There is No 'Middle Ground': It's Either the Second Civil War or Partition

 

By Steven Jonas

Trump is on a racist, xenophobic rampage that is over even his top past performances. For indeed, convincing every last one of his followers to come out and vote on Nov. 6, combined with as massive a voter suppression campaign as the Repubs. are capable of organizing (and for sure they are hard at it), is the only way that the Repubs. can retain control of the House of Representatives. And they might conceivably lose the Senate too. [See the Addendum below for what will likely happen were they to lose even just the House: a massive attack on multiple levels to prevent the 116th Congress from ever convening.] 

Numbers of leading intellectual lights, like the academic historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, (one of whose specialties is the First Civil War), other academics, many mainstream political analysts, certain leading Democrats, the "Third Way" folks (translation: neoliberal, right-wing Democrats), and others, have responded to the Trumpist outpouring by saying that what is wrong with what he is saying is that he is "splitting the country apart." There actually is a political party (quite small, to be sure) the platform of which is built on the concept of "finding the "Middle Ground." It's called the "The Modern Whig Party." It will likely be as successful in "keeping the country together" as its predecessor was. At any rate, the collective response of the "Middlers" (as they might be called) is: "we have to bring the country together;" "the middle ground must be found;" "let's pull together, to reach the common shore." Well, that's a nice idea, but since the time that the first slave was landed in this country, there has been no "middle ground."  

The institution of slavery was built into the Constitution. And as is well known it is one of the provisions that was put in to "protect" the slave states, the Electoral College, that led to Trump assuming the Presidency. The U.S. briefly became "one country," on paper at least, following the end of the Civil War. But when Reconstruction was brought to a sharp sudden end, by the Republican Party no less, the binary nature was opened up again. As I have written previously, except for the loss of the institution of chattel slavery, the South won the First Civil War. It achieved all of its other major goals, including the spread of the Doctrine of White Supremacy, which had been first invented by Portuguese slave traders in the 16^thto justify slavery of Black Africans, across the whole of the country.

This doctrine was the basis for "Jim Crow" and the electoral dominance of the racist Southern Democrats until the Civil Rights movement took over the Democratic Party in the 1960s. As is well-known, the doctrine was then very quickly adopted for the Republicans by Pres. Nixon's creation of the "Southern Strategy" for the party (adopted after he saw the electoral success the openly racist George Wallace had in 1968). It has been continued by every Republican President since then, in a hooded, "dog whistle," way to be sure. Thus Trump has invented nothing new for the Republican Party. Being the ultimate outcome of what I have termed the "Rightward Imperative" for that party, he has simply taken the hood off.

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Source: OpEdNews.com