Sorry, Democrats: Civil War isn’t likely — even if you’re trying to provoke one

Let’s set the scene: American democracy is said to be under threat from a political party that questions the legitimacy and outcome of a presidential election, that incites and justifies lawless “insurrectionist” actions and undermines American democratic institutions and processes, threatening the continued existence of the Constitution itself. If this state of affairs continues unabated, experts claim, the United States might well lapse into a second Civil War, as argued in Barbara F. Walter’s new book “How Civil Wars Start.”

Yes — that’s a pretty good description of the Democratic Party. You were expecting something else around the anniversary of Jan. 6?

Let’s do the checklist. A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll in 2017 found that 67% of Democrats and 69% of Hillary Clinton voters said Donald Trump was not a legitimately elected president, and Hillary herself told CBS News that Trump was not a “legitimate president” because he stole the 2016 election. Three years of contentious and debilitating investigations into what we now know was a phony Democrat-created story followed. But now that Republicans make similar claims about an anomalous election, liberals have caught a case of the vapors and say it is a “threat to democracy.”

And about that “insurrection”: Would that be the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters praised with that term? What about the violent riots of the summer of 2020, which leading Democrats and much of the media called “mostly peaceful” and the legitimate voice of the people despite billions of dollars in damage and dozens of deaths from the violence? Maybe they were just following the lead of Baltimore’s former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who declared during that city’s 2015 riots that “we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

As for the Constitution and long-established democratic processes, which party is it that argues for wholesale changes to the Constitution? That wants to pack the Supreme Court? That wants to jettison century-old rules of the Senate to make it a purely majoritarian body? Admit new states to tilt the partisan balance in Washington? What changes to the Constitution are Republicans demanding exactly? A balanced-budget amendment is about the only one — hardly a regime-shaking idea.

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