What even binds this country together anymore? Consumerism and Netflix? The GOP wants a WASP theocracy. The Tea Party / Libertarians / Q Anon want to destroy government. The Democrats want to be relevant. The Left wants socialism. The Trumpers want ethnofascism. Where is there common ground? The country can’t agree on education, science, history, democratic processes, foreign policy, free speech, religion, health care, civil rights, gender relations, the economy, states rights/obligations…
Four years ago, secession seemed ludicrous. Today a civil war seems inevitable. What is there left holding the country together? We see each other as mortal enemies, and various parties have more in common with various foreigners than each other. Is the American future a balkanized wasteland serving merely as proxy battlefields for China, the EU, and Russia?
As you noted, nobody was worried about the possibility of the country breaking up four years ago. What you’re feeling now is just the despair of having a really bad President in charge during a crisis.
But Donald Trump is not going to be able to single-handedly destroy the United States. He’ll be tossed out of office and he’ll be nothing more than an embarrassing part of our history. The Democrats will take over and begin rebuilding the country while the Republicans complain on the sidelines that none of this was their fault.
The country is in a bad way, but we’re not close to war. Compare what’s happening now to what was going on leading up to secession and the Civil War. Back then there was Bleeding Kansas, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and the beating by Preston Brooks of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor. Today we have a dysfunctional government, and the president and his allies have abandoned the principles of a constitutional republic, but we’re not physically attacking each other, at least not at the scale that was happening then.
Also, I disagree with the statement that the left wants socialism. The closest we have to that is a call for a single-payer health care system. Very few in this country have called for a government takeover of things like the oil industry, farming and other food production, telecommunications, etc.
I’ll be shocked if his game plan doesn’t include throwing fuel on the fire until things explode into serious violence. The more violent the better! Let’s it rage a couple of days. Then he sends his jackboots in to ‘restore order’, and then sweeps the elections with cops/military/militias, etc, lining up behind him.
Red and Blue America are not countrymen. There is no connective tissue, in fact our values are diametrically opposed. Also, blue America can’t keep carrying red America, it’s too hard to keep them alive, they fight at every step and don’t carry their weight.