Fast-forward to FDR, 1930's. By then an entire lifetime since the Civil War had come and gone. Many northerners had flocked to an evolved Democratic Party, one that somehow managed to acquire a soul. Except of course for the Southern Democrats. They took their politics into their own hands, creating an underground society called the Ku Klux Klan.
Fast forward again, this time only half a generation to President Johnson, mid-1960’s. When Johnson signed and passed the Civil Rights Act, most Northern Democrats and most Republicans supported the Act. But the Southern Democrats rose the specter of the Civil War again, politically for the time being. By Nixon’s election in ‘68 the Republican Party had sold its soul to the devil, courting the average American Southerner for votes. Thus begun the Republican Party's obsession with winning at any cost - by hook or crook.
They were able to keep that devil more or less corked in a bottle between 1968 and 2001. On September 11, 2001 the devil uncorked itself from the bottle and The American Taliban was born. They staged a coup of the Republican Party. George Bush Jr. was the last conservative from the Party of Lincoln. That party was all but dead by the time Barack Obama became president, because Obama became president. After Obama, Le Déluge: Donald Trump became the first American Taliban Party president.
True to form of political oppression disguised as a legitimate party, the American Taliban party has yet to win a presidency through a popular vote. And that’s in spite of the most flagrant gerrymandering in the history of democracy. But gerrymandering may not be enough: fascist sleeper cells have been dog-whistled to awaken, through the systematic installation of Taliban Party judges. If Donald Trump's short presidency managed anything it was to set in place a number of party-loyal judges across America's democracy. Like explosives set in a controlled implosion. What we recently witnessed in the Ritterhouse case was the full-on awakening of the American Taliban Militia. A dystopian bookend to a year that started with a fascist insurrection in the formerly-sacred US Capitol.
The specter of the Civil War is no longer a ghost. We may be witnessing the beginning of the second coming of America's Civil War. Except this time there is no Republican Party to win it. There's only the party that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison - two slave-owning Southerners - started.
