[USA Today] The other day, author Tom Ricks asked whether we’re heading toward a civil war. "I don’t believe we’re to Kansas of the 1850s yet. But we seem to be lurching ... in that direction," he wrote.
Ricks was commenting on "What Democratic rage would look like," a Bloomberg opinion column that quotes political scientist Thomas Schaller as saying, "I think we're at the beginning of a soft civil war. ... I don't know if the country gets out of it whole."
That sounds pretty serious. The column by Francis Wilkinson presents a catalog of things Democrats are mad about ‐ from the existence of the electoral college to Trump’s "propaganda apparatus" ‐ and predicts that if Democrats lose the midterm elections, there will be hell to pay. (And Republicans, you know, could make a similar list of their own complaints.)
"I don't know exactly what that would look like," Wilkinson writes. "But liberals have a great deal of cultural, academic and economic heft, stretching from Hollywood to Harvard. Just this week, someHollywood powerhouses flirted with leveraging their clout against the Trumpist Fox News. There are endless variations on such a power play. If Democrats opt to use their power more aggressively ‐ breaking rules ‐ Schaller's soft civil war hardly seems unlikely." |