Everything that can be written about the United States’ socio-political situation has been written. Every idea has been thought and said and written. Each supposedly Olympian Mind has given us his and her two cents. At this point they’re just adding spare change to the mix about Roe, Ukraine, 6 January, and though Covid is out of style right now, its day may come again. Though the CDC may say that Covid might soon be treated like “the flu,” the ranks of the unvaccinated are large enough that we might yet see the hospitals overrun once more. If we don’t, well, good.
Roe, the simple code word for the abortion fight, promises to be the great divisor, the thing that finally shows the US as two separate nations. I’m not so sure. Roe is like the thunderclap that proves the storm has been here for a while. For those who haven’t been following along, in 2020 the United States barely beat back a coup attempt by the defeated outgoing president. That should be enough big news, but it’s not. It’s the historical component of what has become a civil war. It's barely even a historical component. Half the politicians and a third of the electorate can't even agree that there was a coup attempt.
Our commentators have made a cottage industry out of speculating about whether the US is entering a second civil war. They cite racists, the anti-immigrant movement, anti-LGBTQ &c. sentiment, and it goes on through the entire conservative opposition component to the full spectrum of the liberal agenda, from the harmless to the weird.
But all that is what commentators like to call the culture wars. It’s not our new civil war at all. The civil war itself is being fought post 2020 in the state legislatures and a few court rooms. If 2020 was a coup attempt to retain one man, Donald Trump, in power, the new civil war is a focused effort by the national Republican Party and its local chapters to permanently install themselves in power at all levels, by manipulating local laws to dilute non-Republican voting strength.They don't really care about Donald Trump at all. This is no small feat, as the Republican Party represents a dwindling percentage of voters, but our arcane and archaic electoral system will enable this.
The Republicans are assisted in this effort by two factors in addition to the electoral process:
- 1. They are united in a single goal.
- 2. The Democratic Party, their only opponent, is a balkanized group of petitioners, many of whom are galvanized within their own little sub group around a single issue, and are unwilling to unite against a common enemy.
Beginning in 2022, and culminating in 2024, I expect Americans to awaken the morning after election day to find they have elected a government not much to their liking, and I further expect them to find election day 2024 to be just the beginning of a long march into a near single party state unless something not currently foreseeable is done. This is not good; it is very bad. Is anyone listening?
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