Will There Be Another Civil War?

Like everyone else, a month ago I was convinced the November was going to be a blowout for the GOP, and we’d just have to somehow get through the next two years with a daily rant from Trump about how he’d get elected again in 2024.

But that was then, this is now. And now that the mid-term election campaign is getting into full strife, all of a sudden, the whole thing seems to have changed. Not only do recent polls show the blue team is either even or pulling ahead in the Senate and maybe even the House, but the attempt by the GOP to come up with a rational or believable response to the MAGA narrative for bringing people out to vote seems to have collapsed.

I’m referring to the most recent statements by McConnell and Graham, the former stating that the GOP will end Joe Biden’s spending splurge, the latter saying that we better prepare for another civil war. McConnell’s comment made it on my Google news summary for about 30 minutes, Graham’s pronouncements about the upcoming civil war and ‘riots in the streets’ is still reverberating through the Fake News.

And to make the looming civil war idea even more plausible, today we have a survey from a national polling outfit – YouGov – which says that two out of five Americans believe that a civil war is ‘likely’ to break out in the next ten years.

Pardon me if I indulge myself by delivering a brief lecture from American History 101. But if a reputable polling outfit like YouGov is going to ask Americans whether they think that a civil war is coming soon or coming at any time, the least they could do would be to use the term ‘civil war’ the way it should be used.

A civil war is considered to be a political and military conflict between two groups, whatever they call themselves, who want to control the government of the same, national state. This is what is going on in Syria. This is what has gone on in Somalia. This is what went on in China between 1927 and 1949. This is what happened in Cuba until Batista packed up on New Year’s Day 1959 and moved to Miami Beach.

But Robert E. Lee wasn’t some nineteenth-century version of Fidel. He was the commander of a standing army which was the military force of a nation called the Confederate States of America, a national government which had a Chief Executive, which had a legislature, which printed money and postage stamps and yes, collected taxes, which is how this government paid its troops.

Lincoln could talk all he wanted about how the Union was perpetual and indissoluble but there wasn’t one, single word in the United States Constitution which backed him up. For that matter, there was no mention of a crime called ‘rebellion’ in the Federal Code, even though the government published a collection of civil war documents called the ‘War of the Rebellion’ twenty years after the war came to an end.

I can just see it now. The Democrats (hope, hope) will remain the majority in both houses of Congress even though Trump will no doubt claim that the November vote is a ‘fraud.’ When the 118th Congress convenes in January 2023, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and some of the other 2020 election deniers can stage a walkout, then hold a press conference on the Capitol steps and announce that they will reconvene at Mar-a-Lago which will serve as the capitol of MAGA Nation.

And guess who will be the Chief Executive of this new country? That’s a hard one to figure out, right?

I only hope that if such a Congressional exit takes place, that the United States Congress does in 2023 what it should have done in 1860, which is to let these jerkoffs leave and even give them title to all those crummy, little post offices in the towns where they live.

Now exactly how all these MAGA-nation founders will get their respective states to quit the USA remains to be seen. But if Ted Cruz can somehow convince his fellow Texans to become the first MAGA state, as Grandpa would say, ‘gai gezinta hai’ (read: goodbye and good riddance.)

And by the way, since she has made it clear that she also has Presidential ambitions, Liz Cheney can walk out of the House as well, join the new MAGA government at Mar-a-Lago and make nice to Donald Trump.

Will Trump will take her back? Of course he will.