This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

The headline in this blog is not meant as a scare tactic.  No.  It is meant to summarize the new reality we face in America – the huge risk of a “civil war.”

This was driven home anew by a column written by Dana Milbank for the Washington Post.  It appeared a few days ago under this headline:

WE ARE CLOSER TO CIVIL WAR THAN ANY OF US WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE, NEW STUDY SAYS

Whom do we credit for this fragile state of democracy in this country?

No question.  Donald Trump who tried to overthrow democracy a year ago and is about the same business as we head into both the mid-term elections in 2022 and the next presidential election in 2024.

He wants to be a dictator.  He is narcissist.  He believes he always knows what’s best for this country and wants everyone to bow at his throne. 

The apparent last thing he wants?  Democracy.

Milbank began his column this way:

“If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message:  A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own.

“Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence.

“By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter…applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.

“Her bottom line: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.’

“’No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes.  ‘But, if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.’”

Indeed, Milbank says, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6.

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer qualifies technically as a democracy.  Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

That’s a new word for me – “anocracy.”

More Milbank: 

“The question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to.  There is no more important issue; democracy is the foundation of everything else in America.  Democrats, in a nod to this reality, are talking about abandoning President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in favor of pro-democracy voting rights legislation. Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.

“The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail.  We are on the doorstep of the ‘open insurgency’ stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, ‘sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.’”

Well, some might say, this doesn’t sound like Oregon.  But, the Oregonian newspaper, in a story last weekend, said a new poll shows that Republicans here are “overwhelmingly loyal to Donald Trump and would prefer its gubernatorial nominee to be much like the former president, even if that means that nominee can’t win in Oregon.

In the poll of 600 likely Oregon Republican primary voters conducted in early November, 75 per cent said they view Trump favorably, and 58 per cent think that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. Just over 60 per cent said that Republican candidates for statewide office should be “more like Trump” while 23 per cent said they should be less like him.”

Being “more like Trump” means some Oregon Republicans might even favor civil war as a way to win.

At the same time, the phrase “civil war” has come into some disrepute in this country because, for one thing, it calls to mind the bitterness of that war in this country, which was fought over slavery. 

The phrase also is an oxymoron – no way to be “civil” while at “war.”

But, for those of us who care about the future of our country, the phrase is an apt one to describe what clearly is at stake.

So, vote smartly and wisely in the months and weeks ahead.  Vote like the future of the country is at issue because…it is!