The Americans Who Long for Civil War: Should We Take these Big Talkers Seriously?

Some stalwart loyalists to President Trump have threatened — or “merely predicted,” as they might say if they were ever charged with sedition — a civil war over the results of the November 2020 presidential election.

More disturbingly, radical right-wing leaders in the Republican Party like Allen West, the Chairman of the Texas GOP, have floated the idea that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.”

The attempt to steal the name of “Union” and affix it to this pathetic reincarnation of a secessionist-curious Confederation may just be, in the end, the most damaging result of West’s unhinged rhetoric.

We can hope that the true believers in Trump’s false narrative of election fraud and deep-state skullduggery—not the cynical West, but the less well-informed and less well-connected people he and his ilk frighten and mobilize in their effort to cling to minority rule—will come to value their own lives more than Trump has, with his indifference to COVID and his irresponsible and inflammatory lies meant to stoke rage and sow chaos.

Though we have recently been treated to outrageous and unsubstantiated claims of tyranny and accusations of treason coming from right-wing pundits and — shamefully — Republican members of Congress and Republican governors and attorneys general, we are far removed from a situation in which senators from “Trump states” will leave their seats, or high-ranking U.S. military officers will resign their commissions and break their oath to protect and defend the Constitution, in order to form some sort of Mississippi Valley Delusional Society and wage a shooting war against the constitutional government of the United States and its law-abiding citizens.

But Zeynep Tufekci’s recent analysis of the perils of the present should not be ignored.

Nor should we ignore the perils of the past.