Rod Dreher is obsessed with the idea of a new civil war breaking out in America. He recognizes that this won’t look like the battles between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, so what he really means is that we all might start shooting each other because we can’t stand to look at each other. And, I admit, it could definitely happen.
He published some reader emails, and they’re actually pretty thoughtful considering the subject matter. One guy talked about how he’s recently come to the reluctant conclusion that he needs a gun. I most definitely recognized the rationale behind his reasoning, because things are getting pretty desperate for tens of millions of Americans, and the social order is hanging by a thread.
One thing these folks seem to uniformly believe is that conservatives would prevail in any shooting war. Their reasoning seems sound at first. Red America is better armed and better trained than Blue America. But the COVID-19 crisis shows exactly why they’re mistaken.
If you look at the developed countries that are struggling to contain the outbreak, they’re all run by nationalistic/religious conservatives. Narrow-minded bigotry and the rejection of science combine in these places to create a kind of wishful thinking that is devoid of reason. The difference between reality and how these folks perceive reality is usually a societal nuisance, but it becomes lethal in a crisis. It can be a health crisis or it can be some kind of internecine shooting war.
Scientists aren’t usually too handy with a gun, but they win wars nonetheless. One one side, you have people who can slingshot a spacecraft around the moon and land it on a Martian dime, and on the other side you have people who think dinosaurs once coexisted with people. The dinosaur folks stand no chance in any real conflict.
I also think they give themselves too much credit for courage. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, there will be little reason for an insurrection and even if Trump makes a fuss about it, he’ll be a loser the Republican Party is eager to forget. Trump’s potential influence post-presidency is constantly exaggerated, in my opinion. He’ll have fewer diehards than Richard Nixon. I don’t see them besieging Austin or Charlotte.
A lot more trouble will come if Trump is reelected. It almost wouldn’t matter if this was magically accepted as a legitimate outcome because it would immediately lead to a total and possibly irreparable breakdown in our system as we’ve known it. The stress we’ve seen put on the Intelligence Community, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon would become a happy memory. Our scientific branches would be essentially annihilated. Our regulatory agencies would be corrupt beyond all imagination. Congress would be rendered toothless, unable to conduct oversight, and no longer even asked to confirm cabinet officials. All of these things are already fairly far along, and the only thing keeping things at all in check is the possibility that Trump will lose.
Needless to say, there will never be consent for these changes from most people who can remember a time before Trump. I don’t know whether people will start shooting Trump supporters, but the level of dissent in this country will be off the charts, and far greater than anything that could possibly greet a Biden presidency.
In other words, a civil war is far likelier if Trump is reelected, and that’s before we get to the obvious point that Trump revels in creating conflict and division, while Biden wants to bring the country together.
Yes, we’re a badly divided country, but we’re getting ready to take a step in the right direction. This election won’t magically heal the national divide, but a Biden victory will be a good start. The alternative will bring certain catastrophe.
This is an interesting post and follows my own thinking. I grew up in Texas in a Democratic family with a lot of guns. They were just a part of life and not celebrated as an essential part of our “identity”. When I left home for college I did not take any of the family guns with me and over the next 30+ years I never acquired any more, mostly because I wasn’t interested in hunting, and guns just weren’t a priority. Soon after Trump was elected my wife and decided to stock up on some essential supplies and get a pistol. Our concern was that Trump was so incompetent that there was a reasonable risk that he would fuck up badly enough to at least temporarily interrupt supply chains and create significant civil unrest. I thought this would be more along the lines of a limited nuclear incident, but it turns out it was tragically mishandling a pandemic. As the presidential election has drawn closer, our concerns have grown. Again, it looks like there is a very reasonable chance that Trump’s reaction to the election, win or lose, could cause a variety of civil unrest. As a result, we’ve picked up some more supplies and a rifle.
Trump was on tv at Whirlpool in Ohio as I was reading this. He was preaching how much he did for the economy and Whirlpool and how the democrats were useless and caused jobs to move overseas. He always does the best thing ever donchaknow – to stoke trouble.
I have been thinking about this very subject for awhile now. I see Trump dragging us into civil conflict amid the loss of law and order. He wants to be a dictator, I have no doubt. If he wins we will move towards that end and increasing conflict.
I don’t have a crystal ball but I live in a very conservative and Trump area. Their attitude is dismissive at best except if it impinges on their beliefs, whereupon they are openly hostile. They all see democrats as some sort of evil society.
I have three sons, one of whom lives in Ohio, and he decided several years ago to buy a few guns potentially for this very reason. He does not trust his neighbors. So the writing is on the wall if Trump wins.
Thanks for this. Among the many reasons conservatives are unlikely to start a civil war if Biden wins is they lack a power base. The DOD leadership made clear, in the wake of Trump’s little stunt at St. John’s Church, that their loyalty is to the nation and the constitution (unlike in 1860). There’s a real possibility that Biden will win *all* of the 10 largest states in November. If so, the Trumpist right would have no economic base from which to operate and sustain itself.
These aren’t the best reasons for why there’s unlikely to be a civil war…but they’re some of the more pragmatic ones.
I read Rod Dreher semi-regularly. I skim a lot because he’s long-winded and there’s only so much freaking out over political correctness and trans folks that I need to expose myself to. Dreher is a very fearful man. Of course, pessimists turn out to be right a lot of the time, so sure, maybe something like a “civil war” could happen, but in a sense we’re in one right now. Whatever the next step up from the combination of mass shootings, armed and unarmed protests, riots, aggressive propaganda, and legal skulduggery is the likeliest scenario. I’ve considered getting a gun myself, but I dunno. I’ve never been into it and I doubt it’ll help much. Though it is funny how right-wing memes switch between “good-guy with a gun” to “I’m going to take your stuff during the crisis because I have a gun and you don’t.”
I’ve been reading Rod for years. The only thing he cares about is religious liberty issues. That is until recently. He has been very engaged with the pandemic. He is also very critical of Trump. However nothing that Trumps does ever rises to the level of what he fears Democrats will do. He truly believes that if Biden wins people of faith will be rounded up & put in camps. He seems to have forgotten that Biden was just VP for 8 years & no such thing happened. It’s a shame because he really is a smart guy & I believe a nice guy.
I am also a regular reader of Rod’s, and allow me to posit that the last sentence isn’t true, and Rod isn’t a believer in universal religious liberty. I saw a perfect tweet today which is a perfect description of Rod:
My concern is not so much that the streets of America are going to become like Mogadishu in the 1990’s or Fallujah in the 2000’s. My concern is about the small groups scattered all over the country, or the lone wolves, who go out in the woods with their buddies a couple of times a week to shoot their 5.56 at targets of Obama and Hillary, while they fantasize about what a threat the Democrats are to all the things they think they hold dear. I know these people exist. I have met them. They live in my area. If our county party was still holding our normal in-person Executive Committee meetings, we would need to still have a deputy sheriff sitting in our parking lot during those meetings, because the Party has received substantive and direct death threats. Thirty minutes up the road, in an adjacent county, the Dem office right in the middle of town in the county seat had at least 5 shots put through their front windows back in early June. So yes, in many ways there is already a shooting war going on, albeit it is not widespread at this point, and it is one-sided. We already have people who are willing to put bullets into structures occupied by Democrats. That is a given.
I do think that the gun fetishists tremendously overestimate their own numbers compared to those who would actually fight back against them. Yes, they hoard ammo and guns, but one guy can only effectively shoot one gun at a time. So having 20,000 rounds of ammo or a couple dozen .223/5.56 semi-auto rifles in their gun safe is a false security blanket. The numbers of people on each side are really the determining factor here. And they are vastly outnumbered.
If Trump loses, these people are going to go nuts. I simply cannot imagine that they won’t try to air their grievances using gunfire. But I think it’s more likely it will be isolated incidents, in places like my county, or any other county in a very red and very well-armed area, that has an effective Democratic presence. There are a small number of people who will be enraged enough to consider some sort of action. I hope not, but it is not unreasonable to think it will happen.
If Trump wins, I think all bets are off on what could happen. As you point out, it could actually be worse than if he loses, because his win will permanently validate that their tribe is the final arbiter of all things righteous and American. And I don’t think that the vast masses of people on the other side are going to stand by silently and just take that as the final word. It could get very, very ugly.
Yep. Especially because if Trump wins, Democrats will think—with abundant cause—it’s because 1) Republicans cheated, and 2) the system is stacked against Democratic (and democratic) rule.
I think you are very much on the right track.
Compare the BLM inspired protests to the gun humper, tea party protests. They see themselves as a “silent majority” but they’re really a tiny whiny minority.
Liberals would lose the civil war, too.
An out and out civil war would yield some form of governance unrecognizable in the current political climate and we wouldn’t be better for it.
I mean, look at what happened to Jean Sylvain Bailly