Also, a lot of you are saying that our standard of living is too high for large masses of people to risk throwing it all away in a civil war.
But very few Americans alive today have experienced anything like dire need. We our material comfort for granted. With nothing to compare our current situation to, how are people to judge whether or not they’re in dire need right now? If people keep telling the masses that their lives are terrible, and the only thing keeping them from everything they want is those other people, are we really so confident that they’ll step back before it’s too late and say “Well, to be honest, things aren’t really thatbad, are they?”
Add to that the romantic ideal of a downtrodden people rising up and demanding justice from their oppressors… “Oh, wouldn’t it just be so cool, you guys?!? It always works out so well in the movies! What do we have to lose?”
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So what’s the threshold? How many people have to be convinced their way of life is under siege before that fuse gets lit?
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A key will be when you see people actually doing something, instead of just talking about it…or doing the minimum (taking a knee at the start of a football game, as opposed to quitting playing and taking to the streets, for instance). During the run up to the civil war there was real, wide spread violence and even pitched battles across state lines. THAT is people riled enough by a perceived threat to their way of life or committed to a cause enough to go out and do heinous things in the name of their cause. People bitching on the internet then going on vacation or to a monster truck rally or switching the channel to the next riveting episode of Survivor? Not so much.
Horseshit. Good grief man, get a grip and be real. People TALK about that sort of thing, but where is the evidence it’s actually boiling up to that point? There isn’t any because it’s just people talking shit. Certainly there is a segment of US citizens who think their way of life is threatened, but nothing like close to even the civil rights movement era, and we didn’t get a civil war then…I actually don’t think we were even close, though certainly closer than today.
Hell, we have that already. Some nutter goes out and shoots up a mall or their work place or whatever. Happens rarely, though not according to the media, but it happens. And? This isn’t anything like the run-up to the Civil War, or even the Whiskey Rebellion, let alone other periods in our history.
Yeah, and then we have a government whose most visible function is to put down violent revolt. How is that different from a civil war? Plus, every time they crush an insurrection, they force the bystanders to take sides. The ranks of the rebellion, in this case, are at least as likely to grow as they are to shrink.
This is the problem^^. Media moguls have been using a liberal bent to support furthering their agenda for decades. And based on the alarming reactions (here?), it appears to be working! Thirty years ago nobody gave a toss about incidents getting national media coverage these days. Keeping things in perspective becomes difficult from a societal standpoint when everyone seems to be running around with their hair on fire screaming about stupid stuff.
I don’t agree that putting down revolt is equivalent to a civil war, which would require some degree of militarized organization on each side, and the current crop of malcontents have little to none of that.
For that matter, unless the malcontents get some police/military firepower and organization on their side, it won’t even be a revolt - just the occasional riot or Branch Davidian standoff.
I doubt it, barring some unlikely and contrived circumstances. The rebellion will be seen as troublemakers and Americans have never been overly fond of those, despite the national myths of mavericks and independent spirits and such.
I’m honestly not sure if I get your point, but if it’s something about how the media gives wall-to-wall coverage of school shootings and police-shootings and anything terrorist-like and more so than they did in 1986, I’d suggest it’s not some liberal media conspiracy but rather the increasing competition for viewer attention - hence stories with a fear- or violence-angle get played up. In 1986, there were three major networks (plus Fox and CNN, still in their early days), so less need to bombard or value in bombarding viewers with permanent panic triggers.
Nobody gets his point, because it is total and complete bullshit. Liberal media my ass! Straight out of Fox Talking Points.
As for the putting down of armed insurrection, see my previous about pussies. For every heavily armed nutjob who would rebel there are 500 mouthbreathers who would piss themselves at the very thought of somebody shooting back at them, like soldiers.
In my opinion, the OP is mistaking a lot of heated talk for a precursor to actual action. I hold the opposite view; people yell at each other in this country and it gets the anger out of their system. Revolutions happen in places where the people can’t vent their anger and it builds up to explosive levels.
This YouTube Video {1’43"} claims “bra burning” started in protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. The problem was the Atlantic City boardwalk was made of wood, so the powers that be said they couldn’t actually burn anything … so it was symbolic.
Very funny … mostly because it’s so damn true … look at all the people who gathered in The Democratic People’s Republic of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Understood, but suppose Trump and his gang get elected and then attempt to roll back the progress of the 1960s. I agree that, where we stand now at present, yeah, we’re probably some distance from widespread civil unrest. But I’m sure a lot of people felt that that the unrest in Watts couldn’t happen again when it in fact did happen in 1992. There really is talk among some people on the right about race wars and that there may be a need for people to commit violence in order to defend their rights - whatever the hell that means. They’re not necessarily Stormfront posters either. There are a lot of people out there who believe their country is being taken away from them and they’re being fed an unfettered diet of propaganda. As I’ve said before, democracies die when voters become uninformed and become incompetent voters in large numbers – that is happening now as we speak. Moreover, democracies really become endangered when large numbers of voters support ideas that are not democratic. That is also happening now.
Trump doesn’t have any desire to roll back the progress of the 60s.
Lots of people are going to be disappointed if Trump ever becomes president. He’s not interested in policy, he’s interested in appearance. He’s a perfect example of the “all talk” people mentioned earlier. He doesn’t want to accomplish anything except have everybody in the country talking about Donald Trump. Sure, he’s going to appoint horrible horrible judges, and he’s going to appoint horrible horrible cabinet members, and he’s going to take the country in a horrible horrible direction. But that’s not because he wants to accomplish anything in particular, or take the country in any particular direction. Trump’s horrible actions will be in the name of narcissism, vanity, greed, ego, and pride, not ideology.
As for a right-wing insurrection, how’s that going to work?
These sorts of things only work when elements of the establishment turn a blind eye. The Klan only worked because everyone knew who was in the Klan, and even if the Sheriffs and the Judges and the Chamber of Commerce people weren’t Klan members, they allowed the Klan to operate with impunity.
Seven Days in May…or the purported attempt to force FDR to appoint a favorable cabinet (the “Business Plot.”) Either one of these kinds of coups require some significant backing from the military.
Right now, the military is very comfortably uninvolved. Liberal and Conservative politicians alike “support the troops,” and the troops limit their involvement to voting. (Retired officers get to spout their opinions.)
If a bad President started firing entire Federal appeals courts and arresting people who criticize him/her, the military might cough quietly behind their hands and make remarks to the effect that this isn’t acceptable.
We aren’t going to see tanks firing rounds into the Capitol. We don’t do that here.
Another one who, though young at the time, am old enough to recall the late 60s and 1970s era of domestic extremism. Nowhere near there yet (but it COULD get there, after all it did before).
Make that 500 mouthbreathers who are counting on that it will be the soldiers and police who will turn on lawful authority to rally to their side because someone makes a stirring rant about FREEDOM!
We aren’t near a civil war yet, but I worry that we’re following a historical cycle similar to what happened to the Roman Republic. We’re now past the Punic Wars (WW2, Cold War), our strategic interests and our armed forces are now spread across the known world, the citizen army has been replaced by professional soldiers (and when has a professional military ever NOT developed self-interests?). We’ve made the world safe for outsourcing (we don’t import slaves, we export work) and the middle class is turning into the proletariat (in the original Latin sense, not the Marxist). The former middle class has one last legacy of republicanism- the vote- and politics is devolving into two rival versions of bread and circuses (rabid populism or the Nanny State).
This excellent post from an older thread says it far better than I could:
Despite all the talk of red states and blue states, there aren’t geographic boundaries like there were in the 1800s. And that’s EVEN IF the political divide was anywhere near as war-like as it was back then, which it isn’t by a long, long, long shot.
I can remember back to Ruby Ridge and the Waco debacle, and for a couple of years, all the talk all over the news was about militias, and how those folks were training and stocking up on guns, and there was going to be an uprising soon, and blah, blah, blah…Michigan militia …blah, blah…
Then Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building.
The militias heard the explosion, girded their loins, stood up in their numbers, and then, boldly as one team they SHUTTED THE FUCK UP AND LAID LOW!!! Nobody took up arms against the government.
Yep, poor old Timothy, sap that he was, took all that militia shit seriously, when all the time it was mostly an excuse for grown men to run around in the woods, playing soldier, shooting off guns, and then shooting off their big drunken mouths in the taverns afterwards about how much hell they would raise when they took over the country, and how badass they would be.
This militia/sovereign citizen crap was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.
If he tries, he’ll fail. Let’s face it, Trump’s incompetent - even if he has a master plan, he’s not going to go anywhere with it. And his followers are not movers and shakers. The danger with Trump is that he’ll accidentally stumble into a war or depression.