Insta-Glenn: Has A Soft Civil War Begun?

Eh...pretty soft, if refusing service counts as having started... I'd rather not bake you a cake and We won't serve you here at the Red Hen are hardly Fort Sumter.

   What would make things better? It would be nice if people felt social ties that transcend politics. Americans’ lives used to involve a lot more intermediating institutions — churches, fraternal organizations, neighborhoods — that crossed political lines. Those have shrunk and decayed, and in fact, for many people politics seems to have become a substitute for religion or fraternal organizations. If you find your identity in your politics, you’re not going to identify with people who don’t share them.
   The rules of bourgeois civility also helped keep things in check, but of course those rules have been shredded for years. We may come to miss them.
   America had one disastrous civil war, and those who fought it did a surprisingly good job of coming together afterward, realizing how awful it was to have a political divide that set brother against brother. Let us hope that we will not have to learn that lesson again in a similar fashion.

Many people seem to think that the boog would just start right off with violence. My guess is that it'd start with secession by red states--which would probably be triggered by some major effort to infringe on the Bill of Rights by the blue team. Weirdly, the red states would probably just seek to adopt the, y'know, Constitution of the United States of America (including at least the first ten amendments). I've more-or-less always thought that the Tenth Amendment makes secession legal. In fact, I think it was legal the first time, despite its shitty motive. A fortiori it would be legal if it aimed to reinstate the Constitution in the seceding states. At any rate, violence would probably be initiated by the Feds aiming to thwart secession... And then everything would go to hell, of course. 

   It's unbelievable to me that we're even talking about this. But, then, it's unbelievable to me that we're in danger of basically chucking the First (and maybe Second...and maybe Fifth) Amendment(s)...but here we are. It's not the red team driving this, as should be obvious by now. It's the guys seeking to force their secular religion on the rest of us--and aiming to implement radical, "systemic," and in some cases unconstitutional, change.