by Eric Pautos

November 8, 2022 - Things have probably never been more dangerous than they are today. At least, not since election day, 1860. Whatever the outcome of this election, it could result in something like what happened after that election.

Lincoln’s election was intolerable to the people of the South, which shortly after his election in 1860 began to form what became the Southern Confederacy and shortly after that, attempted to withdraw from what it, with cause, saw as a political system that not only did not represent its interests but which it saw, also rightly, as a system that could not represent its interests. That last being an important point rarely, if ever, discussed in the schools established by the government that forced the Southern states back into the Union.

The North controlled the Union politically and so actually because the North had the population and the money to dominate federal elections; so the South had no way to redress its grievances within the construct of the Union.

It was not the election of 1860, per se, that triggered the South’s attempt to withdraw but rather the realization that future elections would go similarly. What option does a minority have in a political system that is based upon majority rule? The choice is either acceptance of subordinate status and hope the master will be kind - or get away from the master.

It is exactly what the Amerikan colonies had done - and for same reasons and realizations - those “four score and seven” years before the election of 1860. Their successful attempt to withdraw from the Union - with Great Britain - is celebrated by modern Amerikans, many of whom also think (if that is the right word) that the failed attempt by the people of the Southern Confederacy to do the same, for similar reasons and on exactly the same basis, in terms of the principle at issue - i.e., that of being governed by themselves rather than a distant people with whom they had increasingly little in common and who wielded political control over them that could not be redressed within the context of the Union - was, somehow, a kind of crime.

So, the Southern states - like the Amerikan colonies, which were also states - declared their political independence from the Union and fought for it.

If today’s elections ensconce the power of the political Left, whether legitimately - in terms of the actual votes - or because the votes were jiggered with - the people who are not of the Left will have to face the awful realization that the Left is in perpetual control and that they no longer have any means, within the system, to combat it. That the oppression of the Left cannot be voted away.

It must be gotten away from - or submitted to. The latter being a condition as intolerable to those not of the Left as the subordination of the not-Left is to the Left. This is a matter of irreconcilable differences - and both sides know it, just as they knew it in 1860. Like a failed marriage, it is not what either party wanted at the beginning. But it is what it has become and there is no fixing it except by separating the estranged or forcing the estranged to endure one another in a state of mutual, endless hatred.

It is even worse than that given that one of the two estranged simply wishes to end the Union as peacefully as possible for the sake of both - while the other estranged will do anything to the other to force them to remain in a Union it despises, knowing the other despises it.

The Left will make that very clear to the not-Left, in the event the not-Left fails to redress its grievances via the ballot box today. It will use the power it cements via the ballot box - stuffed or not - to consolidate its power, possibly forever.

It has said it will do exactly that, as by “reforming” the Electoral College so as to assure the impossibility of a not-Leftist ever becoming president again. By ending the Filibuster, so as to assure there is no check upon the legislative juggernaut of the Left in Congress. By adding Leftist justices to the Supreme Court, so as to eliminate that last check upon the absolute dominion of the Left.

Some Leftists have even been urging that those who spread “misinformation” - the Left’s term for anything the Left dislikes, despite being true - be subject to criminal prosecution. The Left has made it very clear how it feels about free speech. To say nothing of freedom of choice.

The Left may make things even more clear - as regards its power - by “electing” itself, irrespective of the vote.

On the other hand, if the Left should lose power as a result of the vote, it will still have power for the next two months. What the Left may do with that power can be predicted with a high degree of certainty based upon what the Left has done with the power it already has.

The leadership of the Left - including the current president, who has much in common with the man elected in 1860, in terms of his belligerence to all who question his absolute authority - has stated quite openly that any who question the Left constitute a “threat” to “our democracy,” by which is meant the cannot-be-questioned power of the Left to run the country as it sees fit.

How improbable is it that the Left will declare an “insurrection” if the vote turns out to be a “threat” to “our democracy”? How unlikely is it that the Left will not do whatever it takes to hold onto its power, irrespective of the vote?Whatever the vote turns out to be, the result is probably foreordained. As it was in 1860. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Nor should it.