America recklessly divided
A non-shooting civil war is already under way
Robert Reich is not on my list of preferred writers/commentators.
Once an intimate member of the Clinton Gang, which he served as Labor Secretary from 1993 to 1997, Reich is a classic deep-state Democrat, who sees nothing wrong, among others, with “empowering” the woke movement currently undermining the very essence of America (although he does try not to be as strident, and in-your-face, as other woke huffin’-an’-puffin’ comrades).
Reich has been widely lauded and acknowledged for his services to the poor and downtrodden and, inevitably, once he left government, landed at UC Berkeley, still the center of the Bolshevist-Maoist polar point for all “revolutionaries,” since before the Day of Creation, fighting the good fight to turn America into the Kingdom of Oppressed Minorities (straight and otherwise) to the detriment of the overwhelming majority of Americans—and, also, the country’s external standing in an increasingly turbulent and unhinged world.
Among the many different fronts the “woke” defend and promote there’s a persistent push to elevate homosexuals, a.k.a. “gays,” who comprise 1.3 pc of the total US population of roughly 335 million, and the transgender, who, according to the Center for Disease Control, comprise just 0.6 pc of the adult population of the country, to as many top-tier appointments to federal, state, and city governments as possible.
The woke “philosophy’s” centerpiece behind this push is that the more homosexual, trans, and other whatever human life forms “self-identifying” outside the outdated normal, is the greatest victory for democracy since the French Revolution (not to forget the glorious 1917 Bolshevist coup d’etat).
Indeed, the latest “victory” for the Movement, properly and jubilantly celebrated by Democrats, was choosing an openly lesbian black female to succeed Jean Psaki as White House press secretary (Jean, who regrettably also happens to be of partial Greek extraction, is headed back to CNN to continue fighting the good fight via ‘woke’ Fake News).
Reich’s essay stops one short step from announcing an imminent shooting civil war, as continuation of the ferocious struggle between North and South 1861-1865, which remains the deadliest conflict in US history.
Instead, the good professor offers a model that is already taking shape thanks to the US Constitution that allows individual states great latitude in what pertains to day-to-day governance except in questions of national foreign and security policy.
Hence, the American union is already divided into “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democrat) states, all of them behaving as quasi-independent entities within US national borders.
The Trump presidency poured ample fuel on this simmering fire to the point of triggering large bidirectional population movements that further strengthen the “red” or “blue” essence of each individual state’s ideological, social, and political bend—and hardening the “warlike” attitudes to oppose the lurking enemies across state lines.
The time has come, it seems, that the dear American motto “Diversity is our strength” is turning into “Diversity is our undoing.”
Here’s what Good Citizen Robert Reich has to say:
The second American civil war is already happening
America will still be America. But it is fast becoming two versions of itself. The open question is: how will the two be civil toward each other?
The US supreme court’s upcoming decision to reverse Roe v Wade (an early draft of which was leaked last week) doesn’t ban abortions; it leaves the issue to the states. As a result, it will put another large brick in the growing wall separating blue and red America.
The second American civil war is already occurring, but it is less of a war than a kind of benign separation analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce.
One America is largely urban, racially and ethnically diverse, and young. The other is largely rural or exurban, white and older.
The split is accelerating. Red zip codes are getting redder and blue zip codes, bluer. Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties – where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote – jumped from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.
Surveys show Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values. Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. Forty-two per cent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil”.