Job History of the 2000s- 2010s

Desktop Support Technician – University of Wisconsin, River Falls Computer Campus, River Falls, WI                                              01/2003-06/2003

• VHS to Quicktime to iMovie on Mac OS 10.2. tutorial.
• Sample DVD from camcorder footage of the University
• Dreamweaver 4.0 webpage help for students and build a webpage
• MPEG4 AVC DVD paper

Associate – Holiday Gas Station                                                                                  01/2003-06/2004

• Store maintenance and janitorial work. Restock shelves and convenience machines.

Warehouse and Product Stocker – Circuit City, Woodbury, MN 10/2006-04/2007

I got a hold of the Vice President of Circuit City and got a job in woodbury. Stock items (Bluray, DVDs, CDs, computer hardware, batteries), empty totes, organizing, filling totes in warehouse for a while. They had a WoW guild made up of employees playing World of Warcraft at home. I wasn’t able to add employees to Facebook back then.

Data Entry Technician – PC Network Services, Stillwater, MN 05/2007-03/2008

I was a data entry technician in 2008 at PC Network Services. The CEO was Peter. Peter was an immigrant from Eastern Europe. He liked Soccer. His business closed in the great recession. He hired a company called Genius concultants for his CentOS server. I was reading off the Internet and did it wrong. He didn’t want Fedora Linux or Ubuntu linux to run a LAMP. Installed CentOS 5.0 (functioned well) Installed LAMP web server along with installation

Added categories and products to osCommerce eCommerce website which was online for the remainder until they wen out of business due to CEO decisions in 2008.

Pulatech

After I completed Rasmussen College in March 2015, I knew I wanted to be in Information Technology. In Hudson, I interviewed at Star Tech, Pulatech and had an internship. In Baldwin, I interviewed at Western Wisconsin Health and had a internship. Tiffany Upp at Star Tech interviewed me. Pulatech didn’t keep me employed after 3 months. At Pulatech, it was because a Chinese national went back home with data from Pulatech. I think it was stolen data. Pulatech has Indian developers in India. Pulatech moved to River Falls. Anyhow, Pulatech was owned by Geoffrey Lee, CEO, and he had a Batchlors degree in Economics. Geoffrey helped people through his church and volenteered my internship. Geoffrey liked to say the F bomb through snapchat video. He had two sons working there. One son ended up working at Best Buy Richfield for website programming. The other son is in the US airforce . Geoffrey liked the Minnesota Vikings. For job duties, I installed install Ubuntu Server 14.10.3 Apache, SAMBA server, OpenSSH Server. Then I created Ubuntu administrator accounts, redesign file for Gateway, Domain controller IP Addresses in Ubuntu. Third, I format and Install Windows 10 Enterprise. Fourth, I Format and Install Windows Server 2012 R2. Fifth, I login Ubuntu with Putty Sixth, I Login onto an old WatchGuard firewall through Firefox and print out profile settings for its replacement. Seventh, I had set the group policy drive letter for Netgear ReadyNAS. Eighth, I research how to do local active directory on Amazon web services. Ninth, I fixed and explain Epson workforce printer issues. Tenth, I vacuumed eDell Poweredge 2950 and aircan dust pc motherboards. Eleventh, I build cubical wall for workspaces. Twelth, I drill table into studs onto cubical walls . Thirteenth, I obtain files from password protected workstation from Kali Linux LiveDVD. Fourteenth, I type up an email tutorial for Windows, Android and iPad. Fifteenth, I used SugarCRM Community edition ( customer relationship management (CRM) system). Geoffrey Lee gave me tough love for not placing the printer in the right part of the room. I had to move dividers for the tables from another room into the workplace.

Express Employment Services:

Then I went to Express Employment in New Richmond. I took at SAT test, and didn’t do well enough. They had a lot of factory jobs in St. Croix County or truck unloading temporay jobs at $13 hr. They said sometimes they do Information Technology.

Western Wisconsin Health

After 4 months, I was hired at Baldwin Area Medical Center for my second internship. I was a desktop support technician. I had to checking new Hewlett-Packard inkjet printers via unpacking, print test page from Windows Server 2012 R2 (DHCP IP addresses) running in remote desktop, repacking them, and adding 'ok' label . Printers are sent to the new Baldwin hospital. Two out of the 50 printers did not work properly. Then I had to check pc source labeling in a registry book and then adding the destination to the source label with a sharpie. Checking them off in the register book. These PCs are sent to the room location in the new Baldwin hospital via a vendor. Third, I was adding printer ip address to Windows Server 2012 R2 and then typing name into printer settings. Forth, I was labeling RJ-45 cable boxes 1,3,6,10 for 1,3,6,10 feet cable. Fifth, I was adding network hp printers to Windows 7, add printer as a local printer, and check off on list on a paper. Delete the unneeded network printer from printer and devices in Windows 7. Shut down printers and store printers back in a box. Write and search out pcs to add destination sticker onto the pcs such as Tinys, laptops and towers located throughout old hospital. Add network printers and add again as local printers in old hospital rooms.
Write labels for all the handheld scanners in the old hospital and then search out and place the label onto the scanners.

Write labels for the most of the monitors than placed onto the monitors throughout the old hospital.

Alphabetize tiny pcs in boxes, because they were unsorted in the old hospital. Used Microsoft Excel 2010 to create a xlsx map chart containing PCs, printer and access point destinations in new hospital. I unpacked printers onto shelves in the new hospital. Unpacked LED monitors, tiny pcs, keyboards, clamps and made a neat workstation space. Then I used Putty and Telnet in a remote desktop session to access a Cisco switch to change ports for the VLAN in the new Baldwin hospital. Only one computer could access the Cisco catalyst 2960 switch and had to use remote desktop (old hospital pc).Write labels for the most of the monitors, pcs, scanners. I was kinda confused when I added tags to monitors and screens around the hospital.

My Three Best Buy Interviews

I bombed three Best Buy interviews at Oakdale. They were playing Daft Punk over the speaker. Discovery album during my first one and Random Access Memories during my last job. One job was for A+ technician. Other jobs were CSR. My time at Circuit City didn’t help me land the job. I think he told me I should work at a Best Buy warehouse first and then inter to CSR afterwards ultimately became my job at Laptop Chips in Roberts. I gave him my Youtube on the resume. I had my instagram and my college transcripts. I passed the CSR test three times.

WalMart CSR Tests

I passed Walmart CSR test twice in my life. Its kinda easy after you find out you do Absolutely Sure or Absolutely Not on all the answers with no Maybes Yes or Maybe No on multiple choice. I been the Walmart 100 times. I know their store is disorganized and they have rotating Management rotates. The only way to go to another Walmart is if you want to be in Management. After holiday and Circuit City, I ultimately decided Information Technology and no CSR.

Turnkey and Three Square Market interview.

This job was in River Falls, Wisconsin. I had a interview for phone customer service with Cindy Remington to sell money to vending machines in prisons. Three Square Market in River Falls was in the news for microchipping people in their arm for life like chipping dogs. The unconstitutionality debate of chipping people like in Minority Report (2002 movie) got on Hannity on Fox News Channel. There was also a Network Administration job there that I filled out the application six times for. I only had phone interviews.

Computer Concierge interview

Computer Concierge was in downtown Hudson. I had an interview with Padraic Morton for a A+ technician in Hudson, Wisconsin. Padraic was gay. Padraic needed help with computer repair. I also tried to get into Digital Garage in Hudson for a interview. We met at a Starbucks for the interview. No luck. He found someone bettter, but Computer Concierge went bankrupt in 2018. The company was small. They had a business to repair Ipad and iphone screens.

Laptop Chips.

From August 2017 to February 2019 I was at Laptop Chips.

Search database printer using a Virtual private network of Best Buy. Unpack printers and configuring new Gateway, IP Address, Netmask, and host name on the printer. The label printed from the Laptop Chips database. Placing labels from database onto the printers. Repacking Lexmark printers in boxes and placed in new stack.
Scanning Cisco switch + switch module and Cisco gateway serial numbers in Laptop Chips database and sorting them into boxes or stacks .
Testing used Lenovo monitors' LCD screens using Microsoft Paint, printing a shipping label from the Laptop Chips database, repacking monitors into boxes with bubble rap plus foam, and taping box up to be sent back to the Fortune 100 company.
Print out labels from Laptop Chips Internet database for monitors and printer.
Rap units of 8 motherboards into bubble rap and package three units in a cardboard box
Clean cash registers and bubble rap them in cardboard box
Using the google server bios, deactivating file system encryption, getting into raid configuration to reformat 8 hard drives in the raid 0.
Using air compressor to spray debris from a used keyboard so back to brand new. Also tested keyboards and cleaned them.
Deleting Cisco IOS, NVRAM, and other files off used switches and routers through Putty and the IOS terminal.
Clean up and print test page for used Zebra LP-2844Z using Microsoft Word
some pallet jack and dolly experience moving boxes on pallets
recycling gaylord cardboard.
In admin mode in laptop chips database, changing label data
Organizing mice, different types of cables, power supplies to be recycled
Organize 1000s of "pricer" price tags into boxes.
replace batteries for 100s of bar code scanners.
Dismantled the RAM, battery, heat sinks, CPU,; motherboard from several HP Proliant BL460 & Cisco UCS-B250 & HP Proliant DL380 servers ; reassembled the case.
printed label & stacked IBM receipt printers in gaylord
sort end-of-life Cisco AIR-CAP3602I-A-K9 in gaylords
printed label and stacked IBM receipt printers recycling gaylord cardboard.

In admin mode in laptop chips database, changing label data

Organizing mice, different types of cables, power supplies, keyboards, mice to be recycled

wrapping computer hardware on pallet with plastic wrap

adding stickers to boxes and moving pallets with a pallet jack from one side of the warehouse to the other.

Get rented out warehouse ready for its last day of rent. Lease on warehouse ended. New warehouse in Baldwin, Wisconsin somewhere.

Dave K. was nice. He hunted deer. He had a ATV. He was at Century college for 1 year. Dave prefered no music. He was running a project by Best Buy Aaron Foryste played death metal, and heavy metal in the 2^nd warehouse. Aaron went to the last rock concert in Somerset, Northern Invasion, to tape Tool. Aaron had an associate degree from WITC New Richmond. He was listening to Death (Death Metal) Metallica, Silpknot, Mastadon, Stone Temple Pilots, System of a Down, Korn, Amon Amarth, Death, Opeth, . There was also some gangster rap and death metal channels off Spotify. I got to play my own music of Pandora. They also played Pandora and Tidal stations over the speaker. The employees were sometimes acting like children. The warehouse had boxes, computer hardware, pellot loader, and forklifts. Four of them were forklift qualified. Dave K. was 32. Josh was 34. Josh liked Heavy Metal too.  In Roberts, there is nothing good going on.   The McDonalds by the Flying J truck stop and the park and ride is a place for drug dealers and shady stuff.   The warehouse was cold in the winter. There was no heating.  Everybody was on Facebook and Instagram and I added them. 

Best Buy Richfield downsized because of the retail apocalypse and I was laid off at 1 year 7 months from working there. It feels I was let go from age discrimination that starts at 35 years old. I was replaced by David Speath, who was a ASVAB in the marines.  He had nepotism with Eric S (CEO).  Eric Hillstead and David Speath appeared on Epic Economist youtube channel. David looks sad with tears against a white background.  Eric Hillstead was in a monkey suit in a server farm in the videos.

Interview with Fechel Shades with Todd Lochr in New Richmond, WI.

Todd wanted a graphic designer and he did Information Technology. His business was a Lamp Shade business in New Richmond. He wanted me to photograph lap shades and delete the background in Adobe Photoshop. I said I could do that with the Magic Lasso, but he wanted layers. He didn’t think I knew how to use Photoshop. I said I used Paintshop Pro for signatures for videogame message board forums.

2020

Moving to Mankato, Minnesota

What Impeachment Exposed About Trump and 2020

For those who got stuck watching the past two weeks of testimony in the circus inquiry into impeaching President Trump there is a bit of news that has been uncovered.

Let face it only about 3 percent of the American people spent time watching the proceedings. Compare that to the near 30 percent of the American people who tuned in to view the Clinton impeachment proceedings and you already understand something very important.

After watching the Democrats attempt to displace a lawfully elected president via fake charges of collusion with Russia, the voter doesn’t seem very impressed with an effort to displace him over a phony charge of “quid pro quo.”

Denying due process, witnesses, or even their choice of the committee members who would be allowed to speak just added to the (****yawn****) sham and why people felt no compulsion to view the goings on.

Now that it appears Democrats have called their final witnesses and they are preparing to recommend the formal articles of impeachment, it’s my belief that the president’s team will finally be allowed to punch back for the first time.

But before they do we need to point out a significant and vital truth.

Post intel-committee polls are pointing out this truth. But it deserves a wider recognition.

It would be wise for Pelosi and Schiff to consider it prior to taking even another step forward.

Democrats cast President Trump as someone who is so self-driven that he’s attempting to subvert justice just to “win an election.” That his thirst for victory pulsates through his heart so obsessively that he would break laws to have foreign governments interfere in our process just so that he could beat a Democrat.

Yet here’s the unspoken truth: He doesn’t need to.

He never has.

In 2016 he literally spent the least in campaign operations to win an impressive 30 state (plus) victory.

He spent less than his GOP opponents in the primary.

He is spending way less than any of the Democratic candidates at present, with hundreds of millions in cash on hand, ready to go to work when the time is right. But the truth is he’s had hundreds of millions in the bank since his victory in 2016.

The Democrats didn’t lose because the Russians spent $90,000 on Facebook ads. Team Hillary spent upwards of $69 million.

They lost because her message didn’t connect with voters who felt like Washington, D.C. was ignoring them.

In 2016 candidate Trump had no track record, but he had ideas, and he made promises. In 2020 he’s kept 87 of those promises, and he still has ideas not yet implemented.

In 2020 he will likely spend less money on media than his opponent. He will focus resources into going to meet voters at his enormous rallies. People will feel heard, they will look at his track record now, and will easily send him back to finish the fight.

He doesn’t need Russian bot-farms. He doesn’t need Ukrainian investigations. He doesn’t need a thing.

And it seems voters understand this.

Multiple polls showed movement with independents since the “public” impeachment inquiry had begun. Different polls showed differing amounts but the range was 8-11 percent in the president’s favor.

The media—which is the public relations arm of the Democrats—has helped spread the idea that if President Trump has done something illegal, that it should be looked into.

Voters gave the Democrats the chance to make their case. And just like with Russia, collusion, and Mueller, the wheels fell off the cart under scrutiny.

Donald Trump will win more states in 2020 than he won in 2016. (I’m on record saying 34-38. He won 30 in 2016). And he doesn’t need any help from anybody, minus the voters that he has worked tirelessly for while in office.

Believing otherwise is just playing the sucker the impeachment Dems tried to convince you that you were these past two weeks.

Don’t let them

My auto-biography 1.0

I was born in 1984. I was in Redeemer Lutheran Church (ELCA) in the early 1990s. The first pastor was welcoming. The woman pastor wasn’t as welcoming. David and I used to come over. David and I used to go to circuses, Science Museum of Minnesota, play NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, Dreamcast and a little bit of Gamecube. At David’s house in Somerset, we used to hear Ozzfest and a train whistle. Ozzfest was playing nu metal like Slipknot, Korn, Ozzy Osbourne, System of the Down in the 1990s. I noticed at David’s room was messy so I cleaned it up. He had NES games like Star Tropics, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Spyhunter, Contra, and Mega Man II. He had Genesis games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic and knuckles, and the Simpsons. He had Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart. I used to meet him at Thanksgiving and Christmases. He got the cool toys. I was stuck with no videogames like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures until 1997 when I got a N64. I had a PC since 1993. It was MS-DOS and I played Simcity 2000, Hoyles Casino, King’s Quest III. I got a Windows 95 pc in 1995. I made my first website with Netscape Composer and upload it to pressenter.com with FTP Voyager. I was surfing IGN.com, Gamespy.com, Gamespot.com and Gamefaqs.com in the 1990s. I had 20 Disney VHS tapes of animated cartoons. I made a Geocities (geocities.com/nightwalkers101) website with Namo Webeditor 5. I biked to Willow River State Park and around the trails in my childhood, about 13 miles away from Roberts, Wisconsin to Hudson Wisconsin and back.

At Calvin Academy in Roseville and Moundsview. I was happy to be there. I met city kids. I was happy about the one on one education. I had Cs and Ds grades in the St. Croix Central public school. I was at gym. I got many As and Bs at this school. It did have a clinic. I was into country music in grade school. I had speech therapy in grade school. I was happy go lucky. I was in cub scouts. I was afraid of the polls on the recess equipment. One time I returned there with my cousin, David, to use radio controlled cars. David had nitro gas RC car. One time I was with some basketball players and a swarm of wasps was there. I got measles there. I have a regret of only having a disposable camera with me at field trips. St Croix Central elementary had field trips to Minnesota Zoo, Como Zoo, Science Museum of Minnesota, Mall of America. There was a social studies class in SCC elementary. I used to play with LEGOs and build airplanes. I used to have pillow fort downstairs with the tv on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, Disney Channel watching Hanna Barbara, Looney Tunes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Duck Tales, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, Tail Spin, Batman The Animated Series, X-Men Animated Series.

I was in Cub scouts and Boy Scouts. I went to all the ranks up to Life Scout. This was right before boy Scouts were into Jürgen Habermas and invited girls. I went to Tomahawk every year. Sometimes I went to Avanti Camp. It was a nice group of kids. I stayed friends with Randy Peterson and Robert Haggerty for a while. Robert Haggerty moved to Minnesota in 2008. Randy Peterson was in his house until 2008. Then he moved to New Richmond in 2008. My Redeemer Lutheran confirmation (ELCA) had a woman reverend Marilyn, who wasn’t so welcoming. My parents did dinners there. I was there for 8 years. The church has a Jürgen Habermas Critical Theory book. I got to go to Disney World (Epcot, Magic Kingdom) in 1997. The Great Movie Ride. and Caribbean cruise by Royal Caribbean. I went to Cayman Island, Florida Keys, Cozumel, Mexico, and Dunn River Falls, Jamaica. I went on a Submarine on Cayman Island.

I was at Renaissance Academy in River Falls in 2001-2003. This was because Calvin Academy was costly. I met this friend Chuck Peskar. I had a Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Command Prompt class at Chippewa Valley Technical Center in 2003. I had to walk to the Pizza Hut (defunct 2019) and Subway. In the late 2000s I used to go to Bos and Mine and Juniors in River Falls for bar hopping. That time I made it home from Juniors almost totally drunk. When I met Chuck Peskar in 2019, he said he lived in Minneapolis mixed up with the local mafia when it was a sanctuary city of minorities.

I worked with the Holiday Gas Station in Roberts. I had a high school classmate Heidi Green. Circuit City from Woodbury in 2006-2007. I worked both floor CSR and warehouse. PC network Services in 2007-2008. I did oscommence on Centos 5.0 in 2007.

In 2004, I took a network administration associate degree with WITC New Richmond that I didn’t complete. I was using Knoppix in the Linux+ class. I took the CCNA test at the Cisco Academy class. I had English class, an algebra class, a Visual Basic class, and industrial networking class. I didn’t complete the associate degree. My GPA was 2.5.

At Rasmussen College Lake Elmo, I couldn’t take pictures or video. I was there from 2007 to 2015. I took Network Administration, Network Security, Health information technology (coding) and Project Management MIS Bachelors. I met Brian Sager there who later became a Facebook friend. There is only two pictures of me at college, one with class and one with the dean.

I went to Pierce County Fair a lot. I looked at the pictures, farm animals, photography awards, amusement rides for 30 years. I used to go with my cousin David Hartmon and my mom. I was around David 8 times a year.

At Pulatech in Hudson Wisconsin. I was with a job coach during my internship. I was normally into Ubuntu Server 14.04 creating administrator passwords. Gregory just gave me a little tough love when I put a printer in the wrong spot.

At Baldwin Area Medical Center, I found on indeed.com for an internship. I passed the interview. worked with Windows 7, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Cisco Catalyst switches. I changed Virtual LANs in Cisco IOS thru telnet, putty, and terminal. The Management information systems manager needed extra help with a skeleton information technology staff. The new hospital networks went down because of the under budget. They needed to redo it entirely and I wasn’t hired for a permanent full time position. The network configuration was wrong. The hospital was called Western Wisconsin Health too.

At Laptop Chips, I worked for 1 year 7 months. I made friends, but they weren’t able to get me another job. They just worked there, because they couldn’t find any other job. Employees listened to death metal, heavy metal, nu metal over the speaker from Pandora, Spotify. Dave K. did not want a lot of music. Dave Keefer listened to Pink Floyd a lot and had the Animals album for usernames at Laptop Chips. Aaron and Eric had an Associate Degree with Network+. Aaron also had Security+. The management has been to Century College for 1-2 years. The 18-19 year old employees were into old school rap music. It was in the middle of the retail apocalypse and it was a Best Buy warehouse. Best Buy Richfield finally ran out of contracts for me to do before I was laid off. Some employees got to go to Northern Invasion in Somerset, Wisconsin. That last year that they held Northern Invasion due to illegal drugs and brawls. Aaron was listening to Tool, Slipknot, Metallica, Three Days Grace, System of the Down. Aaron was like Robert Haggerty in 2001.

Civil War Begins When the Constitutional Order Breaks Down

Georgetown Institute poll finds that two-thirds of us believe we are edging closer “to the brink of a civil war.” Yet Americans cannot properly analyze this “gathering storm.” We lack a framework, a lexicon, and the historical data (from other civil wars) to see clearly what is happening to us.
Here is a quick template for how we might more usefully decipher how this nation gets to another civil war. It is arranged as a short series of questions: 1) What is civil war? 2) Why do political-constitutional orders sometimes breakdown, rather than simply transform in response to change? 3) How is violence essential to constitutional and political resolution? 4) How close is the U.S. to such a break down, and its consequences?

What is civil war? 
Civil war is, at root, a contest over legitimacy. Legitimacy—literally the right to make law — is shorthand for the consent of the citizens and political parties to abide by the authority of a constitutional order. Civil war begins when this larger political compact breaks down.

Civil War means that there is a functional split within the source of legitimacy between two parties, each of which was formerly part of the old constitutional order. Thus each can claim that it represents the source of new legitimacy, and the right to define a new or reworked constitutional order.
Hence civil war becomes a struggle in which one party must successfully assert a successor legitimate order, and to which the opposing party must eventually submit. This is above all a contest over constitutional authority. Inasmuch as civil war happens after constitutional breakdown, it means that resolution must be reached not only outside of a now-former legal framework, but also unrestrained even by longstanding political customs and norms. Extra-constitutional force is now the deciding factor, which is why these struggles are called civil wars.

Americans are most familiar with our own such battles, from 1775-1783 and 1861-1876. For example, Parliament’s “Intolerable Acts” (1774) stripped Massachusetts of its governing legitimacy, leading to armed resistance to Parliament’s authority. Two “legitimacies” at war.
In 1860, the election of Abraham Lincoln convinced Southern electorates that the incoming Republican administration would strip them of their way of life. The slave states could only accept a constitutional order that fully supported slavery. The only legitimacy lay in Slavocracy—while the North, for its part, would not, as Lincoln declared, accept “the nationalization of slavery.”
Why do some constitutional orders breakdown rather than transform?
Our political stability has depended on the tenure of periodic “party systems.” Legitimacy flows from the give and take of a two-party relationship. American party systems have had dominant parties or states. In the first party system, four of the first five presidents (32 out of 36 years) were slaveholders from Virginia. The second party system was more balanced between Democrats and Whigs, but broke down in the 1850s when the Whigs up and vanished, with party stability disappearing with them. The new GOP dominated the third system, 6-2, with one of the Democrats impeached. Equally, the fourth was also Republican, 6-1, with a Republican third party challenge electing the only Dem. FDR’s fifth party system put Democrats in office for 32 out of 48 years, with both GOP administrations governing within a New Deal worldview.
Many thought that Reagan’s electoral wave signaled a sixth party system, yet it failed to take root. After 1992, the parties have alternated presidents every eight years, and with each succeeding administration, the political milieu has grown yet more rancorous and divided. There is no relationship between parties now — save as sworn enemies — let alone a “system.”
The situation resonates with the 1850s. When collegial understandings between “The Democracy” and the Whigs evaporated, a new opposing party appeared suddenly, and as an enemy. No other relationship was possible.
Hence, a party system ending without a consensual replacement means that longstanding customs and norms that undergird constitutional relationships are quietly pared away. In other words, well before legal confrontations over legitimacy, the erosion of informal rules sets up adjudicating crises over formal rules. This was a feature of the final deterioration in Congress before 1860, marked by brawls on the floor of the House and a bloody assault in the Senate.
Dismantling a web of political relationships precedes the dismantling of constitutional legitimacy.
How is violence essential to constitutional and political resolution?
Violence is the magical substance of civil war. If, by definition, political groups in opposition have also abandoned the legitimacy of the old order, then a successor constitutional order with working politics cannot be birthed without violence. Hence violence is the only force that can bring about a new order. This is why all memorable civil wars, and all parties, enthusiastically embrace violence.
The character of civil war is existential. The breakdown of the old order forces frightening prospects on society. If constitutions represented a collective source of authority, in its violent replacement are suddenly two opposing and inimical pretenders, each crying for both allegiance and punishment. Moreover, one party’s victory is the inevitable loss of the other’s way of life.
Hence in such conflicts, the entire society must choose sides, and it is an all-or-nothing choice. Moderates and undecided, and those peaceful fence sitters all are forced to join warring factions. In civil war, perhaps the greatest violence, in the heart, is the aggressive coercion to join a warring cause.
War becomes a great, mutual ritual of resolution between enemies-once-brothers. Here, longstanding customs and norms, paradoxically, come right into play. While old political norms may have been discarded, old conflict norms again take center stage. If there is to be a war, certain expectations, even hallowed traditions come into play: How battle should be formed, and also too, the pathways battle resolves.
Hence, the “Cousins’ War” of 1775-1781 quite clearly took its battlefield cues from the English Civil War (1642-1651), and followed the rituals, not only of formal battles, but also the norms and standards for victory and defeat. Likewise, the Confederacy, three generations later, explicitly declared itself a glorious cause cut from the same cloth as the declaration of 1776.
Our antique civil wars were not bound to formal rules, yet somehow they held to well-etched bounds of expectation. American society today has very different norms and expectations for civil conflict, which certainly will constrain how we fight the next battle.
Today’s America no longer embraces a national landscape of an industrial-lockstep battlefield (think Gettysburg, D-Day). Our next civil war—as social media so eloquently reminds us—will enact its violence on a battle campus of equal pain, if less blood. Yet there will be much blood, however it will take form like the gatheringchaos of our world.
How close is the U.S. to such a breakdown—and its consequences?
American constitutional order has not broken down, yet. Constitutional legitimacy still rules. Recent tests of legitimacy confirm this. A presidential impeachment in the 1990s did not lead to conviction in a trial, nor did anyone expect it to. The Supreme Court decided a contested presidential election in 2000, and the decision was everywhere accepted. 2016, in contrast, was bitterly accepted. Yet even the relentless force to depose the president that followed, through a special prosecutor, was spent by the spring of 2019.
Yet if these are tests of robust legitimacy they are hardly reassuring.  A daily torrent of unfiltered evidence suggests that our constitutional order is fissuring before our eyes. That we have skirted constitutional crisis for the past quarter century is no reassurance, but rather an alarm of continuing erosion. Each new test is yet more bitterly contested, and still less resolved.
Today, two irreconcilable visions of American life believe that they can continue only if they own the whole order. Yet ours has been a shared constitutional order. As we witnessed from 1860-1876, it must proceed as a consensual and joint party system: It cannot exist through single party ownership. The single-minded drive toward this goal—especially now by Blue state Democrats—has embrittled our constitutional order, and is creating the basis for a full-scale legitimacy crackup. Here’s what it might look like:
A contested election that Court decision fails to resolve. Supreme Court legitimacy has eroded in the years since Bush v. Gore. Today, a Court decision that is rejected by half the nation would not only effectively drain its authority, but also leave the U.S. no final arbiter in governance. Democrats’ courtpacking would certainly abet this.
Declaration of a pre- or post-election state of emergency. As Commander-in-Chief, the executive can temporarily assume extraordinary powers. We have witnessed such moments as recently as 9-11. What if the emergency had a domestic focus, such as a “coup d’état” within the government itself? What if it was the refusal of Congress to accept such an executive order, or even the continued tenure of the president?
State nullification of Federal policy, laws, or executive decisions.State nullification, indelibly tied to another civil war, casts a long shadow. States are selectively nullifying executive decisions and federal law, like Blue states with sanctuary cities and legal marijuana. What if beleaguered Red states defied Federal gun confiscation (second amendment) or exercise of religion (first amendment) laws/executive orders, by calling up state militia and mobilizingstate defense  forces?
The issue here is not “What if?” but rather, “What then?” It is not about the authenticity of conflict scenarios, but rather about how contingencies we cannot now predict might bring us to a breaking point, andthe breakdown of legitimacy.
Already, warring sides have hardened their hearts so that they will do almost anything in order to prevail. The great irony is that their mutual drive to win—either to preserve their way of life, or make their way of life the law of the land—means that the battle has already become a perverse alliance. Today they refuse to work together in the rusting carapace of old constitutional order. Yet nonetheless they work shoulder-to-shoulder, together, to overthrow it. For both sides, the old order is the major obstacle to victory. Hence victory is through overthrow. Only when constitutional obstacles are toppled can the battle for light and truth begin.
Editor’s Note: The first paragraph was edited to reflect the exact wording of the Georgetown Institute poll.

How America Ends A tectonic demographic shift is under way

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss.

In October, with the specter of impeachment looming, he fumed on Twitter, “What is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” For good measure, he also quoted a supporter’s dark prediction that impeachment “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”
Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric matches the tenor of the times. The body politic is more fractious than at any time in recent memory. Over the past 25 years, both red and blue areas have become more deeply hued, with Democrats clustering in cities and suburbs and Republicans filling in rural areas and exurbs. In Congress, where the two caucuses once overlapped ideologically, the dividing aisle has turned into a chasm.
As partisans have drifted apart geographically and ideologically, they’ve become more hostile toward each other. In 1960, less than 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans said they’d be unhappy if their children married someone from the other party; today, 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would be, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic poll—far higher than the percentages that object to marriages crossing the boundaries of race and religion. As hostility rises, Americans’ trust in political institutions, and in one another, is declining. A study released by the Pew Research Center in July found that only about half of respondents believed their fellow citizens would accept election results no matter who won. At the fringes, distrust has become centrifugal: Right-wing activists in Texas and left-wing activists in California have revived talk of secession.

Recent research by political scientists at Vanderbilt University and other institutions has found both Republicans and Democrats distressingly willing to dehumanize members of the opposite party. “Partisans are willing to explicitly state that members of the opposing party are like animals, that they lack essential human traits,” the researchers found. The president encourages and exploits such fears. This is a dangerous line to cross. As the researchers write, “Dehumanization may loosen the moral restraints that would normally prevent us from harming another human being.”
Outright political violence remains considerably rarer than in other periods of partisan divide, including the late 1960s. But overheated rhetoric has helped radicalize some individuals. Cesar Sayoc, who was arrested for targeting multiple prominent Democrats with pipe bombs, was an avid Fox News watcher; in court filings, his lawyers said he took inspiration from Trump’s white-supremacist rhetoric. “It is impossible,” they wrote, “to separate the political climate and [Sayoc’s] mental illness.” James Hodgkinson, who shot at Republican lawmakers (and badly wounded Representative Steve Scalise) at a baseball practice, was a member of the Facebook groups Terminate the Republican Party and The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans. In other instances, political protests have turned violent, most notably in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a Unite the Right rally led to the murder of a young woman. In Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere, the left-wing “antifa” movement has clashed with police. The violence of extremist groups provides ammunition to ideologues seeking to stoke fear of the other side.

What has caused such rancor? The stresses of a globalizing, postindustrial economy. Growing economic inequality. The hyperbolizing force of social media. Geographic sorting. The demagogic provocations of the president himself. As in Murder on the Orient Express, every suspect has had a hand in the crime.
But the biggest driver might be demographic change. The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests. If there are precedents for such a transition, they lie here in the United States, where white Englishmen initially predominated, and the boundaries of the dominant group have been under negotiation ever since. Yet those precedents are hardly comforting. Many of these renegotiations sparked political conflict or open violence, and few were as profound as the one now under way.

From Our December 2019 Issue

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Within the living memory of most Americans, a majority of the country’s residents were white Christians. That is no longer the case, and voters are not insensate to the change—nearly a third of conservatives say they face “a lot” of discrimination for their beliefs, as do more than half of white evangelicals. But more epochal than the change that has already happened is the change that is yet to come: Sometime in the next quarter century or so, depending on immigration rates and the vagaries of ethnic and racial identification, nonwhites will become a majority in the U.S. For some Americans, that change will be cause for celebration; for others, it may pass unnoticed. But the transition is already producing a sharp political backlash, exploited and exacerbated by the president. In 2016, white working-class voters who said that discrimination against whites is a serious problem, or who said they felt like strangers in their own country, were almost twice as likely to vote for Trump as those who did not. Two-thirds of Trump voters agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.” In Trump, they’d found a defender.

Robert P. Jones: The electoral time machine that could reelect Trump

In 2002, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John Judis published a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that demographic changes—the browning of America, along with the movement of more women, professionals, and young people into the Democratic fold—would soon usher in a “new progressive era” that would relegate Republicans to permanent minority political status. The book argued, somewhat triumphally, that the new emerging majority was inexorable and inevitable. After Barack Obama’s reelection, in 2012, Teixeira doubled down on the argument in The Atlantic, writing, “The Democratic majority could be here to stay.” Two years later, after the Democrats got thumped in the 2014 midterms, Judis partially recanted, saying that the emerging Democratic majority had turned out to be a mirage and that growing support for the GOP among the white working class would give the Republicans a long-term advantage. The 2016 election seemed to confirm this.

But now many conservatives, surveying demographic trends, have concluded that Teixeira wasn’t wrong—merely premature. They can see the GOP’s sinking fortunes among younger voters, and feel the culture turning against them, condemning them today for views that were commonplace only yesterday. They are losing faith that they can win elections in the future. With this come dark possibilities.

The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority.

The Republican Party has treated Trump’s tenure more as an interregnum than a revival, a brief respite that can be used to slow its decline. Instead of simply contesting elections, the GOP has redoubled its efforts to narrow the electorate and raise the odds that it can win legislative majorities with a minority of votes. In the first five years after conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 39 percent of the counties that the law had previously restrained reduced their number of polling places. And while gerrymandering is a bipartisan sin, over the past decade Republicans have indulged in it more heavily. In Wisconsin last year, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes cast in state legislative races, but just 36 percent of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans tried to impeach the state Supreme Court justices who had struck down a GOP attempt to gerrymander congressional districts in that state. The Trump White House has tried to suppress counts of immigrants for the 2020 census, to reduce their voting power. All political parties maneuver for advantage, but only a party that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all.

The history of the United States is rich with examples of once-dominant groups adjusting to the rise of formerly marginalized populations—sometimes gracefully, more often bitterly, and occasionally violently. Partisan coalitions in the United States are constantly reshuffling, realigning along new axes. Once-rigid boundaries of faith, ethnicity, and class often prove malleable. Issues gain salience or fade into irrelevance; yesterday’s rivals become tomorrow’s allies.
But sometimes, that process of realignment breaks down. Instead of reaching out and inviting new allies into its coalition, the political right hardens, turning against the democratic processes it fears will subsume it. A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up.

f a democracy in the 20th century, as evidence that the fate of democracy lies in the hands of conservatives. Where the center-right flourishes, it can defend the interests of its adherents, starving more radical movements of support. In Germany, where center-right parties faltered, “not their strength, but rather their weakness” became the driving force behind democracy’s collapse.

Trump has led his party to this dead end, and it may well cost him his chance for reelection, presuming he is not removed through impeachment. But the president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.

Adam Przeworski, a political scientist who has studied struggling democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America, has argued that to survive, democratic institutions “must give all the relevant political forces a chance to win from time to time in the competition of interests and values.” But, he adds, they also have to do something else, of equal importance: “They must make even losing under democracy more attractive than a future under non-democratic outcomes.” That conservatives—despite currently holding the White House, the Senate, and many state governments—are losing faith in their ability to win elections in the future bodes ill for the smooth functioning of American democracy. That they believe these electoral losses would lead to their destruction is even more worrying.
We should be careful about overstating the dangers. It is not 1860 again in the United States—it is not even 1850. But numerous examples from American history—most notably the antebellum South—offer a cautionary tale about how quickly a robust democracy can weaken when a large section of the population becomes convinced that it cannot continue to win elections, and also that it cannot afford to lose them.

The collapse of the mainstream Republican Party in the face of Trumpism is at once a product of highly particular circumstances and a disturbing echo of other events. In his recent study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe, the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt zeroes in on a decisive factor distinguishing the states that achieved democratic stability from those that fell prey to authoritarian impulses: The key variable was not the strength or character of the political left, or of the forces pushing for greater democratization, so much as the viability of the center-right. A strong center-right party could wall off more extreme right-wing movements, shutting out the radicals who attacked the political system itself.

Read: Daniel Ziblatt on why conservative parties are central to democracy

The left is by no means immune to authoritarian impulses; some of the worst excesses of the 20th century were carried out by totalitarian left-wing regimes. But right-wing parties are typically composed of people who have enjoyed power and status within a society. They might include disproportionate numbers of leaders—business magnates, military officers, judges, governors—upon whose loyalty and support the government depends. If groups that traditionally have enjoyed privileged positions see a future for themselves in a more democratic society, Ziblatt finds, they will accede to it. But if “conservative forces believe that electoral politics will permanently exclude them from government, they are more likely to reject democracy outright.”
Ziblatt points to Germany in the 1930s, the most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 20th century, as evidence that the fate of democracy lies in the hands of conservatives. Where the center-right flourishes, it can defend the interests of its adherents, starving more radical movements of support. In Germany, where center-right parties faltered, “not their strength, but rather their weakness” became the driving force behind democracy’s collapse.
Of course, the most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 19th century took place right here in the United States, sparked by the anxieties of white voters who feared the decline of their own power within a diversifying nation.

The slaveholding South exercised disproportionate political power in the early republic. America’s first dozen presidents—excepting only those named Adams—were slaveholders. Twelve of the first 16 secretaries of state came from slave states. The South initially dominated Congress as well, buoyed by its ability to count three-fifths of the enslaved persons held as property for the purposes of apportionment.

Whether the American political system today can endure without fracturing further may depend on the choices of the center-right.

Politics in the early republic was factious and fractious, dominated by crosscutting interests. But as Northern states formally abandoned slavery, and then embraced westward expansion, tensions rose between the states that exalted free labor and the ones whose fortunes were directly tied to slave labor, bringing sectional conflict to the fore. By the mid-19th century, demographics were clearly on the side of the free states, where the population was rapidly expanding. Immigrants surged across the Atlantic, finding jobs in Northern factories and settling on midwestern farms. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign-born would form 19 percent of the population of the Northern states, but just 4 percent of the Southern population.
The new dynamic was first felt in the House of Representatives, the most democratic institution of American government—and the Southern response was a concerted effort to remove the topic of slavery from debate. In 1836, Southern congressmen and their allies imposed a gag rule on the House, barring consideration of petitions that so much as mentioned slavery, which would stand for nine years. As the historian Joanne Freeman shows in her recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, slave-state representatives in Washington also turned to bullying, brandishing weapons, challenging those who dared disparage the peculiar institution to duels, or simply attacking them on the House floor with fists or canes. In 1845, an antislavery speech delivered by Ohio’s Joshua Giddings so upset Louisiana’s John Dawson that he cocked his pistol and announced that he intended to kill his fellow congressman. In a scene more Sergio Leone than Frank Capra, other representatives—at least four of them with guns of their own—rushed to either side, in a tense standoff. By the late 1850s, the threat of violence was so pervasive that members regularly entered the House armed.

As Southern politicians perceived that demographic trends were starting to favor the North, they began to regard popular democracy itself as a threat. “The North has acquired a decided ascendancy over every department of this Government,” warned South Carolina’s Senator John C. Calhoun in 1850, a “despotic” situation, in which the interests of the South were bound to be sacrificed, “however oppressive the effects may be.” With the House tipping against them, Southern politicians focused on the Senate, insisting that the admission of any free states be balanced by new slave states, to preserve their control of the chamber. They looked to the Supreme Court—which by the 1850s had a five-justice majority from slaveholding states—to safeguard their power. And, fatefully, they struck back at the power of Northerners to set the rules of their own communities, launching a frontal assault on states’ rights.
But the South and its conciliating allies overreached. A center-right consensus, drawing Southern plantation owners together with Northern businessmen, had long kept the Union intact. As demographics turned against the South, though, its politicians began to abandon hope of convincing their Northern neighbors of the moral justice of their position, or of the pragmatic case for compromise. Instead of reposing faith in electoral democracy to protect their way of life, they used the coercive power of the federal government to compel the North to support the institution of slavery, insisting that anyone providing sanctuary to slaves, even in free states, be punished: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northern law-enforcement officials to arrest those who escaped from Southern plantations, and imposed penalties on citizens who gave them shelter.

The persecution complex of the South succeeded where decades of abolitionist activism had failed, producing the very hostility to slavery that Southerners feared. The sight of armed marshals ripping apart families and marching their neighbors back to slavery roused many Northerners from their moral torpor. The push-and-pull of democratic politics had produced setbacks for the South over the previous decades, but the South’s abandonment of electoral democracy in favor of countermajoritarian politics would prove catastrophic to its cause.

Today, a Republican Party that appeals primarily to white Christian voters is fighting a losing battle. The Electoral College, Supreme Court, and Senate may delay defeat for a time, but they cannot postpone it forever.

From January/February 2009: Hua Hsu’s cover story on the end of white America

The GOP’s efforts to cling to power by coercion instead of persuasion have illuminated the perils of defining a political party in a pluralistic democracy around a common heritage, rather than around values or ideals. Consider Trump’s push to slow the pace of immigration, which has backfired spectacularly, turning public opinion against his restrictionist stance. Before Trump announced his presidential bid, in 2015, less than a quarter of Americans thought legal immigration should be increased; today, more than a third feel that way. Whatever the merits of Trump’s particular immigration proposals, he has made them less likely to be enacted.

For a populist, Trump is remarkably unpopular. But no one should take comfort from that fact. The more he radicalizes his opponents against his agenda, the more he gives his own supporters to fear. The excesses of the left bind his supporters more tightly to him, even as the excesses of the right make it harder for the Republican Party to command majority support, validating the fear that the party is passing into eclipse, in a vicious cycle.

Civil War 2 Hot War Hope not.

Next to a nuclear strike, foreign invasion, or global pandemic, it’s hard to imagine something as bone-chillingly terrifying as a second hot Civil War. The first one was bad enough, what with the endless carnage and the deaths of over 620,000 soldiers in a time when the U.S. was sparsely populated and wartime technology was in its relative infancy, at least compared to today. Even if the military withheld its most destructive weapons, a modern hot civil war would be disastrous on a scale that’s barely imaginable.

It’s a prospect no sane person wants, even on the fringes of the right or the left. Yet, in today’s polarized age, most people now genuinely believe civil war to be a very real possibility. An October Georgetown Institute poll found that the average American believes we are “two-thirds of the way to the edge of a civil war,” while a solid majority believes that “political, racial, and class divisions are getting worse.”

From where I’m sitting, it sure seems that way, and it’s a topic that’s getting an increasing amount of coverage in the media from both conservative and liberal perspectives.

The Atlantic devoted its entire December issue to the topic of “How To Stop A Civil War.” Interestingly, it includes an article relating how marriage counseling techniques can help bring some sense of mutual understanding to people on both sides of the political spectrum. Because in truth, the kind of ‘contempt’ that research says ends marriages for good, the kind that left and right clearly have for each other these days, could very well end our nation.

In an article for The American Conservative titled, “Civil War Begins When The Constitutional Order Breaks Down,” Michael Vlahos writes of a “daily torrent of unfiltered evidence” that suggests that “our constitutional order is fissuring before our eyes.”

Leftist author Joseph Natoli, writing for CounterPunch about the “Looming Shadow of Civil War,” sardonically but accurately described how conservatives see the ideological opposition: “Liberals retain the old tax and spend/baby killing on demand profile, taking from working Americans and giving to lazy shirkers and on the way killing babies. The profile grows darker: gay marriage, gender choice, LGBTQ rights, amnesty to illegal aliens, open borders, confiscation of guns, cars, cattle, Jesus, Robert E. Lee and white privilege. The ‘extreme Left’ and Progressives have a thinner profile: Communists.”

The left, then, according to Natoli, sees Trump supporters as being motivated by “ignorance and stupidity at the top of the list, followed by racist, bigoted, misogynist and homophobic. In brief, if you voted for Trump, you were a troglodyte with a gun.”

Now, which of those characterizations appears more accurate and which are just a personal attack? Does the left not favor abortion, tax and spend, gun confiscation, and open borders? Don’t they, for example, incessantly yammer on about the ridiculous, nonexistent concept of “white privilege?" The only thing slightly offensive to some might be the “Communist” label, but many on the more extreme left likely only publicly eschew that label for fear of turning people off.

Trump supporters, of course, don’t cotton to the idea of being labeled as “racist, bigoted, misogynist and homophobic,” not to mention "ignorant" and "stupid," by condescending, virtue signaling leftists full of their own self-defined "morality." Yet, at least for now, we are all in the same boat, as HBO host Bill Maher pointed out in a somewhat-joking, mostly-serious “Real Time with Bill Maher” segment on Friday night. To Maher, the “single shining truth about democracy” is “sharing the country with assholes you can’t stand” in the same way families don’t typically choose their Thanksgiving dinner guests. (Sure, we all know who he’s talking about when it comes to “assholes,” but that doesn’t negate the overall point).

“You don’t get to choose the guests, because those freaks are your family,” Maher joked. “Think about that the next time you think you can own someone politically. Think about how you can see politics so differently from people who share your very blood.” The HBO host lamented the desire, on both sides, to “own” the opposition - a tactic that never actually changes minds - before grimly observing that, while a second civil war may sound “impossible,” it is actually “is not.”

Then the comedian, like Natoli, juxtaposed how both sides see each other: “We all talk about Trump as an existential threat, but his side sees Democratic control of government the exact same way. And when both sides believe the other guy taking over means the end of the world, yes, you can have a civil war.”

“We are going to have to learn to live with each other or there will be blood,” Maher soberingly concluded.

Is he right? It’s a bit lengthy, but I highly recommend read this article titled “How America Ends.” In it, Atlantic senior editor Yoni Appelbaum acknowledges both the demographic plight faced by the political majority in America – something “no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced” – along with the fact that democracy is imperiled when one or the other side feels hopeless at the prospects for future electoral victory. A 2020 Trump defeat, writes Appelbaum, would “only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them.”

“When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost,” he continued. Appelbaum’s ‘solution,’ as it were, is for the rise of a center-right party that embraces immigrants and minorities in the same way the Democratic Party expanded its tent in the 30’s.

The article truthfully lays out the landscape in a way that few liberal publications have acknowledged, but the ‘solution’ it offers is simply more of the same. Can America survive when its elites are, against the will of a majority of Americans, importing millions of immigrants from cultures that have little to nothing whatsoever in common with that of the current citizenry? To Maher’s analogy, we may not “choose” our family any more than we “choose” our country-mates, but imagine the tension at Thanksgiving if said “family” included different members every year brought in at random with absolutely nothing culturally in common with the original members. At what point does the concept of assimilation, something that predictably isn’t mentioned in the article but has always been the key to a stable country, become impossible? Still, just turn some into right-of-center conservatives, Appelbaum smugly advises, and all will be well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for recruiting minorities of any stripe into the conservative tent. Hispanics and African Americans who are courageous enough to outwardly support President Trump, despite the pushback they get from their own communities, have my unending respect and gratitude. However, when has ANY conservative leaning party been able to recruit even Hispanics, the group with which they have arguably forged the greatest inroads, at a level that could equal electoral victory in a Hispanic-dominated state? Even George W. Bush, for all his pandering, only managed to win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Most political analysts concede that even Texas will go blue by 2024, if not sooner. What chance will Republicans have on a national scale then?

Thus, the apocalyptic concerns of Michael Anton mentioned in the Atlantic article, laid out in his seminal 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” are even more concerning now than ever. And contrary to Appelbaum’s contention, it is in fact Trump and his supporters who are trying to save America from collapse by curbing immigration to manageable levels. Because as daunting as the prospect of a civil war may be, many conservatives would choose that and all that goes with it – if some form of extreme federalism or non-violent secession doesn’t work – any day of the week over the even more disturbing prospect of being dominated by the political left for the foreseeable future.