“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. – Abraham Lincoln, The River Of Winged Dreams.
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“Thank you, Jon.” wrote MW after I wrote about Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald. “It does help those of us who need to understand why we don’t like him. But I am afraid that her book would not convince the MAGA people of his problems. They will just see it as bitter grapes. Someone needs to do that.”

I receive many messages from people like MW, who like what I write but worry that I will not change any Trumpian minds.

This tells me how divided and partisan we have come, and how naive.

Political writing today is seen as just another tool in the left-right killing of the American Mind, just another way to argue or persuade, to tell people what to do, and convince them to do what I do.

It has lost its authenticity and credibility. People like me are instantly tagged and labeled and easily discarded for committing heresy. People assume if I’m not praising the President, I must be on the team.

If I’m not persuading people to agree with me, then my  failing in some critical way. When I was a political writer, no one ever told me my writing would not convince people about how to vote. This is new.

In our country, there are only two ways to look at the world now, the left and the right, and if you don’t belong to the one, you belong to the other.

Good political writing informs. It doesn’t pontificate or manipulate or ask people to choose sides. Everyone has the right to make up their minds if democracy is to mean a thing.

The people who so fervently support Trump have many needs and grievances; this division will begin to end when people in government listen to what they say and tend to their needs.

If you listened to every presidential debate, you would not know they even exist. Everyone is talking about race, which is good and long overdue. No one is talking about them.

The messages also tell me something else.

Few people seem to accept that there will be no fast and straightforward end to our ugly civil conflict, which has traumatized much of our nation, confounded the world, and threatens to make Congress irrelevant to our form of government.

We are already neck-deep in America’s 2nd civil war; so far, this one is mostly cultural and political, but no less divisive or complicated.

I admire what Mark Mark Twain wrote in The Bible. According to Mark Twain, when our country was also bitterly divided. This inspires me and guides me and my writing.

“Each of you, for himself or herself, by himself or herself, and on his or her own responsibility, must speak. It is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or politician. Each must decide for himself or herself alone what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man, to decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor. It is traitorous both against yourself and your country.
Let men label you as they may if you alone of all the nation decide one way, and that way be the right way by your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country, hold up your head for you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Civil War 2.0 is very similar to the first one, except for one very big difference: the staggering bloodshed and violence of the first. Otherwise, each conflict echoes the other in surprising ways.

John Wilkes Booth did the South no favor when he killed Lincoln.

Andrew Johnson, his successor, was no match for the Radical Republicans in Congress who refused to permit any elected Southern political leaders who supported the Confederacy to take office.

The Congress established blacks as American Citizens, appointed them to public positions, and forbade discrimination against them.

When he was killed, Lincoln was preparing for a massive and expensive reconciliation program meant to unify the country after more than 750,000 soldiers had died, much as Mandela did for South Africa.

He wanted the North to treat the South gently and to heal the country.

He wanted the South to elect its leaders, be financially supported in establishing new businesses apart from slavery. And he meant to tread gently with racial issues, moving towards equality carefully.

That did not happen. Congress wasn’t interested in reconciliation, but revenge.

Instead of reaching out to the South, the Congress undermined President Johnson and sought to punish the Confederacy and its leaders. They insisted on full equality in the South while it was still bitter, bleeding,  and humiliated, and without any preparation.

Equality was a noble idea, but it was done in such a heavy-handed way that it backfired. Without protection, compromise or planning, blacks suffered from persecution, even death, police brutality, lynchings, labor exploitation and false imprisonment.

The newly freed slaves were left to the mercy of a population that still fiercely believed in slavery. Lincoln’s reconciliation became Jim Crow.

Elected leaders were forced out of office, and troops were sent to enforce numerous and various punishments. Congress treated the South as a conquered nation, not an equal part of the Union.

Southerners turned their anger on their former slaves, sparking violent persecution, two bloody race riots, and brutal cruelty and discrimination, including the almost complete segregation of the races.

The slaves were legally free but also tragically enslaved again in a different way.

In the culture and geography of Civil War 1.0,  many of the same geographic and cultural conflicts of the Civil War now still haunt the country and shape the vast rural and urban divide that powered Donald Trump’s election.

Trump’s strongholds are not exclusively Southern, they are mostly Southern and rural (and some in the industrial heartland). What these groups have in common are racial resentments, anger at being dominated or ignored, and deep suspicions about media and government, especially Washington government.

African-American scholars tell us that while whites have mostly forgotten what African-Americans have been through before and after the Civil War, African-Americans have not.

Many see incidents of police brutality, even murder, as a continuation of slavery, not isolated incidents.

This helps explains to whites who are listening  why the protests are so intense and sometimes even violent. There’s a lot of blood and history and mistrust in those demonstrations.

But to Trump and his supporters, these protests are grossly unfair to white people who weren’t even alive when slavery was legal.  And who suffer themselves today.

They see the spectrum of African-American history in America very differently. The past is the past, and it’s time to move on.

Trumpists in some Southern states doesn’t argue in defense of slavery anymore. Instead, they argue against full voter rights for African-Americans, and they fight for the preservation of monuments to confederate generals and leaders.

“This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11… Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.”
―  Author and novelist George Packer

Trumpist communities resent what they see as elitist and arrogant Northerners and journalists, scientists, and Washington bureaucrats telling them what to do and how to live.

They have resented this for generations.

There are deep and angry feelings all over Trump Country, which is rural and Southern country, about domination from government, liberals, and lately, democrats who supported Civil Rights and foreign trade legislation.

People in my town feel like politicians in Congress know as about them and their needs as Martians. They revere a President who has finally told the system to stuff it and has chosen to blow it up rather than fix it.

This divide, this new civil war,  presents itself every day in the struggle to contain the coronavirus, and the many issues of constitutionality, freedom and individual rights that were a core ethos of the Confederacy and are still alive in much of rural America.

Beyond that, thoughtless trade agreements further devastated rural and Southern states, who lost almost all of their manufacturing and mill jobs to Mexico and China.

Very few Northern states suffered a widespread mask and shut- down rebellion. These outbursts have broken out all over the West and the former Confederate states. Some people beat up store clerks when asked to wear a mask.

In the North, the government is still seen as a positive and necessary force. People do as they were told.

In Trump’s land, these restrictions are seen as oppressive, unnecessary, out of touch, and dangerous. It’s another kind of rebellion, another kind of recession from the union.

In a pandemic and an election,  trust of government is critical.

Donald Trump has openly promoted the distrust of both scientists and state-run elections, and there is still a broad audience for those messages. He favors distrust. Many people listen to what the President says, even if he lies much of the time.

In the case of the pandemic, people are paying for this civil war with their lives, just as they did in the 1850s and the years after what we call The American Civil War.

I think this one may end up being called the Coronavirus Civil War.

Donald Trump did not create these divisions; he just sensed them and exploited them, and rode them to victory.

If there is a hero in all this for me, it would be Abraham Lincoln, he was a large man in spirit and heart.

Lincoln was almost alone in seeing the war’s suffering as a verdict on both sides. Perhaps it might be deemed an act of God’s justice, he argued, even if all the wealth piled up by 250 years of “unrequited toil” by the enslaved should be sunk into the war, and even if “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

Lincoln’s most resonant line was his plea to Americans to finish the war and seek lasting peace, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” His refusal to condemn the South alone gave that phrase great resonance, particularly after his assassination, when he became a hallowed martyr to the cause of healing the nation.

If there is a God, there is another Lincoln out there, coming to lead us out of the desert.

Democrats and Progressives can’t fathom why so many people support Donald Trump. Southerners and Westerners, especially white ones, cannot comprehend why so many people dislike him. Many say the same thing: he’s doing a lot of good things, they just won’t stop picking on him.

Civil wars happen when there are two different countries within one. We fought the first one with guns and canons. We’re fighting this one on Facebook and Twitter and digital media and in our paralyzed Congress.

The conservative moment – websites, broadcasts, talk radio – has become a fierce opponent of the government and a loyal support system for the President.

Almost in unison, these new media compete to trash “the Deep State,” any political opposition, and the elitists and professors and politicians of the old industrial North,  now the “Democratic” cities. How sweet the vengeance, even if served cold.

The idea is to fight the government at every turn, not support it.

There is plenty of extreme left rhetoric, but there is a quasi-fascistic quality to the extreme right-wing media, home of boundless conspiracy theories. This week’s conspiracy theory, reported CNN, was that Joe Biden was actually in a nursing home, pretending to be living in a house in Delaware.

There is little contrarian opinion or tolerance for other points of view. Democrats and “liberals,” “leftists” and “anarchists,” and God forbid, “socialists” are always the enemy, no matter what they think, do, or propose.

America is a dark place, surrounded by enemies from without and within.

If you look at the pre-Civil war rhetoric from the South and the rage of Fox News Commentators and conservative websites, it is startling to see how closely they match with one another.

The looming conflict over slavery triggered massive discourse and commentary in the confederate states, just as Trump and the new and more extreme conservative movement has triggered books, websites, blogs, think tanks, books, videos, and countless opportunities for opinion and commentary.

This vibrant media far outweighs anything on the left. It is a powerful and growing system of opinion and information.

Most talk radio is deeply conservative, so is the leading cable news channel in America, Fox News. They are fervent in their views.

Confederate thinkers also responded fervently to the assault on slavery coming from the North, orators, scholars, professors, and journalists embraced their antebellum roles as spokesmen for lecture societies, holidays, graduations, and elections, just as right-wing “orators” do now.

Confederate politicians like Howell Cobb, who helped write the Confederate Constitution, traveled all over the South, demonizing the federal government, its motives, leaders, and decisions.

By the end of the war, wrote Karen E. Fritz in her book Voices In The Storm, Confederate Rhetoric, 1861-1865, speakers described their nation in savage terms, applying to it expressions and characteristics once reserved only for Lincoln’s North.

The outbreak of the war wrote Drake Smith of Campbell University, “led to incredibly nationalist propaganda on both sides.” Religious rhetoric, he wrote, was ever-present in Confederate propaganda.

Evangelical Christianity was closely tied to the formation and revival of the Confederate Armies,  Christian theology was used to motivate Confederate soldiers, to keep up morale and to color perceptions of the war even after it ended.

God, it was said, was on the side of slavery, and the Confederacy.

In the rhetoric of the South, it was impossible not to recognize the heated rhetoric of Donald Trump and Evangelical Christianity today, and what seems like a particularly unholy alliance.

That’s why Trump was waving that Bible around in Lafayette Square across from the White House.

Earlier this week, Trump told a press conference that Joe Biden, a devout Catholic who carries a rosary with him at all times, would “hurt God” if he were elected.

To people who don’t know the history, it seemed a bizarre accusation in an American political campaign. It is quite recognizable in Confederate history, where it was widely believed – and pronounced – that Providence guided history as He saw fit.

God’s support was an idea that permeated pre and post-war Confederate rhetoric, just as Evangelical Christians today believe God sent Donald Trump to protect them from liberals and secular politicians by giving them complete access to power.

The North, like the Democrats of today, was pilloried continuously as Godless and evil, bringing only destruction and ruin. Lincoln, much like Biden, also evoked God, but in a much more cautious way.

He asked for God’s blessing; he never assumed it was a given. Confederate leaders assured the South that God was on their side.

This rhetoric then and now never seems to explain why Trump or the Confederacy could lose if God were really on their side.

Why would they even need to campaign?

This is a new civil war in America, or perhaps a continuation of the first one..

Most Trump supporters don’t see government as a friend of theirs; to them, it’s a danger and enemy, which is just how most of the people reading this see them.

Progressives see the supporters of Donald Trump as dishonest, corrupt, and beyond comprehension. The more he is attacked, the more they cling to him and defend him.

The problem with seeing things that way is that if something is unfathomable or beyond comprehension, it can’t be comprehended or understand. Thus, there is no rational or effective way of responding other than emotion and argument.

As the Confederacy learned, the incomprehensible can triumph even over God if it is not seen or understand. The leaders of the Confederacy never did understand the power that was arrayed against them. They, too, thought God would intervene at the last minute and bring them victory.

Like Trump, they could not imagine defeat until it was much too late. They could not live in reality.

Donald Trump’s defeat will just add more grievance to the fire, depending on how daring Biden is willing to be to reunite the country, and not just talk about it.

But nobody on either side is changing their vote because of what people like me write.

They may re-think politics and responsibility when they have something to lose, and their Main Streets fill up again with merchants, and their children can see doctors and find work.

The media, as always, can’t seem to grasp the big picture, it isn’t considered news like the latest Trump lie is.

They are hypnotized by the small, the boxing match that our civic life has become. It’s easy to miss the truth when you are too close to it.

I believe that Donald Trump is finished as a single entity, but Trumpism – the movement this sad man has launched – will live on way beyond this election, the divisions he symbolizes are not new and will be here for a long, long time.

Are you a communist?”
“No, I am an anti-fascist.”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

It will be a shame if the people who defeat Trump in November wake up the next morning thinking everything has returned to normal. That is far too simplistic an idea for the mess America is in.

And that would be depressing. The election offers a beginning, not an end or resolution.

That idea is the magic miracle tonic of summer soldiers.

Trump was a warning, a warm-up. The real conflict begins on November 4 as Joe Biden presents a new administration, and hopefully, a gentler and kinder one.

Trump’s supporters will begin to respect democracy again when our leaders help them to find good work still, re-build their communities, help them to stop losing their sons and daughters to drugs, lower their suicide rates, provide free health care, offer them real jobs with living wages,  and live as long as people in those dread socialist countries.

Everybody who cares about their country will have some thinking to do, some work to do if they wish.

There are no magic wands from a community as torn and battered and split as ours.

God is not going to wave a magic wand. As Twain wrote so eloquently, we will have to speak up and do something.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates

When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history, and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most-read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding “African slavery.” That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry. So strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars, and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.