schools, election boards, city councils, state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to the forces of autocracy.

Effective manipulation of voting laws provides an air of legitimacy to the new autocrats. Thanks to the lifetime appointment of like-minded judges to our courts, especially the Supreme Court, repressive and anti-democratic laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court in the past (think Plessy v. Ferguson et al.), and we could see that again.

It’s sad and disheartening to see the disinformation spouted on rightwing media repeated by ordinary citizens. I see it in my inbox regularly.  If these forces prevail in 2022 and 2024, I fear that the “American Experiment” will have failed.

My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com.

 

The 2022 Mid-Term Elections Will Test How Gullible & Misinformed We Are

   I’m reminded of the saying attributed (erroneously, it turns out) to Abraham Lincoln that “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Donald Trump and his enablers are working hard to prove that statement wrong — or at least to fool enough voters between now and the 2022 mid-term elections to gain control of the U.S. Congress. And just in case they can’t fool enough voters, they’re also working hard to keep non-Trump voters from the polls.

An actual quote from Abraham Lincoln is quite appropriate in this regard:  “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether our nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] can long endure.”

How much longer can the con we know as the Big Lie build and maintain momentum?

It’s reported that the well-armed and well practiced militias who failed in the January 6 insurrection attempt will take up their arms in August to “reinstate” Donald Trump as president of the United States.  Apparently, they think they could succeed. If those militias do attempt such a coup — for that’s what it would be — and it fails, which it surely will, what effect will that have? Will the Republicans who still consider Trump critical to their own electoral future continue to hold their noses and stand behind him?  Will they, as Republican senatorial candidate J.D. Vance put it so well, “suck it up” and stick with Trump even though they know better?

The fact that so many Americans actually believe the Big Lie (and all the lesser ones) says something very sad, and very disturbing about the United States — namely that roughly 30% of Americans are easily manipulated because they are so gullible and misled.

Surely you have seen the statistics about how uneducated Americans are about basic American facts such as how many branches of government there are. All you need to do is Google the question, “How stupid are Americans,” and you will [not] be surprised how many academic, comedic and journalistic entries you’ll find, such as this June 26, 2020, headline from The Guardian: “Trevor Noah: America ‘dealing with a deadly strain of stupidity’.”

Thom Hartmann’s email newsletter on July 8 reminded us that the term “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated with the Jim Jones religious cult which committed mass suicide on Jones’ order in Guyana back in 1978 by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

Hartmann calculates that for every one of the 913 people who committed suicide with Jim Jones, 438 Americans have died because they adopted from Trump a reluctance to take the Covid-19 vaccine. However, unlike Jones, who killed himself along with his followers, Donald Trump had himself and his family secretly vaccinated in the White House. This shouldn’t surprise us, but it also probably wouldn’t faze his followers, who have been nicknamed Cult-45.

There are two ironies that are apparent to me. The first one is that the craziness coming from the Republicans, QAnon, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump himself is as motivating for those of us who recognize the con as it is for Trump’s base.

The second irony is that Covid is surging only in the states with low vaccination rates, and virtually all Covid deaths are people who declined to be vaccinated. In other words the virus is probably killing off Trumpers in numbers that may well match or exceed the number of non-Trump voters the same states are seeking to suppress.

The coming months will get more and more interesting. The Trump organization and possibly Trump himself may go on trial. There may be that promised insurrection in August. There will be more books published about Trump and his actions as president and before he became president. Worst of all, however, there will be more hysteria manufactured about wedge issues such as critical race theory. Buckle up!