Ahtman wrote:
Thinking the world (or the country) is coming to an end is an American tradition. We, as a people, tend toward paranoia more then many others in this regard.

 dogma wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
Thinking the world (or the country) is coming to an end is an American tradition. We, as a people, tend toward paranoia more then many others in this regard.

This is why South America is best America*, a little revolution here, a little junta there, and everyone just sits back drinks rum and eats delicious grilled meat.



*Also, Brazilian bikinis.

 sebster wrote:

Spoiler:

 ShumaGorath wrote:
It also doesn't help that there aren't clear territorial lines separating belief systems in the modern US. You can't organize a front when every street corner battles every other. The closest you could have are sectarian power struggles.

True. It'd be more like, say Germany during the Weimar Republic, open street battles. Of course, they had street battles between Nazis and Socialists. You'd be having street battles between pro-business centrists who have a side wing of liberal progressives, and pro-business right wingers who have a side wing of conservative Christians.

It's all just two nutty, but I think that there's two US servicemen who post on this forum talking about the USA collapsing or disolving into civil war as a real thing that's going to happen soon is interesting. And very sad.


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 AegisGrimm wrote:
--And before anyone says it, slaves weren't the main cause of the ACW- it was State's Rights. People in the North had slaves, even during the war, and even President Lincoln intended the slaves to be freed- but not made free Americans. They would be shipped out of the country, because he believed that while all men should be equal, the two races "weren't fit to live next to each other for all the trouble it would bring".

I really, really can't be bothered going in to all this again, and now wish I hadn't made the analogy to the US civil war and gone with Weimar Germany or Tsarist Russia.

But just no. Absolutely fething no. The state's rights thing is just wrong. Absolute fiction made up by people who didn't like to admit they started a war to protect an ugly economic/social system. The state's rights thing just makes no sense if you read the Confederate Constitution - if the goal had been free states then they would have put in place a constitution that said 'every state is free to have slaves if it wants to', instead they put in a clause that states 'no state can outlaw slavery'.

Nor does state's rights make any sense when you look at the actions of the Southern States in the lead up to war - they attempted to pass laws restricting non-slave states from acting as they pleased, and allowing slaves to be free men.

I mean, yeah, the situation was very complex and a lot of things were at play but it all boils down to one basic dividing point - the North was increasingly moving towards being a nation in which the idea of one person owning another was morally unacceptable, and the South held a social and economic structure dependant on on the ownership of slaves.

Also, I have never seen your quote before and when I type it into google the only site google returns is dakka, showing your quote. Which I have never seen happen before, so kudos for typing something that has never been entered into the internet anywhere before. Do you have another copy of the quote, or a source, because I'd like to look it up.


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 whembly wrote:
sebster... slavery was certainly one of the things fought for during the civil war and in it's conclusion.

But, what started it were the unfair tarifs imposed onto the southern economy (the North muddling with the South)... the south were kicking arse in the global economy at that time (tobacco, cotton, sugar, etc...). THATS what started the war... then, once started everyone brought their greviences to the table.

That's not true. If we really have to get into this on dakka again, the South had dominated politics for some time. Lincoln was the first president to win the Presidency without any success in the South. This in large part was because while the South was very wealthy on the back of cotton trade, much of this wealth was centred at the top, and so there was little population swell beneath that. The country's politics was increasingly coming to be dominated by the growing North.

It didn't take a genius to figure what was going to happen when an increasingly politically powerful North was increasingly opposed to slavery, and that was a grave fear in the South. Hence the walkout in the Democratic Convention in 1860 by the Southern members over, guess what, slavery.

Hence the Southern Democratic party putting up their own candidate, Breckinridge, who differed from the Democratic nomination, Douglas, on one issue - slavery (Douglas was actually a moderate on slavery and felt it should be left to state's rights - this was wildly unacceptable to the Southern Democrats). In the main election Breckinridge won a fraction of the vote Douglas won, but won a lot more electoral votes because his votes were focussed entirely in the South, where he picked up every state. His win there was helped in no small part by a yellow journalism campaign in the South that Lincoln was going to free the slaves. Lincoln won the election without carrying a single slave holding state.

 Ahtman wrote:
Thinking the world (or the country) is coming to an end is an American tradition. We, as a people, tend toward paranoia more then many others in this regard.

 whembly wrote:
LOL... I feel like we're arguing for the same thing... my point was, it wasn't JUST slavery... it was ALL OF THE ABOVE that started the war.

 reds8n wrote:
Would people see a dissolution of the Union as being more plausible perhaps ? Perhaps akin to the break up of the USSR ?

gorgon wrote:

 reds8n wrote:
Would people see a dissolution of the Union as being more plausible perhaps ? Perhaps akin to the break up of the USSR ?

The USSR had some ethnic fracture lines in place that helped that process along. While the US has some cultural differences by region, even those are muddled just because there are so many transplants. For instance, the South's population boomed over the past several decades not because of a Southern baby boom but because of Northerners moving there for new opportunities.

To outsiders, it probably seems like the US is horribly fractured along red/blue state lines. But IMO, we all get along pretty well unless we're talking politics. And even then there are plenty of people with reasonable political opinions. You probably just see a steady diet of extremists on the news.

 reds8n wrote:
Would people see a dissolution of the Union as being more plausible perhaps ? Perhaps akin to the break up of the USSR ?

chaos0xomega wrote:
It would be very hard to have a proper civil war/secessionst movement in today's America. We are very much a different nation than we were back in the 1850s, and the way our government itself is structured and viewed has changed remarkably. The federal government has consolidated a lot of power, and these days Americans are overwhelmingly American rather than "Texan" or "Californian", etc. whereas back then the opposite was true.

We might have serious internal strife and domestic terrorism, but a proper war/insurrection? Doubtful.

Seaward wrote:A day or so ago, AustonT made the comment that he believes America's headed towards another civil war. At the time, I said that it was unlikely in the extreme, as most of America remains firmly in the center, but the more I've thought about it, the more I'm not so sure.

Our politicians and pundits speak to extremism, on both sides of the aisle; there are no true moderates left in either sphere, at the national level, that I can think of. It doesn't matter who fired the first shot in terms of going beyond the pale, what matters is that once one side did, the other did as well. Extremism begets extremism, if only because the idiocy of the other side gets you angry enough that your own response becomes more aggressive.

How long before the hatred the right has for the left, and the left for the right, boils over into an actual conflict, if it ever does? Having witnessed two separate political shouting matches that barely avoided getting physical this week, between people who did not know each other, and who were just buying groceries mere minutes before they started, I'm inclined to wonder if it might be sooner than we all think.

Brother SRM wrote:The only people at all interested in a civil war are the handful of extremists on either side of the party lines. Fortunately, almost none of these people are in any position of power above district manager at a McDonald's so we don't need to worry about it. Domestic terrorism is always an unfortunate possibility, but anything more than a handful of militant crazies getting put down by the National Guard/local police isn't going to happen.

 Jihadin wrote:
Thinking it'll be mass riots and protest at the most.