America’s Next Civil War

An American friend living in Australia for many years still keeps in touch with his good friends in the US. He is not particularly political but favours Donald Trump because of the alternatives. He was mildly supportive of Obama but couldn’t stand Hillary. He saw Biden as past it but loathes the idea of the deceitful scheming incompetent Kamala Harris acceding to his country’s highest office and would vote for Trump if only to keep her out. In the course of a political conversation of the sort we all seem to be having these days he mentioned this on the phone to a friend in New York he had known for years. ‘In that case,’ said the friend, ‘we can’t be friends any more’ and hung up.

America is dangerously close to a second civil war. The first Civil War left well over half a million dead. This time there are not yet any corpse-strewn battlefields – though there has already been one casualty in the unfortunate rally attender who was shot dead by the would-be assassin of Donald Trump. To those millions of Americans who believe Trump to be a God-sent saviour of their country, that man will come to be seen as a martyr.

Civil war hangs over the nation like the sword of Damocles. It is still a war of political ideas but with an intensity of hatred never seen in the domestic politics of a civilised modern nation. An intensity at which valued friendships are cast aside, where Voltaire should really have said, ‘I may disagree with you but I would defend to the death my right to shut you up.’

What explains this hatred? At heart it is the galvanising figure of Donald Trump, about whom even the sanest of us find it impossible to be rational. From the sneers at his so-called orange hair – surely irrelevant to his politics: you don’t vote for the hair, and anyway, what about purple-haired leftist wierdoes? – to criticism of his ‘boorishness’, the range of Trumpophobia stretches across the world, to the point that it has become unthinkable in polite circles to praise him. You expect this kind of unreasoned vilification from the Left, or from organs where mendacity vies with incompetence, such as our own ABC, but even conservatives who agree that Trump’s idea of a good clean-out of the Deep State is what the United States needs, as we do here, tend to put a peg on their noses when Trump is mentioned. They are cautious about expressing support publicly and openly dislike his manner. Alexander Downer, as civilised a politician as you could find, has described him as ‘vulgar’.

It is very strange, because in terms of policies, which politicians should be judged on, Trump was a good President. There were no wars with American involvement in his time in office, the nation’s prosperity increased, industry was reviving, unemployment fell, especially black unemployment. Covid was not his finest hour, but no government anywhere emerged from that with credit, except possibly Sweden. Trump hatred ignores his political record and concentrates on his personality. This is because the Deep State, or the ‘Blob’, knows that if Trump can’t be attacked on his record, his personality is not to everyone’s taste. So they seek to inflame opposition to him with a hysterical barrage of ad hominem abuse and lies – he is a fascist, a would-be dictator, America’s Hitler.

The Blob and the various institutions of the élite – juridical, financial, educational and the ‘mainstream’ media – has become the enemy of democracy and thus the enemy of every citizen. All those unelected, unanswerable, dictatorial bureaucrats to whom lazy governments have delegated power treat their subject populations as though they were a personal fiefdom, oscillating between indifference to their needs and micromanagement of their lives. Have you ever had anything to do with a municipal planning department or a federal or state instrumentality? These people are a law until themselves, as they showed with their arbitrary shutdowns during Covid. That was a dress rehearsal for the way they’d like it to be all the time: an obedient citizenry doing what it’s told. You think there’s too much immigration? Too bad, the government wants more. Don’t like the idea of your social media communications being censored? Tough, it’s happening anyway. Think global warming and net zero are a crock? Politicised scientists and a fanatical minister will subject you to cold showers and blackouts to prove they know better. 

The Deep State loathes Trump. Not only is he an outsider who has come barging into their cosy world of crony politics, but he threatens their hegemony and says he will take it from them with mass sackings and changes of personnel, and they are terrified he will. That is why they want him stopped at any price.

If they succeed, the price will perhaps be a few more January the Sixths. But if he wins, the hatred being whipped up against him and his ‘deplorable’ supporters will explode into a tsunami of violence. America’s cities will be aflame again. There will be riots and urban vigilantes. The Blob and Democrat fanatics will stop at nothing to prevent Trump from making it to his Inauguration. Assassination has always played a part in American politics and Trump must demand better protection.

‘With malice towards none, with charity towards all,’ was Abraham Lincoln’s plea for peace in 1865. This time for millions of Americans the nouns are inverted, so that whether Trump wins or loses, it is impossible to see how the fracture in the nation’s body politic can be healed. But if it isn’t, America is finished. And if America is finished we’ll be finished with it.