This article is liberal commentary.
Lincoln didn’t think so. He didn’t get around to emancipating the slaves until 3 years into the war, and then only in the secessionist states, as a measure to punish them for secession and pressure them to give up. Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, and in his most famous speech on that topic, he didn’t even mention slaves. This, of course, is basic history that everyone knows.
In fact, the very first paragraph of his Gettysburg address contains a flat out lie. He said,
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,”
which is patently false, because nearly half (25 of 55) of the framers of the Constitution owned slaves and had no intention of bestowing freedom, much less equality, on them. At least these hypocrites didn’t claim that women were created equal; they didn’t get suffrage for another 150 years. Even today, some American males and a soon-to-be Supreme Court justice think wives should walk behind their husbands and only speak when spoken to.
But I digress. Secession was a rejection of democratic principles, and tested whether they could work in real life. Although Southerners and Northerners alike saw the Civil War through a slavery lens, and slavery certainly was a root cause, the even deeper cause was unwillingness to abide by democratic principles when they didn’t get their way. Slavery was merely the precipitating issue, but it could have been some other issue. To understand the true cause of the Civil War, you must dig deep into human nature.
It’s human nature to rebel against losing. It’s why children pick up their marbles and go home, or grownups knock over a board game (watch movie clip here). It’s why teachers and schools spend so much time, effort, and resources trying to pound democratic ideas into little skulls. Let’s face it, that basic trait — rebelling against losing — renders human temperament ill-suited for democracy.
Many people see the 2020 election in similar terms. Trump says he won’t accept the election results unless he wins, and a just-published Reuters/Ipsos poll says more than 4 in 10 of his supporters won’t, either (read story here), although it’s not clear what they can, or will, do about it. On the Democratic side, many see this election as a referendum on democracy, which explains why they’re turning out in unprecedented droves to vote for a nominee most feel blah about.
This is occurring in the context of a general worldwide trend against democracy. Even in nominal democracies like Hungary, Turkey, Phillippines, and Indonesia, strongmen have taken over; a quarter century after the demise of the Cold War, authoritarianism is on the rise again, it seems, nearly everywhere — now, including in the United States, the fortress of democracy.
The U.S. Civil War was fundamentally about democracy’s viability as a governing system. As Lincoln acknowledged, it tested whether a system founded on democratic principles could endure. Secession was equivalent to a child picking up his marbles and walking away when the game didn’t play out to his liking. It was, more than anything else, a rejection of democracy. Lincoln fought for the survival of democracy.
Ironically, Trump compared himself to Lincoln in the last debate. Trump is the ultimate anti-Lincoln, the leader of an anti-democratic party, and the candidate who says he won’t accept the election results if he loses, whose followers threaten a second civil war if they don’t get their way. It’s hard to see any daylight between this attitude and that of the 1860 secessionists. Like them, they are anti-democracy, and oppose what Lincoln fought to save.
Recognizing democracy’s fragility, the American system bends over backwards to prop it up by catering to the minority in numerous ways. This includes protections for minority political rights (free speech, dissent, assembly, wide-ranging gun rights, unlimited “dark money” campaign spending, no restraints on political smears and dirty tricks, roadblocks to voting and tolerance of voter suppression campaigns, etc.), and maintaining a system that lets popular vote losers win elections.
How much farther over backwards do we have to bend to accomodate these folks? It seems to me if Trump loses the popular and electoral votes under a system rigged in his supporters’ favor to begin with, they should accept that. But a near-majority of them are telling pollsters they won’t, calling into question again whether the democratic ideal is too fragile to survive real-life stress testing.
This is by no means the first, or most severe, test of those ideals. But we live in the here and now, not in the past, and we need to see clearly the challenge in front of us: How to get people who don’t like democracy to live under it, when even all of the advantages we’ve already given them aren’t enough to satisfy them, when nothing less than getting their way will satisfy them.
Lincoln groped for an answer. The decision to use force was taken out of his hands when the South fired the first shots. After defeating them, at great cost in blood and treasure, Lincoln tried to woo them back by refusing to treat them as traitors, offering them a generous peace, and deciding (in his own words to Grant) to “let ’em up easy.” They responded by creating the KKK and unleashing a century-long wave of terrorism against black people that, although more subdued now, continues today.
I think I do know the answer. In politics, the dog always wags the tail. That is, it’s not ideology that arouses people to rebellion, but the real-life consequences of political decisions. The French, American, and Russian revolutions weren’t ideologically-driven uprisings against the monarchical system; they were grievance-driven revolts against specific monarchs. Post-revolutionary France quickly reverted to a de facto monarchy, and Russia replaced one authoritarian system with another.
The American rebels didn’t know what they wanted beyond getting out from under George III’s heavy thumb. Some proposed making Washington a king, i.e., simply replace a detested king with a popular one. The Constitution is actually a series of awkward compromises hammered out to get everyone on board. When it came apart in 1860, that wasn’t because of objections to the system of governance — the Confederates created a nearly identical framework of government — but because of policies they feared would destroy the southern economy.
So it is today. By the nature of the disease, the burdens of Covid-19 are distributed asymmetrically. The disease is most threatening to senior citizens, who are mostly retired, and whose incomes are little affected by Covid-19 containment measures. Working-age people. who are at less risk, see their livelihoods gravely threatened by those measures. So you have one group being asked to make great sacrifices, with little in it for themselves, for the benefit of another group that is making few sacrifices. Something similar happened during the Vietnam War, when the young were forced to sacrifice their lives for a cause promulgated and supported an older generation who were safe at home and, in many cases, profiting from the war through employment and investments. Anytime you have a situation like that, it’s an incendiary mix. Both the Vietnam War and Covid-19 are political events that provoked societal division and widespread discontent, dissent, and outright conflict.
The obvious way you defuse such situations is to compensate those who are disadvantaged by them. For example, if the government orders people to close their businesses and stay home, it should replace their lost income. In the larger picture, you preserve a governing system by giving people a stake in keeping it. Democracy doesn’t work well, and might not survive, if there are significant groups who feel disadvantaged by it and don’t receive offsetting compensation. Governing is a balancing act.
However, there is a tipping point beyond which people become dead-set against the status quo, and no amount of compromise or compensation will keep them on board. This tipping point exists in all violent revolutions. There was a point beyond which Louis XVI, George III, and Nicholas II could no longer bring their rebellious subject back into the fold no matter what concessions they made. Such a point was reached in Southern Secession, as well (historians debate what the tipping point was; some say John Brown’s Harper’ Ferry raid, others point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Has a similar tipping point already been reached in America’s current political divisions? I don’t know; such tipping points usually are visible only from hindsight.
It does seem clear, though, that passing another generous relief package would help lower the political temperature. Republicans, fretting about debt (which they didn’t when cutting their own taxes), don’t want to do that. Maybe they want revolution. In any case, this country didn’t worry about debt when borrowing to finance World War 2, and faced with a pandemic that now appears likely to kill as many Americans as that war did, we shouldn’t be focusing on debt now. Passing the Democrats’ Covid relief bill is the least we can do to save our democracy. But there are also deeper wounds, ones that may be harder to bandage.
Trump supporters are not likely the group that will cause a second civil war. The group most likely to are Democrats in state governments. The three states most likely to succeed are the three on the west coast. Then again these states have much the same nearsightedness as the south did thinking they had accomplished a fait accompli simply succeeding. All three states have east and west sides that are very different. Succession likely would mean the eastern part of the states would remain in the US perhaps becoming new states like West Virginia did. There is of course the issue that finally brought the actual shooting war and that is federal property. There is a lot of federal property in all three western states. The Federal government would not simply hand over the property. In some cases the property houses the US military, and there is no reason to think that the General in charge of Ft Lewis would not be told to go seize Olympia. Though doing what Lincoln did at ft Sumter might mean months before such orders would be given.
Hard to imagine a civil war with nukes. It would be a one sided affair since it is the Federal Government that owns and operates the nuclear devices in the guise of the Energy Department. Would that department immediately shut off electricity to the areas in rebellion, would the states succeed in gaining access and control of he western dams owned and operated by the energy department?
This is the most likely scenario for a US Civil War. Such a war would be different from the Civil War. It could be short, but have many times the number of dead, particularly civilian dead. One thing it would lead to is the Democratic party being out of power for a generation, and the Republican party being the party in control often with super majorities in Congress. Oddly last time this did give us the 13th, 14h, and 15th Constitutional amendments that strengthened democracy.
That’s just plain silly.
Reply to #1: It isn’t necessary to speak of conflict, but more about what we all can do as AMERICANS to work together to try to get this epidemic under control. The current administration is sowing conflict through harsh denouncements and needs to show leadership skills. Wear a mask, social distance, wash hands be respectful of others, even if you disagree with your fellow Americans. We are in this together.