It’s hot. People snap in this kind of heat. It’s not just cars that boil over.
Last week it got hotter.
The feds turned up the heat on former President Trump by raiding his Mar-a-Lago home. The blowback came swiftly, with ominous threats against the FBI by Trump loyalists and an explosion of online chatter calling for armed resistance, including talk of civil war.
The violence (and threat thereof) is not one-sided. Last Tuesday, a group of homeless advocates shouted down and then charged at members of the Los Angeles City Council. Death threats have poured in to conservative members of the Supreme Court, with one armed maniac arrested outside the home of Justice Kavanaugh. Portland, Oregon, continues to smolder from radical leftist violence, and let’s not forget the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise by a Bernie Sanders supporter. All across America, both right and left are resorting to fists and firearms and firebombs.
Mobocracy is becoming the tail that wags the dog.
In 1856, pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks shattered his walking stick on the skull of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, nearly killing him. Brooks got a hero’s welcome at home and a flood of new walking-sticks. Four years later America went to war with herself. More than 700,000 died.
We’re far from the end of our current cycle of political violence. There will be more Jan. 6 hearings. There should be until every aspect of that horrible day is accounted for.
If this is America’s new normal, is it survivable?
Missouri Senate candidate Eric Greitens recently ran a commercial holding a shotgun surrounded by soldiers in tactical gear. “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” said Greitens as he chambers a round.
RINO, of course, stands for “Republican in name only,” but a better definition today is “Republicans who don’t bow to Donald Trump.” The purge is real. We are not living in an age of nuance.
“Get a RINO hunting permit,” Greitens said. “There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Greitens lost, but got nearly 20% of the vote.
We know from history the United States was conceived in violence — the American Revolution, and the four-year bloodbath of the Civil War. In both conflicts, the issues were specific, the right of the governed to choose their own leaders in one, slavery in the other.
Today’s battlelines are less clear. The problem is, each side sees the other as the embodiment of everything they loath: The right believes the left are America-hating neo-communists, and the left sees the right as fascists and racists. Not a lot of room for kumbaya here.
I believe those of us lucky enough to be born in this country were gifted a remarkable birthright; we are citizens, not subjects, governed by the rule of law, free to pursue happiness, although not guaranteed happiness. Some of you do not share this feeling.
The descendants of slaves and Jim Crow and the First Nations people have historical scars not easily absolved. I get that. And it doesn’t help that we teach our history poorly, having abandoned civics and lumped American history into the generic “social studies,” or reducing historical figures to cartoon heroes and villains. Lost in all this is context, without which history is not only useless but dangerous, a tool for demagogues.
John Adams famously warned, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Some of you will object to the inclusion of religion, but all of us should take Adams’ counsel to heart. We have thrived all these years under the Constitution without becoming a theocracy. We cannot survive if we allow our leaders to lie and mislead with impunity.
Is it hot enough for you?
Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. He can be reached at: Doug@DougMcIntyre.com.
