I’ve made a mistake in my analyses of the future of American democracy (or lack thereof): The next civil war won’t necessarily pit red states against blue states. Just like now when elections are often won in suburban America—let’s call that the conurbation of a major city instead to emphasize the connection with the urban—the next civil war will be fought between urban and rural America. It will still feature progressives against conservatives—anti-fascist forces against fascist ones, if we restrict ourselves to the current extreme positions in America—but the geographical separations are a bit fuzzier than just red versus blue.
And the principal reasons (or motivations?) will be mostly what they always are in any war: economic ones. In that first Civil War in America, the forces pitted against each other were those from the North, a region willing to enter the new world of the Industrial Revolution, versus those of the South, a region trying to defend the debunked and failing economy of a racist, slave-based farming system. Nowadays the economic reality is tilted even more against rural America: It doesn’t make economic sense that under-populated and failing regions of the American economy is allowed determine the laws and regulations for all Americans when citizens in the former live on the dole and take the lion’s share of federal taxes. (For example, NJ citizens never get returned to them what they pay in federal taxes, while McConnell’s Kentucky gets back a lot more than what they pay.) That’s tyranny of the minority, and it rankles the majority of Americans because, just like any inequitble distribution of wealth, it’s unjust. Civil wars have been fought over much less!
Of course, tax revenues are just one thing that lead to war. Rural America also wants to dictate what urban America’s morals should be and take away a slew of rights. They try to cloak that wolf in the sheep’s clothing of “abortion is murder” or “gays are mentally ill people who need to be forcibly cured,” for example, even though the Good Ole Piranhas, especially the MAGA maniacs, are mostly fascist Putin lovers. Such statements, of course, deny women and gays their rights, but that doesn’t bother the Piranhas at all. Their fuehrer even questions the US Constitution, so he and they are just sociopaths who only support their own rights, not those of others.
This coming civil war will be both an economic war and a cultural one simply because the current situation caused by the far right is fast becoming intolerable. There’s no consensus or compromise with the far-right fascists of rural America anymore. It’s either their way or no way. They are out to destroy America, just like they tried to destroy the Capitol in that Trump-led insurrection on January 6, 2021, and the Good Ole Piranhas are their willing tools.
No electoral process is likely to resolve this seige-like situation because rural America has rigged things, thanks to Piranhas like McConnell and McCarthy, so that the courts and many state legislatures are in the death grips of far-right MAGA maniacs. Are they so stupid that they don’t realize that urban America has an advantage in numbers? That advantage will rapidly become evident if rural America forces urban America to stand up for their rights and take up arms!
I hope I’m wrong, and the fascists will eventually come to their senses and realize that they can’t win. Progressive Americans outnumber the conservatives, and the former will defeat the latter handedly.
As much as they would like to do so, Piranhas can’t return to the days of yore when they could hang a black man with impunity, beat a gay man to death without repurcussion, or force a woman into a life of servitude as a breeder if she’d rather be doing something else. That might happen in Jim Jordan’s Columbus, Ohio, or even in Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, California, where fascists are in control; it won’t happen in Hakeem Jefferies or Chuck Shumer’s Brooklyn, NYC. And people will be willing to fight to the death to make sure it doesn’t occur anywhere, and America will truly be free again.
Rural America should wise up before it’s too late!