Just when we started "re-honoring" those turncoat Confederate leaders, it appears we shall have more.

A new Civil War means more heroes...and more traitors.

We are approaching the official beginning of America's second civil war. Ah hell, let's capitalize the term—it's a historic event, Civil War II.

And just as we learned the causes of the first one, our descendants will be studying this one, and they'll be wondering—as you and I often did years ago—how could a country founded on such humane and democratic principles spiral into the bloodiest war in our history in only...well...if I may speak poetically and not politically, four score and five years.

There were many causes of Civil War I, and I would never discount the economic factor, specifically, the very real threat to the Southern economy engendered by the threat of abolishing slavery. But, because the slave economy was based on inhumanity, its preservation cannot be argued, and its demise was long overdue.

Civil War II has its economic underpinnings, too—the promotion of a billionaire class at the expense of the average citizen and the constant MAGA echo chamber hammering away at the middle class that their economic well-being is falling victim to immigrants and minorities. It's a preposterous fear, but how quickly it has led to the complete acceptance of inhumanity and cruelty. We were taught that in Civil War I, brother killed brother and neighbor killed neighbor. We are doing it again—the only addition being that the patriarchy has dissolved somewhat so that sister can now kill sister with equal rancor and cruelty. And our sisters are Black, Hispanic, transgender, and Muslim, and live not just south of the Mason-Dixon line, but in New Hampshire, Utah, and Wisconsin. It is already ugly and can only grow worse.

In 1861, a few weeks after Abraham Lincoln's inauguration and the secession of a half dozen Southern states, Andrew Stephens, the nominal vice-president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in which he said, "Our new government['s]...cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition." His words echo today in the hateful reaction of lawmakers like Tommy Tuberville, Andy Ogles, and Nancy Mace, and their reaction to the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral primary. There's a throughline from Andrew Stephens to Steven Miller, one that runs through every racist who has been repressed for years but has now found a voice in Donald Trump.

And as it was during CW-1, again, the Supreme Court is scuttling our democracy. In March 1857, the court ruled that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory was not thereby entitled to his freedom and that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States. With that decision, war became inevitable. This past Friday, that same body ruled against the Constitutional birthright of children born in the United States, leaving each state to decide citizenship. The six conservative judges may have thought this to be a clever way of making everyone happy, but all they did was create a larger fissure between "citizen states" and "deportation states," a divide that the worst of our politicians (Tuberville, Ogles, Mace) will exploit and abuse.

Civil War 1 cost upwards of 700,000 American lives, most of them soldiers. Ten times the number in Vietnam, almost twice the number in World War 2, pretty much the population of Vermont. It is unlikely that this new war will create that kind of bloodshed, but people will die, and if democracy fails to win out this time, the death toll in the new world of a divided, weakened, and ungoverned America may be beyond our imagination.