David Franke: America Slides into a New Civil War

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David Franke: America Slides into a New Civil War http://conservativehq.com/article/33241-

By David Franke, RichardCYoung.com | 9/8/20

 

Civil wars do not develop overnight.  It takes years, even decades, for revolutionary movements to grow, sapping the morale of the established order and concealing their ultimate goals until they reach enough strength.  Then the pent-up political bubble bursts.  And when that happens, events move very, very fast.  Many people cannot process the unpleasantness and rapidity of what’s happening and go into massive denial.  In our current situation that translates into: “Yes, many people are acting crazy, but they don’t represent the vast majority of Americans.”

We are at that final stage today.  The bubble has burst and revolution in the form of civil war has come to America.  You can deny it but that doesn’t stop it from happening.  Or, as the saying goes, you can run but you can’t hide.

I see four main stages that have led to our present situation:

Stage 1: The revolutionary Left grows methodically and largely unnoticed over a period of decades

It concentrates on capturing two segments of the population that will prove invaluable at the end—the schools and the media.  Rather than seeking to turn most of them into hard-core revolutionaries overnight, it appropriates righteous-sounding causes that can be captured with bumper-sticker slogans and phrases—“civil rights,” “end racism,” “democracy now,” and such.  And the targets—teachers, professors, and students, including those in our journalism schools—are indoctrinated in the message that there is “no enemy to the Left.”  The enemies of these righteous aspirations are always to the Right.

This process has been going on since the beginning of the twentieth century—a long time.  It has met with no effective opposition from the vast majority of Americans, who are too busy with daily life to notice.  Marriage, children, jobs, and all the diversions of daily life (sports, gadgets, community life, and yes—“politics” itself) keep them occupied.  But over those many decades the education and media institutions are growing more and more leftist, and more and more alienated from traditional American values.

It’s not that the “silent majority” is totally oblivious to what is going on.  There are periodic political realignments (Nixon and his Sunbelt Strategy, the “Reagan revolution”) but they are surface skirmishes, concentrating on the next election.  There is no effective long-term strategy to counter the leftist capture of the education and media establishments.  This leads to…

Stage 2:  Growing partisanship and realignment

Most noticeable is the political partisanship.  The two dominant parties create legal barriers that prevent competition from any new party.  And without effective competition, conservatives migrate to the Republican Party and liberals to the Democratic Party.  This is the realignment that has captured the headlines.

With the growing pervasiveness of the media in our lives, media alignment becomes important.  With their capture of the journalism schools and other educational institutions, liberals get virtually all of the mainstream media—the TV networks and cable channels, and what’s left of print newspapers and magazines.  Conservatives get part of Fox News but are mostly relegated to Internet and social media sites.  Those areas are basically a “No Man’s Land” where Left and Right battle it out for influence.

Less noticed is the realignment in daily life and where we reside.  At first it was conservatives moving to the suburbs, leaving liberals to dominate the cities.  But then the suburbs became a battleground, and the big geographical division today consists of the East Coast and West Coast (the Left) against the Heartland (the Right).  The Left has the population advantage, the Right is left with a few precarious institutional advantages such as the Electoral College.

The scene is set for the next stage…

Stage 3:  Donald Trump’s election leads to open, nontraditional political warfare by the Left

Nobody expected this to happen.  Certainly not on the Left—their institutions, notably the media and the polls—assured them that Hillary Clinton would become the first female president of the United States.  And not on the Right either—it was thoroughly demoralized since it absorbed the same media onslaught and the same polls, and in addition was perplexed by its strange candidate, who had no traditional political background and who said things that supposedly had made him unelectable.

But it did happen, thanks to fed-up voters in the Heartland and to the Electoral College.  With that epochal upset, all political hell broke loose.  The Democrats, now effectively captured by the Left, no longer accepted the traditional notion that elections decide who wins and who loses.  Even before Trump took office, they refused to accept his political legitimacy and declared no-holds-barred warfare under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi.  In collusion with the Deep State, which saw its dominance threatened by some of Trump’s stated positions, the Democrats created the myth of “Russian collusion.”  That didn’t fly with the facts or the public.  Then they tried impeachment, but that stalled in the Senate and also didn’t fly with the American public.  They tried a gutter smear campaign against his appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and that worked against them.

Totally frustrated, they realized that the economy was Trump’s strongest argument for reelection.  And with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, they saw their opportunity to crash the American economy.  But they are haunted by memories of how they were totally blindsided in 2016.  They see this 2020 election as their last chance to drive Trump and his supporters out of political contention forever.  So, anything goes, which brings us to: CONSERVATIVE HQ read more