Paul Pelosi's Assault is More Evidence the Long-Anticipated Civil War is Upon Us
We don't need a carbon copy of 1930s Germany to recognize the similarities today. We don't need an attack on Fort Sumpter for the civil war to begin. It has begun.
Photo by Daniel Stuben. on Unsplash
Headline from Business Insider: “The far right is calling for civil war after the FBI raid on Trump’s home. Experts say that fight wouldn’t look like the last one.”
The New York Times: “Is Civil War Coming to America?”
The Washington Post: “Is the United States headed for a civil war?”
What the media is anticipating is a shooting war like the one that ripped the country apart from 1861 to 1865.
But if we step back and consider the general definition of small-c civil war, we might realize it’s already started.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “civil war” as, “A war between factions or regions of the same country.”
So maybe this headline from The Guardian is the most accurate: “The next US civil war is already here — we just refuse to see it.”
On Friday, Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked with a hammer in his San Francisco home after a man broke in and demanded, “Where is Nancy?”
The assault left Pelosi with a skull fracture and injuries to his right arm and hands.
His assailant never got to his intended target.
Midterm election voting is underway, and the republican party is fulfilling its promise to confuse, frustrate, circumvent, and complicate the electoral process in an attempt to swing ballots in its favor.
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Two years ago, election deniers were hanging their hopes on statewide audits, like the farce perpetrated in Maricopa County, Arizona that confirmed — again — Joe Biden was the undisputed winner over Trump.
Just because they failed doesn’t mean they were going away.
They attacked the Capitol January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overthrow democracy.
Right-wing vigilante groups have been spending the past two years mobilizing.
Since the last presidential election, threats to poll workers have spiked as right-wing Donald Trump supporters targeted their animosity toward those they baselessly felt were helping to “steal votes” from Trump.
Now they’ve expanded the conspiracy to “votes being stolen” from all republican candidates.
Protect Democracy policy advocate, Jennifer Dresden, warned:
“To be clear, we’re not yet at a point where political violence has fundamentally undermined our democracy. But when violence is connected to other authoritarian tactics, like disinformation and efforts to corrupt elections, that sets a dangerous path for our democracy that we cannot ignore.”
The threats against election workers isn’t just about intimidation about violence.
Its real intent is to frighten those who would work as poll watchers or inspectors into never performing those jobs again, because when there aren’t enough poll workers, the possibility of mistakes increases, bolstering the right-wing claim elections are inherently flawed; i.e., fraudulent.
Until fairly recently, most political aspirants didn’t need to worry much about the possibility of violence against them and their families.
Political violence had been something we normally associate with third-world dictatorships, weaker governments replete with crime, corruption, and fascism.
A recent report from researchers at the University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP), however, reveals an alarming number of 8,600 respondents — one in five — believe political violence may be necessary to achieve certain political goals.
According to the survey, half of Americans somewhat agree the country will engage in civil war “in the next few years.”
Nearly one in five assert they will soon arm themselves in situations “where political violence is justified.”
Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a Carnegie Endowment senior fellow specializing in democracy and security, stated:
“This is a very strong methodological study that backs up what we are seeing in a lot of other data. America is at risk of experiencing major political violence.”
This data comes at the same time members of the House of Representatives are going to start receiving up to $10,000 to upgrade security at their homes amid increasing threats.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), senatorial candidate and chair of a House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Capitol Police, told Axios “everybody’s on high alert” after two incidents in which a man was arrested for threatening Wash. Rep. Pramila Jayapal with a handgun outside her home, and a man attacked NY Rep. Lee Zeldin, who is running for governor.
Ryan said:
“The threats are real, the increases have been unbelievable. We’ve got to do everything we can to try to make sure people are safe. Lot of wild cats out there.”
Liliana Mason, Johns Hopkins University political science professor and co-author of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy, agrees political violence is trending upward, explaining:
“I think of it as pretty low numbers of people who actually approve of violence at all. The problem is that, if you go from 7% to 20%, that means that there are certain social spaces where the norms around anti-violence are eroding.”
US Capitol police reported 9,625 threats and “concerning actions or statements” against congressional members last year.
Five years ago, there were 3,939 reported.
44% — nearly half of respondents identifying as republicans on a CBS and YouGov survey administered to 2,021 — answered that we should accept mass shootings as the price of living in a free society.
There are a few groups new to the political violence milieu, however.
So much hate and violence have been lately directed at school board members and school district personnel, the FBI has gotten involved.
Librarians have also become targets of extremist threats from neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Over the past year, we have seen more evidence America is closer to fascism than ever.
Jason Stanley, writing for The Guardian, stated:
“The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.”
Even Canadians fear the American experiment is on the precipice of ending.
In his new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Canadian author Stephen Marche warns:
“The United States is coming to an end. The question is how.”
He isn’t alone.
Cascade Institute executive director Thomas Homer-Dixon begins a Globe & Mail piece titled “ The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare” with a harrowing assertion:
“By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.”
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
Yet here we are, beginning to look more like Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Mauritius, Namibia, Slovenia, and Poland, countries the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance states the United States’ “backsliding” democracy is beginning to resemble.
Over the past forty years, we have been in the midst of a slow-moving coup that got accelerated five years after Donald Trump’s election.
Can we yet count ourselves among the banana republics in which political violence is a feature instead of the bug it has traditionally been?
The civil war has already started, and with there being more guns than people, it’s looking more threatening every day.
Will this be a North versus South conflict?
Probably not.
Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
We don’t need a carbon copy of 1930s Germany to recognize the similarities today.
We don’t need an attack on Fort Sumpter for the civil war to begin.
It has begun.