Civil War
September 5, 2024
“Human groups from the earliest times to the present have resorted to collective, lethal violence against other groups when prompted by ambition, fear, need or prejudice.”
Those words, in The Economist’s review of a book titled Why War? struck me scarily in today’s America.
Even as it increasingly defies reason, the Trump cult’s pathology intensifies. I want to believe a majority of voters will ultimately gag. Yet fear we face the Scylla of Trump versus the Charybdis of violence.
January 6 was a foretaste. Actually surprising how few people and guns were involved; it could have been far worse. Perhaps this time many will finally feel chastened by successive electoral defeats, prompting some soul-searching. Yet others, long marinated in apocalyptic rhetoric, will gird for a last-ditch battle.
We’re constantly told how violent humans are. However, Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, rigorously documented violence actually declining. And the big reality is that most of us — especially in advanced modern nations — live practically violence-free, in oases of peaceableness. It’s been six decades since I personally encountered any violence.
And for all the blood-curdling Trumpist noise, most of his voters won’t reach for their weapons if he’s defeated, but will just show up for work as usual the next day. And yet — even if that describes 99% — that other 1% is hundreds of thousands. Many of them gun nuts romanticizing war.
Trump will incite them. For all his flag-hugging, loving not America but only himself. Election defeat (by a non-white woman no less) will feel to him a massive insult to be avenged. His unhingement will go into overdrive. This megalomaniacal moral monster, if he can’t rule the country, will try to burn it down.
Buckle your seat belts.