No. Wasn’t supposed to be predicting the future, was supposed to be affecting it, and other than the eventual regime change in Iraq none of it materialized or even made sense in the 21st century, which is why it disappeared. Even if they were influential in Bush Jr.'s war on Iraq they were likely disappointed in the results.
Which made the US civil war very unusual, as civil wars go. Usually, the two sides of a civil war are all mixed up in each others’ business. Which makes the war even uglier.
We came within the width of a wooden door of the January 6th terrorism spreading to something larger. They didn’t succeed. But they could have.
To be sure, we’re not at direct democracy, but that’s all that your links are demonstrating. I didn’t say that we had become a perfect, true democracy but nor have you argued that there’s some good thing that comes with direct democracy. I’ve said that we’ve moved towards direct democracy and that, that has been bad.
Gerrymandering has empowered the parties. In that, you’re somewhat correct that direct democracy was weakened. However, a) weakening direct democracy doesn’t mean that you’re empowering moderate, republican government - which was the goal of the Constitution - and b) even if it had been a move in the right direction, it would be like pointing to a salmon that’s swimming up-stream and saying, “Look, the water flows up-hill!” Climate deniers can point to brief periods of time that the Earth cooled, in the last few decades; it’s not evidence against the trend when you look at the whole image.
On the rules level:
- There did not used to be a popular vote. The electoral college, as originally envisioned, was to be a non-partisan group of locally trusted individuals who were to be empowered to investigate the candidates and vote their conscience. Today, they are uknown hacks, selected by the dominant party in power and are often legally obliged to abide by the popular vote.
- The Senate used to be elected by the state governments. Today, they are elected by a popular vote.
- Congress used to use the voice vote and only reported the high-level number of yeas and nays - no name nor party attached. Now they publicize everything, down to the individual representative. The people can watch and punish the candidates for any action they take against the popular will.
- There used to be very few persons elected. Now, we elect a wide variety of positions - even politicizing judges and police districts.
And then we have the non-rules differences:
- Communication and news used to be hard to transmit and slow to travel. The people couldn’t watch and punish their elected representatives in quick order. Quite often, they probably had no idea what the person was doing.
- For the same reason, politics were local, not national. Even up to the 80s, a Texas Democrat was effectively the same as a California Republican. Now, the parties have national uniformity because they’ll be punished for going off-script or having any shared/cooperative view with “the enemy”.
- Journalism lost most of its funding in the transition to the Internet. Where people used to have minions fly around the country and the world, to talk to people and try to get information out of them, now most journalism is just individuals in their bedrooms accepting content that’s given to them by political types and reposting it, with a little bit of editorial. Fact checking has always been bad for the top line - trash news isn’t new and neither is partisan news - but, in an era where it’s also infeasible for the bottom line as well, even the few companies that try to follow a reasonable fact-checking process are still flubbing it most of the time.
Consider that the New York Gerrymander was popular. Saying that it’s anti-democracy ignores that gerrymanders are only opposed when they’re on the other side.
The framers always and consistently point to the human propensity for factionalism - the desire to split into teams, and approach topics like a sports game between the teams, rather than as fact finders and engineers, working to build something robust, together. And that tendency to factionalism is directly attached to the idea of democracy, based on their experience living in tumultuous times of factionalism run amuck, working in local governments and experiencing different styles of governance, etc. Even besides looking at the history of democracy, these were people who experienced a war, brought on by the popular spirits of about 1/3rd of the population, and watched those individuals set out to murder, torture, and destroy the lives of another 1/3rd (royalists).
Everything we see today - giant factions, ready to destroy the government and replace it with something else - is what we were warned about when populism leads the day. Gerrymandering is the product of our two mega-factions trying to play sports and destroy one another, and the average voter loves it. On the blue side, they just love it slightly less because they’d currently win more votes without it. But, again, they were enthralled with the idea in New York, when gerrymandering was the answer to getting more votes. It’s a lie to say that the goal of your average anti-gerrymanderists is to empower the people, it’s clearly to let Team Blue win. Otherwise, how do you explain New York?
Movements that empower the factions are moves that empower democratists. Direct democracy is mass factionalism and the first-past-the-post system has turned that into two groups who, on the power scale, are more-or-less of equal size.
I am opposed to gerrymandering, but I’m always opposed to it. It’s not to win points for my team - I don’t have a team - it’s because I want to have my children and their children live in a peaceful and prosperous land, that’s run by decent and reasonable people. That’s what the framers tried to build; they showed us the process for doing it; and we’ve only become worse by trying to go the direction that they told us not to go.
The framers believed that the government should work for the people and be answerable to them. But they also had the personal experience to know that human nature makes your average person a very poor candidate for that sort of evaluation. You need to build complex systems that mediate against this.
The modern world has broken what the Framers built. But the modern world also has - in theory - far greater ability to create systems of sortition, to have more complex voting systems, etc. Improving our government doesn’t mean dumping the oversight of the people, it just means adding layers that strip out the crazy part of the human condition.
Of course that doesn’t mean that half of Americans want, or plan to participate in, a civil war.
Mostly. Both sides had resisters and contrarians.
On the northern side Maryland- a slave state- was so hostile to the Lincoln administration and posed so direct a threat to the District of Columbia that the administration imprisoned without trial several prominent sympathizers to the Confederacy. And the prosecution of the war was hampered by “Copperheads” who opposed virtually every measure the Union took to win the war.
The border states of Kentucky (nominally Union) and Tennessee (nominally Confederate) saw bitter internecine warfare, including the massacre of political minorities.
In the South, many upland regions were opposed to the “Rich Man’s War” of the pro-Confederate state governments dominated by the plantation owners. Some counties were actively Unionist, others merely violently opposed to the draft and forced requisition of supplies. Every southern state except South Carolina had some volunteers in the Union army.
Odd, my 2a firearms are for hunting and internal to the house self defense [and concealed carry in the states I am allowed to carry.] I don’t feel the need to take on the whole army, or even a small part of it unless they shoot at me first
I am more worried about the repubs and such that are wanting to abrogate my rights and use violence to accomplish it.
Dalio wrote a book on this a while back, which I liked. Perceptive and simplistic but easy to understand. Criticized for being “too close to China”. I wish he had been more mathematically rigorous.
He estimated the chance of US civil war at 5-10% (over ten years). It has possibly increased more recently, but I would put the chance at 5% myself. A survey of random people is unlikely to be helpful unless they are informed and independent.
In case of a civil war, I assume you, if you are a fighting-age individual, would be conscripted into the side of whoever is running your state, and you would take on whomever your CO tells you to shoot, or else be executed for desertion or treason. Unless it is a guerilla war or something, in which case who knows.
He is not… quite. He is a Populist, which is kinda like fascist-lite, but they still appeal to the (lowest common denominator) voters. Mussolini and Hitler started out as Populists (so yeah, populists can & have turned Fascists). There are a lot of them world wide, Boris, Netanyahu, Ortega, Modi, Bolsonaro, etc. Thankfully that trend seems to be lessening.
https://institute.global/policy/populists-power-perils-and-prospects-2021
Is there a link to the actual study yet?
Are you suggesting populism is unpopular?
They appeal to the masses- who are often xenophobes or bigots. As seen by how many popular votes trump got, they are fairly popular.
Sorry, I see by my link Dalio suggested a 30% chance of US civil war within a decade. This is still too high. It is true US divisions are significant, but the grandfather clock will stop when the old man dies. Trump sycophants and similars shortchange Trump’s sociopathic skill set, see? The military, administrators and enough partisans and people will do the right thing if the fan becomes fecal.
Cesar Sayoc would like a word with you.
That’s already happening. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in 2017 and this year Justice Kavanaugh and Representative and Gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin.
I thought the common thinking has it that while Trump paved the way we were saved by Trump being an actual idiot and buffoon. It would only take someone with a bit more smarts and savvy to finish what Trump started (many think DeSantis might be that person).
How about Virginia / West Virginia?
Of course these days, WV is pretty Trumpy while VA less so.
The battle lines aren’t state vs state. There would be no battle lines as much of the fighting would be on the scale of neighbor vs neighbor with a largely irrelevant military. How is the military fighter pilot going to fly his plane and bomb targets indistinguishable from those who are on his theoretical side, whatever it might be, when those he would bomb know where and he and his family live? Think of the weaponry available to anyone with a few thousand dollars. $5000 will get you a 50 caliber rifle. In a war of this nature no where in the USA is safe.
That’s the difference between sectarian conflict now and wars between armies in the past. To the poster who said the military’s weapons are locked when not in actual use. That may be true. But military members’ weapons that are personally owned aren’t.
The best thing to do when folks blather about civil war 2.0 is to remind them that it’s better to live in an imperfect democracy than a dystopic anarchy.
Now if I were to give untestable odds, I’d say less than 1% chance of a civil war in the US during this century.
I was not arguing for a direct democracy. I was pointing out how far our current system is from one.
We saw how well South Africa got on with Apartheid. 10% of the population was running the show and the rest were disenfranchised.
California has the population of the 21 smallest states. Yet those states get 42 votes and California gets two.
That’s a problem.
Having the last two republican presidents elected by a minority is a problem.
And we have not even started on the inherent racism present in the voting restrictions across red states.
And honestly, if they were inclined to rebellion, how hard would it really be for the troops to break in to that storage? Breaking things is kind of their job, after all.
Plus, the people with the keys might also be inclined to rebellion. Security systems are only as secure as the people charged with running the systems make them. It’s the old, “Who watches the watchmen?” problem.