Denial Won’t Save Democracy
I’m going to say something out loud that you already know in your head, feel in your heart, but might not be ready to admit. America—right now—is engaged in a low simmering civil war. Whether it volcanically explodes into something ghastly is anyone’s guess.
The rapidly spiraling situation is the culmination of colliding forces that have existed for decades. The advent of a mentally deranged authoritarian cult leader like Donald Trump, however, has created the precarious conditions for our cold war to turn red hot.
The deadly invasion of Minneapolis by heavily armed federal goons, combined with Trump’s deranged speech at Davos makes continued denial of our situation untenable.
Civil War. It is something that people of sound mind desperately want to avoid. The sane majority loves spending blissful nights with their families eating pizza and watching movies. We enjoy meeting friends in cozy coffee shops and catching up at charming sidewalk cafes.
Unfortunately, we share a combustible country with “camouflage creeps” who collect weapons of war, purchase survival gear, and pathologically fantasize about finding meaning in their empty lives by slaughtering fellow Americans.
While we have no desire to trek through the mud, lug heavy guns and dodge deadly drones, these right-wing losers imagine themselves as heroes, demonstrating their “patriotism” in foxholes, while breaking apart the country they purport to love.
As a result of our peaceful values, liberals and moderates have spent the past six decades working, against all odds, to hold our country together. I’ve been involved in politics since 1995, including almost a decade in Washington. The entire time, our country only survived intact because Democrats willed it to happen by being the adults in the room.
During this unruly period, Republicans were free to throw tantrums, spread disinformation, shut down the government, and threaten a global financial meltdown by holding the debt ceiling hostage.
To add insult, members of the GOP chronically treated Democrats with the utmost contempt–hurling vile insults in the most disrespectful ways imaginable. In doing so, Republicans went from a loyal opposition to disloyal obstructionists. Most of the time, creating mayhem, in an effort to appear on Fox News, seemed to be the end game, rather than serving as lawmakers who actually made laws.
Democrats were the glue that held our country together. They would bite their tongues and routinely respond to ugly personal attacks with polite rejoinders, such as, “my esteemed colleague from…”
This was done to preserve a veneer of civilization. Had Democrats strategically decided to behave as abusively as Republicans the wheels of democracy would have come off long ago. But Republicans knew we would be the adults in the room, indulging their bad behavior.
In the end, this cycle of sickness reached its logical conclusion with the election of Donald Trump, a mentally deranged vulgarian with no scruples.
As a result, America is collapsing in real time. The evidence is overwhelming and growing each time we refresh our browsers and glimpse the latest news. Without a change of tune by the Republican Party, and a little luck, our country is destined to take the road to perdition.
Looking back, there is not much more we could have done to prevent this unfolding national catastrophe. The Republican-project to sabotage American democracy has been ongoing for decades. It’s a miracle we didn’t get to this tipping point sooner.
In the late 1950’s and 1960’s, the GOP was infected with John Birch Society conspiracy theories. Much like today’s Q-Anon, these crazies floated outlandish ideas.
This included claiming that President Eisenhower was a communist agent, The Civil Rights Movement was a Kremlin plot, water fluoridation was a Russian scheme to weaken Americans, and the United Nations was an evil conspiracy to create a totalitarian One World Government. In the 1970s, the group promoted the bogus claim that laetrile, a compound derived from apricot pits, was a suppressed cure for cancer.
The GOP’s course for violent radicalism was set in 1964 by presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. At the Republican National Convention, Goldwater said, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
In 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a corporate lawyer who was appointed to the U.S.Supreme Court, wrote the “Powell Memo.” He believed that the American free enterprise system was under attack from academia, the media, and “leftist” intellectuals like Ralph Nader.
Powell’s remedy was the aggressive formation of right wing think tanks, lobby groups and media organizations that would take back the country. Sadly, Powell’s vision for corporate dominance and oligarchy has prevailed, slowly suffocating our country.
Our nation’s path on combating racism was undermined by Republican President Richard Nixon. America had taken huge strides, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our leaders could have worked together to build on this astonishing progress.
Instead, Nixon stoked racial resentment and exploited backlash. He implemented the Southern Strategy during his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, which used code words like “silent majority”, “law and order”, and “states’ rights” to win power. Nixon’s efforts eventually led the American south to flip from solidly Democratic to almost universally Republican, a tragic reality that defines contemporary politics.
Ronald Reagan followed in Nixon’s footsteps. In August 1980, presidential candidate Reagan delivered a speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the infamous site of the “Mississippi Burning” murders, where three civil rights workers were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. During his Mississippi speech, Reagan said, “I believe in states’ rights”.
In many ways, Reagan was worse for America than Nixon. It was The Gipper who kowtowed to a former segregationist Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. On August 22, 1980, Reagan delivered a speech in front of 16,000 evangelicals at the Religious Roundtable in Dallas, TX.
Reagan told the theocrats in attendance, “I know this is nonpartisan, so you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you!”
This one speech permanently ruined the Republican Party and potentially set us on the course for civil war. Once the Religious Right was welcomed into the GOP tent, Republicans arguing with Democrats could no longer politely “agree to disagree” and remain friends.
Republican positions seemed to harden overnight, because their policies henceforth allegedly represented God’s views. Anyone who disobeyed the Religious Right’s crazy demands were considered apostates. The result was endless Culture Wars that divided America, creating a red/blue, urban/rural separation. It has led to irreconcilable differences that have ripped national unity asunder.
Another Reagan contribution to America’s downfall was his cynical effort to sow distrust in government. In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In a 1986 press conference, Reagan spewed, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.'”
This skewed view of government led to decades of underinvestment in the American people and a rotting infrastructure. The result was a declining middle class, a fall in educational achievement, and little hope for the poor. This created desperation among millions of people, producing anger that could be exploited by opportunistic politicians.
Once such person was Newt Gingrich, a bombastic, flame-throwing Republican Congressman from Georgia. In 1990, Gingrich, then the Republican Minority Whip, collaborated with pollster Frank Luntz to transform political rhetoric into a weapon of “complete destruction”.
The two released a partisan memo in 1990 titled, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control“. The instruction manual strongly urged GOP candidates to demonize Democrats with “Negative Contrasting Words”.
Examples included: decay, failure, collapse, deeper, crisis, destructive, sick, pathetic, lie, radical, liberal, betray, traitors, sensationalists, and corruption. This process culminated with the bitter, partisan impeachment of President Bill Clinton over sex with an intern—which backfired on the hypocritical Gingrich who was having his own extramarital affair.
Gingrich permanently poisoned the bipartisan comity in Washington and is directly responsible for today’s toxic environment on Capitol Hill. His efforts were aided by the advent of cable television and talk radio. Fox News created a fact-free, alternative reality, while Rush Limbaugh and his many imitators transformed our cars into right wing propaganda pods.
Democrats briefly regained the information initiative with the Internet. Liberals and young voters were early online users, providing Barack Obama a communications advantage. However, Republicans—aided by billionaire dark money—finally caught up to Democrats just in time for Trump’s first campaign.
Now, wealthy social media owners have swung to the right, elevating the most extreme conservative voices, while actively suppressing liberal voices through shadow bans. The most recent example is Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell, warning that TikTok suppressed their video about Alex Pretti’s death, at the hands of ICE in Minneapolis. (Last year, I detailed my own battle against TikTok’s censorship.)
The next right-wing movement to attack American values was the Tea Party. In an effort to undermine Obamacare, Big Oil, Big Tobacco and the billionaire Koch Brothers partnered to create Astroturf organizations designed to berate and harangue members of Congress at town halls. This had the deleterious effect of eliminating the barrier between Internet harassment and in-person menace.
Trump routinely uses the threat of violence to cow GOP lawmakers into doing his bidding. For example, one Republican congressman confided to then-Utah Sen. Mitt Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety.
The United States of America has zero chance of healing as long as the Trump regime is in power. The president calls Democrats “scum”. His minions, such as aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, falsely portray protesters as “domestic terrorists”.
They make these bullshit allegations while flooding Minneapolis with a private army of 3,000 thugs with badges. Many of these masked goons were recruited at gun shows or attracted to the job by ads featuring brazenly white supremacist themes.
At a time of broad national discontent over the conduct of federal military and police operations, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is destroying press freedom by demanding reporters, “sign a 21-page form that sets restrictions on journalistic activities, including requests for story tips and inquiries to Pentagon sources.”
Given the tense situation, there are five definable trip wires for civil war:
- A mass killing of civilian protesters
- Stealing the midterm or presidential elections in broad daylight
- Trump declaring himself King
- The Trump administration blatantly ignoring judicial orders
- A Trump-induced economic crash that would greatly increase domestic strife
Unfortunately, these lines are already being crossed on multiple fronts. ICE has killed innocent people in Minneapolis. If these singular killings morph into a mass shooting of protesters, this nation will most certainly unravel, and there is no guarantee it will be peaceful.
There is reason to fear the situation in Minneapolis will deteriorate. ICE issued new guidelines this week that significantly broaden officers’ ability to make arrests without warrants. The New York Times reports that this includes, “the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.”
Trump administration has also been accused of defying or frustrating court oversight in roughly 35% of rulings made against it. If the Supreme Court is openly defied on a controversial case, particularly regarding elections, all hell could break loose.
Meanwhile, Trump sent F.B.I. agents, and inexplicably Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, to Fulton County, Ga. to seize ballots from the 2020 elections.
Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, linking the surge of ICE hoodlums in Minneapolis to a demand for state election data. In July 2025, an ally of Stephen Miller pressured election officials in Colorado to allow a third party to come in and do a review of the [voting] machines.”
Obviously, the Trump administration is up to something sinister. If they openly try to steal elections, a nation with more guns than people will explode.
These threats are escalating at a moment when Trump’s mental health is clearly deteriorating. When not insulting Bruce Springsteen as a “dried out prune”, deriding our European partners, or driving investment capital out of America, Trump is making his dictatorial intentions known.
During an extemporaneous interview with Fox News, Trump praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for his totalitarian control: “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
It’s time we stop sugarcoating the past and tell the real story. The Republican Party has operated in bad faith for decades. They have destabilized America by sledgehammering our institutions, inflaming passions, trampling on our Constitution and mocking our norms.
A perfect example is how in 2010, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the National Journal‘s Major Garrett: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” McConnell wasn’t kidding. He spent the remainder of Obama’s presidency gumming up the works in Washington.
This culminated in 2016, when as Senate Majority Leader, McConnell effectively blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
The nomination expired in January 2017. Following his inauguration, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed to the seat in April 2017 after Republicans changed Senate rules (the “nuclear option”) to allow for a simple majority vote. The extreme partisanship and outright cheating to rob Democrats of a seat haunts the legitimacy of the Supreme Court to this day.
As a result of such ignoble actions, our nation has become a fragile tinderbox. Will Trump’s incessant bullying and law-breaking belligerence cause this nation to snap? Will a resistance arise to topple this odious regime and hold tribunals for the violent paramilitary goons, lying propagandists, and bootlicking government apparatchiks who tried to replace the United States Constitution with a MAGA dictatorship?
If Trump believes he can illegally use force to mold our country into a North Korea, I believe the answer may be a resounding “yes”. Americans were born citizens and we will not die as subjects.
