Finally a little perspective in the panic-fest:
Just as one could be forgiven for concluding from his tweets that President Trump is an actual tyrant (when in fact he's a remarkably impotent president), so online mêlées feel like evidence of real-world civil unrest and looming violence. But they're not. They're the expression of the passions of a small number of highly polarized, intensely committed partisans whipping themselves into ever-greater paroxysms of rage while most of the rest of the country goes about its business largely unaware of the tumult.
If you doubt it, compare the real world of the past couple of years with any comparable span of time during the late 1960s or early 1970s. Political assassinations; widespread, large, and sometimes violent protests; race riots and burning cities; regular terrorist bombings — all of this was commonplace during those years, and all of it looks far more like the early stages of a civil war than anything happening now. Yet of course there was no civil war in America 50 years ago. Still less is one about to break out in the present.
The idea that the intolerant few who are bravest at their keyboards (or on talk radio) are the bleeding edge of civil war is nonsense, and only pumps up their egos to an undeserved level.
And the author even overstates the population of potential civil war believers by relying on Fox or MSNBC viewership as a proxy. I prefer Fox, but I've never been in the civil war camp even as I worry about the ugliness of public discourse that flows from putting too much power in the federal government.
Elements of the political class may be waging a hysterical civil war online and over the air waves, but the vast majority of Americans are not involved. And do you really think those politically active people are ready to take up arms to get their way? I may be unusual in closely following national politics but not convinced most people give a damn about politics in their busy lives.
Which is as it should be. Nobody's life should be dependent on who rules in Washington, DC. The disturbing trend is that each major party has basically lost their once wider spread of ideology to become more uniform toward the extreme. I suspect that in the long run this problem will be self correcting when one party collapses from going too far to an extreme, leading the refugees to start a new party that draws from both traditional parties and leads one of the two traditional parties to adapt by broadening their base in response. Thank God we don't have a parliamentary system.
But for now, the only people who might fight are the anarchist and communist scum of antifa or the few extreme "right wing" scum who have a strange attraction to tiki torches. But even they seem more interested in setting Twitter on fire despite a surge of street violence--mostly by the antifa scum--during 2017.
Any foreign country that is counting on America folding in on itself in a civil war will be disappointed.
UPDATE: Elites are the ones dividing America.
Social media isn't America. Let them hate each other without bothering the rest of us.
