It is likely that the January 6th Trump insurrection is when talk of political violence became widespread in the news biz. How much of this talk have we heard during the last four years? We were all on standby for post-election chaos.
So here we are, post-election. What happened to all that talk of civil war? Here’s what happened: Trump won. (I’ll give him this: he may be the most successful con man in history, having conned his way into the presidency. TWICE.) And suddenly all that talk of political violence simply vanished. Poof! What’s going on?
The belief was often expressed, in response to the innumerable MAGA racist and violent rants, that “this is not who we are.” But this sentiment seems only to apply to a subset of the population and ought to be assessed a little more closely.
Democrats and liberals are by and large typified as those that accept and value facts; truth, science. In a word: “Reality.”
Juxtapose that with the significant proportion of Republicans and conservatives that live in a world where the suppression of ideas, the banning of books and the denial of science is the preferred vision of the world. The fear of civil war is prevalent only when these snowflake sore losers face defeat at the polls.
And while it is immensely frustrating and even frightening having to tolerate being governed by imbeciles and craven idealogues, the civil-minded reality-based left has no interest in solving a crisis by resorting to violence. That’s not the way we think.
It’s discouraging that this important division between Americans hasn’t become common knowledge. But then again, if Americans can elect a lying narcissist insurrectionist racist misogynist fascist adjudicated rapist criminal felon who can’t string two sentences together and whose brain is deteriorating before our very eyes, then nothing surprises anymore.
Along these lines, here’s a sentiment, eerily prescient, from Clarence Darrow in his summary statement from the 1925 Scopes trial:
“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots [i.e. a bundle of sticks bound together as fuel] to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
Oh, Clarence. If only you could see us now...