by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A far smarter person than I pointed something out about my hysterical psychohistory of a Second American Civil War starting around 2025: he said it wouldn’t happen for economic reasons.
This threw me for a loop, but I’ve given this cogent critism some thought and I think my initial belief about a Second American Civil War still holds up. But my comparison to the origins of the First American Civil War require a more nuance than I originally gave it.
So, yes, as my smart friend noted, the “right” to own someone else was an economic right. While there were many, many reasons for the First Civil War, pretty much everything else hung on the economics of slavery. When Lincoln was elected, Slave Power saw his future potential anti-slavery policies as a direct threat to their economic well being.
Hence, secession.
Thus, initially, it seems my belief that there is a near one-to-one comparison between slave power fearing a loss of the “right” to own other people and the modern center-Left fearing their rights being abridged by MAGA power don’t hold as much weight as I originally thought.
But I’ve given this some thought and it seems to me that in the modern age every “right” has an economic element to it. Or, all the rights that the center-Left are worried about do.
Take, for instance, reproductive rights.
If, by 2025, Blue States face all three branches of government working actively to make any form of contraception illegal there is a definite economic element to that fear. That would be the crux of Blue States like California and New York leaving the Union in the first place — the economic freedoms of women would be highly curtailed if birth control was illegal.
The list goes on — gay marriage has a economic element to it, and so on.
My smart friend also suggested that Fortune 500 companies would have no interest in essentially destroying the gravy train that is the American economy and, as such, would put the kibosh on a Second American Civil War.
That, too, doesn’t hold much water with me upon some reflection.
We already have a move on the part of the MAGA New Right to punish “woke” corporations and it seems to me that by around Certification Day 2025 things will have gotten so bad that not even the all-powerful Industrialists would be able to stop California, then the rest of the Blue States from leaving the Union.
At the core of all of this, the thing that is eating away at the Union, making it less perfect, is Red States and Blue States are receding away from each other at an alarming rate at the same time that Red States are ascendant politically and want to force Blue States to bend a knee.
We’re still too far out for me to know if Blue States will, in fact, avoid organized political violence and “bend a knee” to the fascists of the MAGA New Right. All of that is still very much up in the air.
But gird your loins. America as we know it might destroy itself in a violent manner not seen in 160 years.
