The current issue of the Atlantic magazine, founded itself in the years just before the Civil War, is ominously titled, “How to Stop a Civil War.”.
If we are, indeed, on the brink of a second Civil War, it’s already being waged as a “cold war,” with the occasional armed skirmish being provoked by the so-called alt-right movement.
And, as in the past, this will be a war by the very, very rich against the rest of America.
Arnold Toynbee is said to have noted that “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
The Civil War could thus be recast as a war between oligarchy and democracy, where democracy won by a whisker.
And now Very Serious People are talking about the possibility of a second Civil War.
Then comes the threat of a real Civil War breaking out, and an informed populace is the best defense against it. »