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Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, writes on his blog that just as the South misunderstood the North’s ability and willingness to fight for the constitution before the Civil War, so too are the left misunderstanding the willingness of loyal Americans today. He writes (abridged):
I had foolishly thought that all the syrupy calls for blessed bipartisanship in 2018 would peter out and return to storage closet labeled “nonsense”. That burnout has not occurred, and many pundits and journalists still demand bipartisanship, hands-across-the aisle, and the joining of forces in efforts for the betterment of the “American people”. It is much too late for all of that, and that really should be plain to everyone.
At no time since 1861 have Americans been divided to a greater extent by political differences, cultural warfare, and contending sets of worries about the republic’s future. It also seems likely that Americans of 1861 –probably more southerners than northerners — also shared a deep disgust with the inability of their national government to resolve decades-old problems like slavery, tariffs, and western expansion. There also was a festering anger among many southerners at all levels of society for the rhetorical abuse that had been relentlessly heaped upon them by the North’s abolitionists, novelists, editors, and politicians
The war cost more than 620,000 dead, devastated large areas in the southern states, and resulted in a joint military/carpet-bagger occupation of much of the territory of southern America by their sometimes vengeful and always avaricious fellow northern Americans.
Still, the memory of fiercely acrimonious antebellum debates, the costs of war, and the post-war military occupation of the South yielded a deeply divided population and it took more than a century to reunite it into a single people and country
Though lengthy, this reconciliation process reestablished a bond among Americans from both sections that survived world wars, depression, cold war, over-taxation, unnecessary interventionist wars, inundation by illegal foreigners, and the emergence of a near-tyranny in the guise of the national government.
The Democrats, the left, and their Black, deviant, ethnic, terrorist, and feminist coolies seem to have the same kind of misperception about today’s loyal Americans that the Confederates had of northerners in their day.
Read more here.
