The civil war lies on us like a sleeping dragon': America's deadly divide - and why it has returned
Awesome read by David Blight in The Guardian:
The years leading up to 1861 saw polarised politics, paranoia and conspiracy theories. Sound familiar? One of the US’s foremost historians reflects on America’s Disunion - then and now.
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1781. The American revolution still raged, many of his own slaves had escaped, his beloved Virginia teetered on social and political chaos. Jefferson, who had crafted the Declaration of Independence for this fledgling nation at war with the world’s strongest empire, felt deeply worried about whether his new country could survive with slavery, much less the war against Britain. Slavery was a system, said Jefferson, “daily exercised in tyranny,” with slaveholders practicing “unremitting despotism,” and the slaves a “degrading submission.”
The founder was hopeless and hopeful. He admitted that slaveholding rendered his own class depraved “despots,” and destroyed the “amor patriae” of their bondsmen. But his fear was universal. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” This advocate of the natural rights tradition, and confounding contradictory genius, ended his rumination with the vague entreaty that his countrymen “be contented to hope” that a “mollifying” of the conditions of slaves and a new “spirit” from the revolution would in the “order of events” save his country.
Danger cannot come from abroad … If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher
Abraham Lincoln in 1838
For that republic to survive it took far more than hope and a faith in progress. Indeed, it did not survive; in roughly four score years it tore itself asunder over the issue of racial slavery, as well as over fateful contradictions in its constitution. The American disunion of 1861-65, the emancipation of 4 million slaves, and the reimagining of the second republic that resulted form the pivot of American history. The civil war sits like the giant sleeping dragon of American history ever ready to rise up when we do not expect it and strike us with unbearable fire. It has happened here – existential civil war, fought with unspeakable death and suffering for fundamentally different visions of the future.
Republics are ever unsteady and at risk, as our first and second founders well understood. Americans love to believe their history is blessed and exceptional, the story of a people with creeds born of the Enlightenment that will govern the worst of human nature and inspire our “better angels” to hold us together. Sometimes they do. But this most diverse nation in the world is still an experiment, and we are once again in a political condition that has made us ask if we are on the verge of some kind of new civil conflict.
Read the entire article here:
I also have been seeing similarities to outright civil war and the fights for civil rights in the fifties and sixties.
It's looking like the lead-up to history repeating itself -- imho. Fearing for our Republic being rent asunder...
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And Fox News and their 24/7 attacks on liberals certainly haven't helped things. And now we have a government and a president who are doing everything they can to further fuel the division. Now thanks to them, we have an angry populace and the most incompetent, piece of shit government known to man, with the biggest piece of shit president in American history, and the rest of the world is laughing at us. 
Like when did it suddenly become cool to love a genocidal dictator? That seems to be the thing with 18 - 25 year olds. They think it's cool to love Hitler and the Nazis because it pisses liberals off, because they've been fed a steady diet of hatred thanks to Breitbart, Infowars, Fox News, and AM hate radio. Genocide is *NEVER* cool under any circumstances. These morons are on the losing side of history. People don't like being ruled by tyrants. Hitler was a tyrant, Stalin was a tyrant, Mussolini was a tyrant, King Louis was a tyrant, Trump is a wannabe tyrant, And that won't end well for him. 
