The American Civil War in 1861-1865 proved that even constitutional governments are not able to stand when civil opinion determines that the Constitution no longer needs to be obeyed. This is the same situation that is unfolding in our sight now, during the begining of the Second American Civil War. No shots were fired in the initial stages of the Civil War; rather, the secession of states came about somewhat organically as the Southern slave states resisted the notion of the abolition of slavery for both perceived economic fears and fear of social integration that did indeed spring from the understood notion of race at that time. The withdrawal of the Southern States was, for these States, their attempt to preserve what was important to them and their existence, and further, a rebuttal to being told what to do by other states in the Union. In short, they thought they were doing what was right. This may be the pattern that is being repeated now, in the Second American Civil War, as cities and urban areas decry traditional police departments and advocate for police-free zones, and as Black Lives Matter’s siren song deceives great masses of people AND companies into believing that BLM is the new face of the Civil Rights Movement, when the fact is that the rights BLM advocates would horrify many, if not most, of the African Americans themselves.
We need to chronicle this new Civil War – it has been predicted for quite some time, and now it is upon us, whether we like it or not. It is not a shooting war (yet) in the classical sense, with armies trying to sweep into and retake “lost” seceded territories, but there are plenty of signs that such a conflict may arise. There are also signs to suggest that military armed conflict in this case is extremely unlikely, and in fact, if what we see is true, the Second American Civil War may well be simply the greatest and most visible expression of what happens when a nation rejects God, tradition, culture and its own history, and tries to completely discard the past in favor of something that they think is better. Let’s look at the makeup of the opposing camps that appear to be in place, and we may well see that this conflict is shaping up to be the most pathetic in recorded human history.
[Full disclosure: I am heavily partisan for one of the sides in this conflict, and it is only fair to say that. Nevertheless I will try to express the opposition’s views as fairly as possible, and in so doing, I will also try to reserve my opinion about their point of view until a section in this series specifically reserved for that purpose]
We need names for the sides, and the best convention I can offer at this time suggests four groups are involved. We will call them the Blues, the Averages, the USA Conservatives, and the Traditionalists. Perhaps comments from readers will help us refine these names and the observations, but this is hopefully a fair start.
Some of the group we are calling “the Blues” as one of the sides in the Second American Civil War.
Who are the Blues?
The Blues, as one might expect, constitute much of the activist elements of the modern-day Democrat Party of the United States. The positions that seem important to these people include, but are not restricted to, the following:
- Many, if not most of, the Blues think there is a race problem in the United States. For them, the narratives of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Trayvon Martin in Florida, and the two recent figures of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks all reflect the notion that white police officers hate black men and feel themselves justified in extra cruelty and mistreatment, with or without provocation. These four men’s legends form much of the basis for the energy in the Black Lives Matter movement, which I maintain must be held as distinct from the Black Lives Matter as an organization. The reason for this distinction is that BLM is being praised on social and public levels as an advocacy group to correct what is wrong in race relations, but the actual stated goals of the group seem to use this line as merely a springboard to other things that many, if not most, African Americans would not wish to personally be associated with. Nevertheless, BLM has for the moment, found its place in the limelight and it commands great fealty across much of America’s business community, and great admiration from elected leaderships in states and cities run by other Blues.
- The Blues comprise the bulk of the drug legalization crowd. Starting with cannabis legalization in four American states in contravention to Federal law concerning this substance, the legalizers have scored great success through much of the United States. Their point of view is tremendously short-sighted, but they are organized around their narrative that pot is not addictive, that no one ever died from it and a number of other talking points that are very tightly adhered to.
- The Blues include most of the mainstream media and a great deal of the entertainment professionals in the United States, particularly among the pop music and rock and roll crowds in a visible sense, but there are also quite a few among classical musicians who identify at least with liberal Democrat points of view.
The second group we will call the “Averages.” Here are their characteristics:
- The Averages are not particularly politically involved. One might say that their level of knowledge on social issues is fairly light, easily influenced by the Blues’ effect in the news media, but at the same time, the Averages resist radical liberalism. These people would object to the tearing down of statues, and they would object to an out-and-out attack on Christianity and the family as an institution, but they also would have little in the way of an intellectual fall-back in order to support their wish to be left alone. In my opinion, Averages would probably be more likely to vote for familiar faces, familiar messages and they might take offense to someone like Donald Trump, because his approach to solving the nation’s issues is often very aggressive. At the same time, Joe Biden, the Democrat candidate, probably looks very obviously frail and weak, and it is also clear that he does not have any particular platform to offer. The Averages are likely to vote their pocketbooks, but my guess is that many of them would hold their nose, vote for Biden and hope that somehow his presidency would just return things to normal. Were it to be that he wins, it is unlikely that the Averages would remain so, as the country is almost sure to continue to disintegrate under a “Biden as puppet” presidency.
- The averages are nominal churchgoers. They do not consider their religion to be life-affecting or worth being the true center of everything, but the religious traditions the Averages have are familiar and comfortable. As this war progresses, they would again find that allowing leftism to continue to progress would strip them away of what they hold as important, and hence, they probably would not remain Averages over time.
An example of the kind of arguments offered by the “USA Conservatives” group in the Second American Civil War
A third group I will dub the “USA Conservatives.”
These are great people, who view conservatism itself as what must be preserved. However this also is problematic because it does not address the core of what creates conservatism. Because of this, there are characteristics I would suggest weaken this group of people:
- This sort of conservatism is “conservatism for conservatism’s sake.” It is definitely a desire for America as she was forty or fifty years ago, or longer, when church attendance was considered an important thing to do, when people were polite to one another, when gun ownership was no issue, but also when parents who owned firearms taught their kids proper respect for them; when political debate could be handled in a far more intellectually honest manner than it can now, when drug use was illegal, and when marriage was only and always between one man and one woman. These people are usually very strong Trump supporters, but they can sometimes get rattled when the President acts in a pragmatic fashion and seems to ignore conservative causes to get what he wants done. USA Conservatives are ideologically based along a strictly ecumenical (see point 2 ahead) set of conservative viewpoints. Following the example of people like Sean Hannity on Fox News (a beloved bulldog of this point of view), they are good at “trapping” the opponent into being unable to speak about their own point of view, but instead either getting them to betray its weakness or to erupt in anger, causing those who watch such discourse also to erupt in anger.
- The USA Conservative gets a little rough around the edges when it comes to religious views, and this is the biggest point of weakness. Sean himself is Roman Catholic, but many of his fans are Protestants. There are not a few Orthodox in the mix, but the USA Conservatives view is rather monolithic about what Christianity is to people in all these groups, suggesting that “everybody believes the same things.” This is a problem because what is held to constitute “Christianity” is extremely widely disputed across many of the Americans claiming Christ, and there are so many so-called Christian communities, each with its own twist on the theology and praxis of the faith, that it is very easy to set these groups against one another over things like social issues, abortion and drug use. This has fragmented conservatives over the years so that where there used to be no conservatives advocating drug use, now a good many of them think cannabis should be legal and they want to be left along by the government to be able to use it.
- The problem here is that the core beliefs are not always united. This leads to the existence of “Never Trumpers” for example, people who were intellectually dishonest, but very passionate, and who discounted Trump’s extraodinary conservatism because they took exception to the things he said and his brusque personality. This is a big group, but this internal disintegration of what it is to be a conservative is swinging some of these people over to a more libertarian point of view, and libertarianism can be most problematic, often just as liberal as the potheads in the Blues camp. At the same time, this group of people is also very likely to catch their own errors and swing into the fourth group involved in the Second American Civil War.
The Traditionalists
Most of these people are Christians from the very traditional and strongly scripturally-based Protestant groups, a fair number of Roman Catholics and among the Orthodox Christians, probably most of the people in the Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Georgian jurisdictions in the Orthodox Church.
Orthodox Christians in a Cross Procession in Russia
The Greek Orthodox Christians in America have a hierarchy in the US that often goes with the Blues, but the Greeks themselves are all over the map in terms of which group they might be a part of. The Antiochian Orthodox are more conservative the less Arab they are, for the Democrat softness on Palestine and feigned disdain for Israel is usually enough to keep them thinking that Democrats are somehow the best people to support them in their Church lives. The ethnic Antiochians are turned off strongly by the unconditional zeal that Republicans display for Israel, Trump being no exception to this. The Russians tend to be traditionalist because they are often in the United States because they fled Communism or the lawless craziness in Russia right after Communism ended. They are usually quiet in public but any American wanting to ask a Russian Orthodox Christian of this kind in the United States about what they think will surely get quite an earful along the lines of our nation already did this, and look where it got us. You are traveling down the same destructive road.
Traditionalists have a view that centers on the core teachings of Christianity but also the core praxis of Christianity. This is a point of view that says what you do means far more than what you say. For this reason many traditionalists see the Civil War taking place as a real struggle between the powers of Darkness and those of God. Some of them see President Trump as God’s last extension of help to the United States to keep it from permanently going over the brink. They see the Black Lives Matter and Antifa demonstrations and riots as tools of consummate evil, and they also distrust the media narratives intensely, and they observe (and rejoice over) President Trump’s insistence on keeping things running as usual – not wearing a mask in public, showing no fear of COVID-19, and keeping Dr Birx and Dr Fauci out of the limelight in the greatest part.
Their great strength is that they know that this Civil War is really a spiritual war, between Good and Evil, and that Evil is getting most of the attention and credit right now. Their weakness appears to be lack of connection and organization. Some of this is the result of social media censorship, almost constant bombardment with leftist propaganda on any and all news reports, and social and peer pressure from the other groups.
I would not be surprised if every single one of these people voted for President Trump in 2016, and they will vote for him in 2020, unless the dark side can discourage them. They will not vote for Biden, but they will feel sorry for him, because they see him as hopelessly compromised.
Some prominent voices in the news are among the Traditionalists. Fox News has several of them: Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, to name a few. The President’s Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnanny, Melania Trump herself, many Russian Orthodox priests both in America and abroad, and many of the Calvinists, Baptists and a lot of traditional Southern Baptists (who are black in great numbers!) all are included in this group.
These sides are all involved in the Second American Civil War. This war has only one parallel in history – the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that brought on Communism. However, this war is more insidious. We will examine this in the next installment.
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