I didn’t originally intend this post to be a sequel to my last post on SCOUTS.

It started with a Tweet from @jack.

Great read https://t.co/O2djSQf8Qv

— jack (@jack) April 6, 2018

Jack is of course Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter.

Jack is also the founder of Square, the credit card processing company, and is worth $3.4 Billion.  He is a mover and shaker in tech and an Silicon Valley influencer.  Like Mark Zuckerberg and other Tech gurus, Jack has shown himself to be a partisan censor.  Twitter is his company and he is going to rule what is done on it with an iron fist.  Long have conservatives said that Twitter has a bias where harassment and threats of conservatives go unpunished while benign statements made to liberals results in bans and blocks.

So what was this “great read” that Jack endorsed.

The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War.

That doesn’t bode well.

Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win.

Really?

The next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done.

In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.

One party rule in which the most extreme, out of touch wing of the majority party leads?  That is the proposal?

Well let me take a break from this article to jump over to Fox News for a second.

Has the California backlash against liberal craziness finally begun?

In a state consumed by conservation and environmental issues, one highly endangered species has long gone unnoticed and unprotected – the California Conservative.  Is it still possible to rescue them from the brink of extinction?  Can their numbers be revived?  And can they thrive here once again?

While the nation continues to view California as a homogeneous voting block of individuals in lock step with an increasingly progressive liberal agenda, for Common Sense Californians up and down the left coast state, there’s a sense that a different tide is rising.

The ripple began in Los Alamitos where the city council voted to opt out of California’s sanctuary law.  And it was followed by Orange County who voted to join the U.S. Department of Justice in challenging the state’s sanctuary city laws.  This decision was echoed by the city of Escondido and later this month San Diego County will also vote to join their ranks in this federal lawsuit.  Other municipalities are lining up to consider doing the same…

Ronald Reagan was a Democrat for many years before switching to the Republican Party.  When asked why he changed parties, he said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party – the Democratic Party left me.”  That seems to be a sentiment being echoed by Common Sense Californians up and down the state as many blue blood Democrats and Reagan Democrats feel like their party no longer reflects their values or priorities. 

So the theory that Fox News is putting out is that under one party Democrat rule lead by the most extreme Liberal fringe, moderate Democrats are tired of footing the bill for useless environmental projects while getting fined for drinking straws.  They may not be ready to become Trumpers yet, but they aren’t as Blue as they used to be.

But back to Medium’s call for a civil war.

In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.  

The Republicans are brain dead and out of date.  Sanctuary cities and plastic bag bans are the future.

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

I don’t think that any of that is accurate.  California is becoming a third world country.  The middle class is fleeing California and business are going with them.  California is now a state that is made up of either the super rich from primary the entertainment, tech, or banking/investment industries or the very poor and unskilled working class which is largely minority and illegal.

California has the highest poverty rate in the US.  The most liberal Blue areas of the State are drowning in needles and human shit or have become tent cities filled with homeless.

California today provides a model for America as a whole. This model of politics and government is by no means perfect, but it is far ahead of the nation in coming to terms with the inexorable digital, global, sustainable transformation of our era. It is a thriving work in progress that gives hope that America can pull out of the political mess we’re in. California today provides a playbook for America’s new way forward. It’s worth contemplating as we enter 2018, which will be a critical election year.

I guess when the author of this article is a tech CEO, the view from the elite seats is pretty damn rosy.   

This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day.

I agree.

The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers.

Yes, it does.

America today is nowhere near that level of conflict or at risk of such violence. However, America today does exhibit some of the core elements that move a society from what normally is the process of working out political differences toward the slippery slope of civil war. We’ve seen it in many societies in many previous historical eras, including what happened in the United States in 1860.

Oh, you have no fucking idea, cocksucker.

America’s original Civil War was not just fought to emancipate slaves for humanitarian reasons. The conflict was really about the clash between two very different economic systems that were fundamentally at odds and ultimately could not coexist. The Confederacy was based on an agrarian economy dependent on slaves. The Union was based on a new kind of capitalist manufacturing economy dependent on free labor. They tried to somehow coexist from the time of the founding era, but by the middle of the 19th century, something had to give. One side or the other had to win.

But that’s not America right now.  This isn’t so much of an industrial issue as a cultural one.  Spending a lifetime in tech might have convinced this guy that soy lattes magically appear out drive-thru windows but a nation of 320 Million people can not survive on an economy that is banking and dot-coms.  We are the world’s largest exporter of food, third largest producer of oil,  second largest in manufacturing (and poised to take over No. 1 again).  Most of that happens in between the blue coasts.

America today faces a similar juncture around fundamentally incompatible energy systems. The red states held by the Republicans are deeply entrenched in carbon-based energy systems like coal and oil. They consequently deny the science of climate change, are trying to resuscitate the dying coal industry, and recently have begun to open up coastal waters to oil drilling.

Low cost energy driving the economy.

The blue states held by the Democrats are increasingly shifting to clean energy like solar and installing policies that wean the energy system off carbon. In the era of climate change, with the mounting pressure of increased natural disasters, something must give. We can’t have one step forward, one step back every time an administration changes. One side or the other has to win.

Energy so expensive and inefficient to generate that it has to be mandated.  It’s not like California is ranked 44 out of 50 for highest energy costs… oh wait, it is.

Another driver on the road to civil war is when two classes become fundamentally at odds. This usually takes some form of rich versus poor, the wealthy and the people, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The system gets so skewed toward those at the top that the majority at the bottom rises up and power shifts.

Tell me tech mogul, what percent are you in?  California is 7th in the 10 states with the highest income inequality.  The only “Red” state on the list is Wyoming, and the growth in inequality is coming from Californians moving to sky towns.  The fact is that eight of the ten states are deep Blue liberal states with Massachusetts and New York right at the top.  So tell me how it is Red Middle America that is the 1% vs the 99%.

The last time America was in that position was in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. We were on the road of severe class conflict that could have continued toward civil war, but we worked out a power shift that prevented widespread violence. Franklin Roosevelt, the so-called traitor to his class, helped establish a supermajority New Deal coalition of Democrats that rolled all the way through the postwar boom. The conservative Republicans who had championed a politics that advantaged the rich throughout the 1920s and promoted isolationism in the 1930s were sidelined for two generations — close to 50 years.

So rather than have any sort of meaningful social reform, we got the introduction of the welfare state.

Today’s conservative Republicans face the same risk. Since 1980, their policies have engorged the rich while flatlining the incomes of the majority of Americans, from the presidency of Ronald Reagan through to last December’s tax overhaul, which ultimately bestows 83 percent of the benefits over time to the top 1 percent. Make no mistake: A reckoning with not just Trump, but conservatism, is coming.

This is just factually wrong.

The differences between two economic systems or two classes that are fundamentally at odds could conceivably get worked out through a political process that peacefully resolves differences. However, culture frequently gets in the way. That’s especially true when pressures are building for big system overhauls that will create new winners and losers.

Two different political cultures already at odds through different political ideologies, philosophies, and worldviews can get trapped in a polarizing process that increasingly undermines compromise. They see the world through different lenses, consume different media, and literally live in different places. They start to misunderstand the other side, then start to misrepresent them, and eventually make them the enemy. The opportunity for compromise is then lost. This is where America is today.

I’ve been hearing that the NRA and gun owners are terrorists who want to murder children for profit for a month now.  I know where America is today.  I remember when Hillary called NRA members and Republicans her “enemies.”  I guess you stand with her.

At some point, one side or the other must win — and win big. The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards. The losing party or movement will need that same time to go through a fundamental rethink, a long-term renewal that eventually will enable them to play a new game.

So you single-handedly decided that Republicans are obsolete and backwards and for the good of America must be totally and utterly dominated, with their culture, identity, and beliefs crushed under the California liberal bootheel?

Trump is doing exactly what America needs him to do right now. He’s becoming increasingly conservative and outrageous by the day. Trump could have come into office with a genuinely new agenda that could have helped working people. Instead, he has spent the past year becoming a caricature of all things conservative — and in the meantime has alienated most of America and certainly all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century. He is turning the Republican brand toxic for millennials, women, Latinos, people of color, college-educated people, urban centers, the tech industry, and the economic powerhouses of the coasts, to name a few.

So everybody you like hates Trump an everybody you hate likes Trump?

The Republican Party is playing their part perfectly, too. They completely fell for the Trump trap — and that’s exactly what America needed them to do. The Republican Party could have maintained some distance from Trump and kept a healthy check on him through Congress. Instead, they fully embraced him in a group bear hug that culminated in a deeply flawed tax law in the waning days of 2017. This mess of a law, thrown together without traditional vetting, is riddled with outrageous loopholes that benefit the crony donor class and line the pockets of many of the politicians who passed it. The law is hugely unpopular, and everyone who voted for it is marked for the election of 2018.

I don’t think you realize how popular the Trump tax cuts are outside of your little bubble.  A new Truck after 15 years is a little more than “crumbs” to me.

Now the entire Republican Party, and the entire conservative movement that has controlled it for the past four decades, is fully positioned for the final takedown that will cast them out for a long period of time in the political wilderness. They deserve it.

Why?  Because we see certain economic realities like the “fight for 15” results in job losses and loss of hours.

Let’s just say what needs to be said: The Republican Party over the past 40 years has maneuvered itself into a position where they are the bad guys on the wrong side of history. For a long time, they have been able to hide this fact through a sophisticated series of veils, invoking cultural voodoo that fools a large enough number of Americans to stay in the game. However, Donald Trump has laid waste to that sophistication and has given America and the world the raw version of what current conservative politics is all about.

Whenever I hear the phrase “the wrong side of history” it frightens the fuck out of me.

You don’t get to judge history before it happened.  That is the statement made of someone who is 100% secure in their moral righteousness.  Mass graves have been filled by tyrants who though they were going to be on the right side of history and were going to do whatever it took to get there.

The Republican Party is all about rule by and for billionaires at the expense of working people. Trump is literally the incarnation of what the party stands for: shaping laws for the good of billionaires and the 1 percent. His cabinet is stuffed with them.

Billionaires like Zuckerberg, Jack, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg?  How about the Wall Street investment class that Obama bailed out and didn’t send to prison when their malfeasance fucked over our economy?  You may not like Trump but don’t “for billionaires at the expense of working people” me about the Republicans.  Not with Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, and Warren at the helm of the Democrats for eight years.

The Republican Party is the party of climate change denial. Trump is the denier-in-chief, but there are 180 climate science deniers in the current Congress (142 in the House and 38 in the Senate), and none of them are Democrats. More than 59 percent of Republicans in the House and 73 percent of Republicans in the Senate deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening, that human activity is the main cause, and that it is a serious threat. Another way to say it is that the Republican Party is in the pocket of the oil and carbon energy industry. Trump just cut through the crap and named Exxon’s CEO as our secretary of state to unravel the United Nations climate accords. No beating around that bush for the sake of appearances — Trump burned the bush down.

I like not having to spend a mortgage payment for my utility bills.  I’m all for clean energy but not at the cost of the economy.  Every time I hear some California liberal talk about green energy, it means I’m going to have to pay twice as much to fill my tank.

The Republican Party for the past 40 years has mastered using dog whistles to gin up racial divides to get their white voters to the polls. Trump just disposes of niceties and flatly encourages white nationalists, bans Muslims, walls off Mexicans, and calls out “shithole” countries.

Says Mr. “I’m with the party that tore this nation apart with identity politics and used the first black president to worsen race relations.”  Also, countries that stone women for being raped, practice female genital mutilation, throw acid in women’s faces, and have turned into narco-states are shitholes.  That is objective fact.

Trump is just making clear to all what was boiling under the surface for decades, and that’s exactly what we need him to do. Why? Because America finally needs to take the Republican Party down for a generation or two. Not just the presidency. Not just clear out the U.S. House. Not just tip back the Senate. But fundamentally beat the Republicans on all levels at once, including clearing out governorships and statehouses across the land.

How many mass graves will we have to fill to make that happen?

Could such as collapse of the Republican Party really happen? Won’t it take decades of trench warfare to put the GOP on the run? Not at all. A political collapse could happen very fast, as it did in California.

California was a model of governmental dysfunction in the 1990–2005 period, with Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats and little being accomplished. The political atmosphere became so toxic that Democratic governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003 and replaced with populist Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who then proceeded to up the ante on polarization by pushing a series of conservative ballot initiatives in a special election in 2005. They were all handily defeated by the voters, marking the zenith of conservative Republican attempts to control California.

Did I mess when Schwarzenegger was a “conservative” Republican.  He was elected, partly due to fame, and partially due to being a fiscally conservative social liberal.  It takes a far, far Left point of view to think that Schwarzenegger was the second coming of Reagan in California.

After that point, it was all downhill for the conservative GOP agenda in California. Schwarzenegger understood the sea change early and dumped right-wing populism and became far more moderate, going along with many progressive priorities. He soon started working with Democrats in the legislature on infrastructure, culminating in the passage of Proposition 1B in 2006 ($20 billion for roads and public transportation). Also in 2006, he and the legislature allocated an additional $150 million to stem cell research, supported a successful move to raise the minimum wage, and passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, which targeted a reduction of 25 percent in greenhouse gas emissions in the next 20 years. And in 2008, voters passed Prop 1A, authorizing $10 billion for high-speed rail.

All these “moderate” initiatives driving business out of California.  Fires and floods ad still California can’t build a reservoir.  But it can build a high speed rail to help LA entertainment moguls take a tax-payer subsidized trip up to wine country without having to fell the guilt of flying.  California is experiencing record rain and can’t capture a drop of it.  Only in California is this immediate and fixable problem  met with “let’s build more wind turbines” instead of “let’s build a dam.”

Meanwhile, even though Schwarzenegger remained governor, the Democrats steadily expanded their majority in the state assembly. Then, in 2010, Democrat Jerry Brown was elected governor, and with the 2012 election, Democrats finally attained a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature. This was critical for overriding constant Republican filibusters and passing tax revenue laws (which still required a supermajority by Prop 13 dictates). The supermajority attained in 2012 was the first California legislative supermajority since 1933 and the first one for the Democrats since 1883. This is remarkable considering that in the dysfunctional 1990s, the state assembly and senate were closely divided between Republicans and Democrats, seemingly light-years away from the supermajority Democrats really needed to get things done.

Alongside these developments, Democratic domination of California representation in the U.S. House of Representatives steadily increased. Back in the 1990s, under Republican governor Pete Wilson, there was essentially parity between Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Today, there is almost a 3:1 split (39–14) in favor of the Democrats. Plus, they control both U.S. Senate seats and every single statewide elected office. There are no longer any Republicans able to mount a credible statewide election.

So, going from the zenith of right-wing populism to progressive domination in California did not take very long. That could easily happen in the country as a whole. The national GOP, after the 2016 election, controlled the presidency, the House, the Senate, and a strong majority of governorships and state legislatures. Since then, President Trump has become historically unpopular among American voters and the GOP Congress and its actions have become widely detested. Very quickly, their 2016 triumphs have morphed into a poisonous electoral environment where the GOP in 2018 is probably going to lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, lose governorships and many hundreds of state legislative seats. And while the 2020 election is still a couple years away, an early forecast from political scientist Eric R.A.N. Smith has Trump (assuming his unpopularity continues) netting only 41 percent of electoral votes in that election.

In short, political change is slow until it’s very fast. The fall of the GOP is likely to be no different.

WOW!!!  So the election of a socially liberal Democrat from Hollywood who is married to a Kennedy is his definition of California right wing populism.  He then cheers on California going so far Left that it’s socioeconomic breakdown and living conditions are starting to look like Caracas.

It is comprised of a minority of wealthy elite, protected in gated communities behind armed guards, from what is becoming more and more an mass of uneducated, unskilled poor and homeless population living in squalor and homelessness as finding anyplace to live in metropolitan California has become prohibitively expensive for all but the richest citizens.

California has one of the largest unfunded liability problems in America and the highest welfare spending of any state.

This is what all that Democrat super majority rule did.  That is what this asshole wants to do to America.

He is part of the cloistered California elite and hates the Republicans outside he bubble so wants to crush them all and be be part of some cloistered American elite, while the rest of the nation falls turns into a South American socialist republic.

This is what is being pushed by our tech oligarch “superiors.”

My wife looked at this and said “it sounds very Hunger Games.”

I wondered why they haven’t call it “America’s Great Leap Forward.”

So here is my Second Option.

Rather than have a 2020 election, we uses the census data to hold a national referendum on the future of this nation.  I propose a “national amicable divorce.”

I figure the US can break into three, maybe four nations.

1. The Pacific Coast, making up the coastal counties of California, Washington, and Oregon, from Orange county to Canada.  San Diego is both a Red county as well as a deep water Pacific port for the inland area of the US.  We already see a proposal for “New California” so the Inland Empire won’t be going with them.
2. The North East Corridor, stretching from the Blue suburbs of DC in northern Virginia up to Maine, including the eastern half of Pennsylvania.
3. The Midwest, Deep South, and Texas.  I think Florida will most likely stay here.  Orlando south might try and secede or go with the North East Corridor but they will be quickly outnumbered.
4. (Maybe) Chicago MSA, Wisconsin, the south-east corner of Minnesota including the Twin Cities.  This is the midwest “Blue Bubble”

I think the level of hatred and acrimony we’ve seen in the last few years as pushed us over the edge.  Marriage counselors say a marriage can’t be saved once the couple shows contempt for each other.  Well, what we’ve seen come out of the Left since the 2016 election is nothing but contempt.

I don’t want to share a country with people who call me a terrorist and a baby killer and think I should be totally culturally dominated.

To be honest, I don’t want to get into a shooting war for secession either.

The Pacific Coast will turn into Venezuela in short order.  Middle America will be a slightly right of center nation, not too terribly different from Texas.  The North East Corridor will become an amalgamation of Boston, New York City, and DC.

Dissolving America isn’t my ideal either, but I think it is the most peaceful solution.

The alternative is this proposed “utter domination of Republicans and Democrat one party” rule.  The difference between us and the Hunger Games is that we have 400 million guns and a trillion rounds of ammo.

I’ve studied my history.  I know what happens to people who are subject to total cultural domination.  The guy who thinks he’s on the “right side of history” will be written about presiding over the “Killing Fields of Iowa.”

Like I said before, if that is the direction these people want to go, next time they are the ones who fill the mass graves.