Another Civil War? Sounds Far-Fetched, Until It Isn’t
Or should that be “heartland prairie populists” versus “liberal coastal elites”?
More than a century later, the “states’ rights” issues raised in the first Civil War remain largely unsettled, although they have moved on, thankfully from slavery, but to other vexing matters such as abortion and gun rights.
Last summer, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that authorized any private individual to bring a civil suit against those who facilitate abortions — and offered large monetary bounties to encourage enforcement. The impact was devastating as clinics across the state canceled appointments and shuttered their doors.
Well, it didn’t take long for lawmakers in Illinois and California to draft bounty laws of their own, with more states possibly to follow. Talk is brewing about a further backlash against, for example, businesses who withhold services from same-sex couples.
Yes, other battles may well be on the way, one hopes without bloodshed. But as this country should have learned to its great sorrow, once you start a conflict between the states you don’t always know where or how it’s going to end.
Another disturbing aspect of this rising wave of war talk is how much of it boils down to a very old-fashioned notion of something crucial to our democracy: The ability of Americans and all of our many tribes to get along.
Our societal failures to deal with the racial divide showed up in a widely covered study taken by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, directed by Robert Pape, a leading scholar on terror warfare and politics.
In the CPOST poll of 725 arrestees in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, almost two-thirds agreed that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”
As Pape has said, that meshes with the increasingly popular “Great Replacement” theory promoted by far-right anti-immigration activists here and in Europe that conspiratorial elites are trying to replace this country’s white population with nonwhites.
That’s quite a yarn. If you believe it, I have a nice bridge to sell you. No Confederate dollars, please.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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