Our Civil War About Nothing
With the most divisive president in our history receiving 74 million votes, about 47% of the voting population, and with some portion of those voters ready to rise up in violent insurrection, we seem to be a hopelessly divided nation. It appears we can’t resolve our differences the way constitutional democracies are supposed to: by legislative compromise or judicial decision. Our time has been compared to the period just before the Civil War, when the country was on the verge of breaking apart. But it’s not the same at all. Then, there were real differences based on a tangible clash of interests. Today, we are on the brink of the Civil War about nothing. At the time of the Civil War in 1861, the plantation owners who controlled Southern politics wanted to expand their economic model, based on slave labor, to the rest of the country, convinced that they needed new territory to continue their way of life. Lincoln came into power in 1861 with no intention to abolish...