Now that Brett Kavanaugh has officially been confirmed, it is a good time to reflect upon where we are at as a nation. And where we are at is a nation that is rapidly moving toward a state of civil war. At one time we were a nation that was united by shared values, a shared purpose and a shared destiny, but now all of that has been replaced by anger, frustration, bitterness, strife and discord. The left hates the right and vice versa, and both sides are becoming increasingly radicalized. And without a doubt we are in a life or death battle for the future of America. Eventually one side or the other will emerge victorious, and their ideology will become dominant in this country.
Up to this point, there has been a lot of screaming, yelling and protesting, but it isn’t going to take very much to push the nation over the edge into violence.
On a daily basis the pot is being stirred by our leading politicians and the mainstream media, and it is very difficult to see any way that this story is going to end well.
It’s going to get worse. Virtually every major American institution is being radicalized — or being reshaped by the radicalization of our public lives.
You see this most vividly in politics, where the White House and Congress are often the cause and effect of the radicalization. You now see it in the courts and the Supreme Court, in particular, where a narrow, party-line vote made Brett Kavanaugh the next justice after a nasty, personal political brawl. Already, lawyer Michael Avenatti is calling for a new Democratic litmus test: increasing the size of the court to 11 from nine.
Of course if Hillary Clinton had won the election, there are millions upon millions of Americans that would not have been willing to be governed by her either.
We are rapidly getting to the point where America is simply going to be ungovernable.
In order for any government to function, a certain percentage of the population must be willing to recognize that government as legitimate. For example, if everybody in the country suddenly decided to quit paying taxes there wouldn’t be too much that the federal government could do about it. They could put some of us in prison to try to scare the rest of us back in line, but if the rest of us refused to be intimidated our system of taxation would collapse.
Every system of government depends upon the fact that most people will willingly submit to it, and we are rapidly getting to the point where a large portion of the population will not submit to being governed.
But perhaps no incident better expressed the protesters’ tenuous hold on sanity than a demonstration at the Supreme Court, where protesters — mostly women — broke through a police line and barged to the Court’s chamber, where they proceeded to wail, gnash teeth, and pound at the doors while Kavanaugh was being sworn in inside.
Some of the protesters, who managed to get all the way through to the doors themselves, tried desperately to claw their way in, even though the doors were clearly locked (and look very heavy).
If you have not seen this yet, you can watch footage of this happening on Facebook right here.
Can you imagine how you would feel if that happened to you?
Many of these leftist protesters are extremely passionate about protecting abortion rights. To be honest, I wish that those on the right were just as passionate about defending the lives of the unborn.
Kavanaugh didn’t just say no.
After everything that happened, the ironic thing is that Kavanaugh getting on to the Supreme Court is a loss for conservatives, but nobody on the right wants to admit this. We got fooled by Justice Kennedy, we got fooled by Sandra Day O’Connor, we got fooled by David Souter, and now we have just been fooled again.
Kavanaugh clerked for Justice Kennedy, and he is cut from the exact same cloth as his mentor. Kennedy was one of the key votes to uphold Roe v. Wade in the Casey decision, and he actually wrote the opinion for the case that legalized gay marriage in America. It is rumored that Kennedy would not retire until he was assured that Kavanaugh would be nominated in his place, because he knew that Kavanaugh would be the exact same type of Supreme Court justice that he had been.
So conservatives should not be celebrating this “victory” at all.
To be clear, what we just witnessed, and what we have seen for two years, is not a case of mere political differences, which the Founders recognized as inevitable and even desirable.
Instead, we face something more akin to the combustible climate historian Christopher Clark described as the origins of World War I. In his book, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,” Clark illustrates how none of the great powers wanted war, but all felt free to escalate the build-up in the certainty that the other side would back down.
Something similar is happening here, and our nation could be sleepwalking into a second civil war. Even though justice and fairness prevailed this time, the stained confirmation process must serve as a wake-up alarm.
This time around, however, it won’t be a battle between two opposing armies from two distinct geographic regions.