Will America’s divisions lead to a broken country? Consider period before Civil War

The most troubling aspect to emerge from this year’s Republican National Convention may be the depiction presented by the GOP of the Democrats and their candidate for president, Joe Biden.

Throughout the course of the event, Republican after Republican railed on the extremist nature of the other party and the radical policies they claimed their opponents would impose on the nation should they win in the fall elections. In some ways this is standard political rhetoric as the Democrats did something similar (although not to the same extent) to Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.

However, the president’s acceptance speech on the final night of the convention threatened to heighten the already acrimonious atmosphere to outright hatred and fear of one part of America for another based solely on their political views.

In his speech, Trump proposed several times — with a veritable forest of American flags behind him — that the Republican party was the defender not of just conservative values but of American values. He intimated that the Democratic party was un-American and a threat to the continued existence of the country. That, in essence, a Joe Biden victory would be the unmaking of the nation.

At several points during the summer, the president has mused that the only way the Republican party (and by extension, himself) could lose the election would be through a massive voter fraud campaign by the Democrats. Trump has even gone so far as to suggest that the only acceptable election outcome was one where he was declared the victor, implying that he would contest any other result.

This dangerous and over-the-top characterization of a political rival and rejection of the ideal of the peaceful transfer of power that this nation’s politics is based on is one of several norms in our modern politics broken by the Trump presidency. As dangerous as this moment is, it is also worth remembering that it can get worse from here. There was another moment in our nation’s past when members of one part of the American political system came to not just mistrust, but also refuse to accept the results of elections and it culminated in the shattering of our nation. It was the 1860 election.

After that election, many white southerners (and even some in the North) decried the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the “Black Republicans.” White southerners in particular refused to accept the outcome of the election, and even before the Electoral College declared Lincoln the official winner, these southerners were holding meetings about seceding from the Union. South Carolina held its special convention on secession in December of 1860, and six other slave states of the Deep South would follow early in 1861. The statement issued by this special convention of South Carolina declared that Lincoln’s election and the rise of the Republican party was “hostile to the South, and destructive of its peace and safety.”

What comes next is the crucial parallel to our modern problems: In order to shore up support among other slave-holding states, the first seven seceding states that formed the Confederacy and sent out commissioners to convince the other slave-holding states to join them. Historian Charles Dew, in his book “Apostles of Disunion,” explains the import these commissioners had on the secession crisis and most illuminatingly the argument they used to encourage other slave states to follow suit. Almost universally these commissioners depicted Lincoln and Republicans as a dire threat to the South and its way of life, claiming that Republicans would not only abolish slavery in the South but would also encourage a race war, miscegenation and ultimately the destruction of the white race in the South simply to gain political control of the country.

The same level of rancor, distrust and mischaracterization runs through today’s Republican party. Much like white southerners in the run-up to the Civil War, Republicans now claim not to just represent a conservative take on the liberal ideology of democratic government, but rather the entire nation and its ideals. They portray themselves as the party of patriotism wrapping themselves in the American flag, declaring themselves the bulwark of “law and order,” the last line of defense for democracy, capitalism and freedom against socialism and totalitarianism that they claim is espoused by their political opponents.

Much like the South after Lincoln’s election, today’s Republicans can only see Democrats as dangerous enemies that must be stopped at all costs, even if it means breaking norms that have stood for generations. For them, the ends definitely justify the means.

The next step in their progression is to follow the example of their southern predecessors and contest any elections that allow their opponents a chance to govern — up to and including breaking the nation in order to “save it.”