On that fairway, America dodged only very immediate danger, and nothing more. That immediate danger? The legitimacy of the November elections would have been forfeit.
Absent their citizens confidence in the November election, in the federal process at all, several red states would probably refuse to even send their electors to Washington. Others may have demanded a delay in the election.
American inaugurations don’t just transfer power, they essentially serve to confer legitimacy on the federal government for another four years. With that legitimacy forfeit, we’d have no clear path away from constitutional crisis as Election Day comes and goes and January 20th looms before us ominously.
All of those idiotic 1968 comparisons will fall away quickly.
We dodge that future, a few millimeters or a few yards at a time, yet every ounce of the revealed danger still looms. And we’re failing to grasp it.
America has been given two gifts between Butler and West Palm Beach. Unfortunately, we appear intent on squandering those gifts.
But what were the two gifts providence provided?
First, Donald Trump’s incredible, historic responses. Let’s understand what that word historic means: Donald Trump’s resilience and sheer blessed stubbornness is a testament to some of our greatest qualities, of the greatness both this country and trying times can together produce.
The second is that we were granted a terrifying preview out over the top of the precipice we keep peaking over into, typically glimpsing it only from the edges.
A volcano of conflict awaits America if we don’t figure out how – and quickly – to actually talk about where we are. Unfortunately, the past 68 days suggest we are not interested in finding out how to talk about our civil conflict.
When we do have these discussions – of a cold civil war, or of how many steps away from fascism we are – they tend to be treated as an academic, almost rote diagnosis versus a visceral understanding that all of the evidence points towards a still unrealized framework of civil conflict.
More plainly, the heated rhetoric we so fear belies the real passions and grievances of Americans who’s widely divergent worldviews may no longer be reconcilable within our system. A lot of big words with a simple meaning: we might not be able to keep this thing together.
By our good graces we can, but the path is thinner and narrower than most realize or are comfortable admitting.
There is no end to the civil conflict if we continue to try and solve constitutional and civilizational differences though contemporary political mechanisms. We are running out of parliamentary maneuvers via which to resolve our disputes. More big words to say we’re running the course of normal politics.
And disaster is possible at any time between now and some kind of resolution. Further, the path to that resolution may require available mechanisms that match the depth and breadth of our disagreement but makes us deeply uncomfortable. Those are amendment or convention.
And, at the risk of alienating a significant portion of the populace by stating it, this must be stated: it is unlikely that there is a path towards conciliation absent America’s Left wing abandoning its radical rejection of our institutions over the past decade.
The Media Masters want to talk about the ills of equivocation? Fine, let’s.
One side seeks to replace the Electoral College. One side seeks to dismantle proportional representation in the Senate. One side seeks to pack the Supreme Court. One side intimidates Supreme Court justices, almost getting one killed. One side had an armed member try to kill a dozen members of Congress.
One side calls for “democracy reform” that would federalize the supervision and conduct of our elections. One side defaces and replaces our statues. One side has members in our federal legislature who declare allegiance to an alien form of government known as democratic socialism.
And one side – by a dramatic and painful margin – is responsible for the vast majority of political violence, civic disruption, and politically motivated property destruction in this country. If we can’t speak this out loud and face what it means, we’ve lost the plot and, maybe, our union.
Further, we should expect more Left-driven political violence. The folks now accustomed to blocking our highways and “occupying” public spaces, the anti-ICE activists who will again soon resist attempts at border control and repatriation, the Antifa socialists: none will become less aggressive during a second Trump presidency.
America is underestimating the estrangement and radicalization of the Left over the past ten years. They don’t just reject the beliefs of their opposing party brethren; they reject America’s institutions.
It’s true and painful and terrifying. The magnitude of change they want is not matched to the processes and institutions they now abuse, that type of departure is appropriately pursued through constitutional amendments.
It’s the constitution versus the canard ‘democracy reform.’
But fearing the depth and breadth of support required to use the amendment process, the Left has instead embarked on a delusion, talking themselves into a dangerous feedback loop: their goals are just, so it must be the system that is corrupt. They’ve largely hinged the legitimacy of our government on anti-institution, union-killing majoritarian rule changes.
This answer may be too hard to face – and yet have a very practical cost in the coming few years – that a significant enough portion of people in our country are no longer willing to submit to the current constitutional order. This can be true at the same time that we can recognize there is a great American center.
The end of this period of extraordinary risk and danger, of a federal union straining at its bounds, will necessarily require the Left to make peace with American institutions. This may happen informally or may require accords, if the federal machine breaks before then. Their conciliation does not preclude the dramatic change they want, it grounds that change in the appropriate consensus-gathering mechanisms the American system requires.
Until that day, all of the above is a lamentation yet unheeded. It’s been months since that fateful day in July where the fiction of American peace was revealed as a lie, and America still can’t face the truth.
