Trump goes bananas over Dem message to military re: illegal orders

What's that old saying - "a hit dog always howls." The response of both Trump and his minions to the Congressional Democrats who said this is so over-the-top that it does seem to imply that they are worried that in the future military personnel might not be willing to blindly follow their orders to do blatantly unconstitutional things, including committing violence against US citizens, not just illegal immigrants. That seems to be their worry here.
 
rodoheel said:
I appreciate that position, but respectfully think we're further away from "armed conflict" on anything approaching a widespread scale than this post implies. I don't want to discount that very real and scary possibility. I do think it remains highly unlikely, for a variety of reasons. I think it's important to talk about the threat being real while also not exaggerating either (1) how close we are to that, or (2) how likely it is to happen at all.

I also think we suffer from the natural bias of living in the moment. It is easier to look back at past times with historical context, when we can know "what comes next" which is a virtue we don't have in the present. The future seems scary because we have no idea what it holds. It's easy to look back at, say, 1930 or 1968 and think it wasn't that bad because we knew what was coming later. But I'm confident the people living in those and other moments in our nation's history were every bit as terrified for their future, and the future of the nation, than we are right now. So I think it's important to keep that context in mind; and never give in to the nihilistic impulse to think that the country is doomed, or we're past the point that anything can be done to save our democracy. (not saying you're saying that, to be clear, but I have heard people on the board say it.) Because part of the way we pull through the darkness is to continue to have faith that there can be a better future on the other side.
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I think you are very correct that we have to be careful of thinking that our current time as being worse than what happened in the past because we know how the past turned out.

However, even with that noted, I do think we're closer to armed conflict than any time since the end of the Civil War/Reconstruction.

We have a major political party that fairly routinely advocates for armed responses to governmental actions with which they disagree. We have states openly acting to either undercut the federal government or to ignore the federal government. We have a president who has created an armed force to terrorize communities across our nation and who targets states and cities based purely on their partisan orientation. The bases of both major parties are expressing that they are losing/have lost faith in the government to carry out its duties and both increasing see governments operated by the opposing party as corrupt and often, worse, as illegitimate.

FFS, we had a deep and serious attempt to overthrow the will of the people after the 2020 election, including an armed insurrection that closed the operations of Congress to keep them from certifying the election.

We aren't in uncharted territory, but we are in a place we've only gone once before...the 1850s.

This isn't to say we are fated for a second Civil War and there are reasons to hope that we avoid such an outcome, but we should not downplay how serious the current situation is in order to provide false hope that we will avoid the worst of outcomes.
 
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