There will be no civil war, no social disruption, no rioting in the streets.
Because we aren’t that way. We didn’t pull the trigger.
We have disagreed for almost 250 years, fighting over politics in a way most of the world can’t comprehend, as bitter and divisive and personal in the days of Washington as in the days of Trump. We tried bipartisanship for four years – the first term of James Monroe, the “Era of Good Feelings” – and we didn’t like it, and we didn’t try it again.
You don’t guide a free people by holding hands and singing campfire songs. You do it by standing firm and passionate in the advocacy of your beliefs and interests. There has never been a time in the governance of our Republic where there haven’t been intense, deeply held beliefs argued with a mixture of zeal and anger.
It’s how we roll, and it’s how we’ve always rolled. And recent claims that these times are different are simply historically false. We are Americans and we give a damn, and we do it in a context of freedom so that we say what we want and do what we want and campaign for what we want.
And it’s worked out. Between the sometimes whipsaw pulls to the left and the right we’ve generally steered a steady course, accomplishing more and advancing the interests of humankind better than any nation in the history of the world.
We’ve done it for two reasons – because our people are good and our Constitution is better. Blessed by God and the Framers with a Republic that forces compromise, coalition or consensus on an innately divided population, we’ve welded the varied and competing interests of a vast people and homeland into a steady government that typically represents the majority view and achieves the greatest good.
And underlying the Constitution are the people who it makes sovereign. Our liberty has been exercised in a context of morality, we have been a nation where the average person is a good person, a person whose actions and judgment are typically going to be positive and wise.
So, no, there will be no civil war, no social disruption, no rioting in the streets.
No matter how much our enemies at home and afar wish it so.
No matter how much the disciples of Karl Marx hope in this country to sow the seeds of revolution and hatred along lines of class and race. The socialist revolution of arms to force a revolution of society is not going to happen.
At least not among the supporters of Donald Trump.
They have persecuted him and prosecuted him and now they have shot him, and there was not riot or rampage. Suburban and rural America did not burn Saturday night. The crowd did not loot or attack. People saw, helped where they could, prayed for the wounded and the country, and quietly and peacefully went home.
In spite of what the commentators feared.
We are not Nazis, we are not a threat to democracy, we are not supporters of a tyrant or vassals of a king. We are not extremists, we are not bigots, we don’t hate people because of their color or their creed, we are not any of the things the politicians say we are. Those accusations are false, whether they come from the anchor desk or the well of the Senate or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
We are the man who was killed. He is what America is about. God, family, country. A volunteer fireman and active Christian whose last act was throwing his body over his wife and daughters in order to protect them from the latest madman to think his will is superior to the will of the people. It wasn’t the man on the roof who is the American norm, it was the man in the stands. There are only a handful of assassins, and hundreds of millions of us – and we will win, as we have always won.
No matter how disappointing that is to those who think we are sheep to be herded by the deceptive narrative of their newscasts and college lectures, campaign speeches and executive orders. The sky is not falling, the alarmism is not warranted, the world is not ending.
And America is not wavering.