Lack of civility? It's not a new phenomenon! ..."Their endgame is clear: the effective abolition of the states for all national political purposes."

Michael Walsh writes in American Greatness,

Hillary Clinton, the most vengeful, spiteful loser in the history of American electoral politics, has abandoned the Left’s always deceptive, now evanescent call for “civility.” She insists there can be no civility between the parties until the Democrats are restored to power—and, by extension, the Republicans are vanquished.

...Battling between the parties is almost as old as the republic itself, but the vast majority of the actual violence has always come from the Democrats. Aaron Burr, the proto-Democrat and founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. In 1856, on the eve of the Civil War, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was nearly beaten to death by Democrat Preston Brooks of South Carolina, presaging the bloody events to come. John Wilkes Booth, an ardent Southern Democrat, assassinated Abraham Lincoln just days after Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. Even after the war ended, the Democrats waged a long rearguard action against the Union, including creating the Ku Klux Klan to beat and murder newly freed black Americans.

...Short of civil war, there’s a clear solution to this two-state problem, and it’s been available from the beginning: federalism. The Left’s drive to diminish the power of the states and to consolidate power at the federal level is the reason why it hates the Senate and the Electoral College. The bulk of Hillary’s popular-vote margin came in California, where every vote for her beyond a one-vote majority in a winner-take-all state was wasted. The irony is that as long as Democrats flock together along the coasts, they’ll continue losing.

So their endgame is clear: the effective abolition of the states for all national political purposes. Talk about “fundamental change.” Because when you cut away all the boilerplate and the verbiage, the mock-piety and pretend horror, and strip the battle down to its essentials, what’s left is this: will the United States remain, as its founders intended, a federal republic, or will it become something more akin to a plebiscitary democracy, in which all important questions are decided in the heat and passion of the moment?

If the Democrats really want to see a breakdown in “civility,” this is precisely the way to go: to threaten the essential nature of the republic with an eye to transforming it into something completely different. They tried that once before, and it didn’t end well.

A victory for conservatives

Daniel Henninger reports in the Wall Street Journal,

Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.

As of a few weeks ago, that tilt in the guidelines has vanished. The College Board’s rewritten 2015 teaching guidelines are almost a model of political fair-mindedness. This isn’t just an about-face. It is an important political event.

The earlier guidelines characterized the discovery of America as mostly the story of Europeans bringing pestilence, destructive plants and cultural obliteration to American Indians. The new guidelines put it this way: “Mutual misunderstandings between Europeans and Native Americans often defined the early years of interaction and trade as each group sought to make sense of the other. Over time, Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other’s culture.”

Also new: “The effort for American independence was energized by colonial leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, as well as by popular movements that included the political activism of laborers, artisans, and women.” The earlier version never suggested the existence of Franklin—or Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison or anyone resembling a Founding Father. Now they’re back. Even the Federalist Papers were fished out of the memory hole.

Most incredible of all, the private enterprise system is, as they say, reimagined as a force for good: “As the price of many goods decreased, workers’ real wages increased, providing new access to a variety of goods and services.” There’s an idea that has fallen out of favor the past six years.

...What really happened was the resurrection of an American idea the left wants to extinguish—federalism. Some states began to push back. Legislative opposition to the guidelines formed in Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Nebraska, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas.

Stanley Kurtz, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has argued that the College Board was concerned that its lucrative nationwide testing franchise would be at risk if states began to replace it with their own courses. I think he’s right.

This is a significant event. It marks an important turn in the American culture wars that exploded at the Republican convention in 1992 with the religious right, a movement that faded but whose sense of political alienation has remained alive, whether in the original tea-party groups or today with voters adopting the improbable Donald Trump.

...Is the country polarized? How could it not be? Is there a solution? Take a look at how the AP U.S. history mess was handled. Someone rewrote those guidelines into a reasonable political accommodation. It is not impossible.

Read more here.

Maybe we should give it a try!

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today about secession. Lots of people are talking about it, here and abroad. Glenn, though, has a better idea:

So what's a solution? Let the central government do the things that only central governments can do -- national defense, regulation of trade to keep the provinces from engaging in economic warfare with one another, protection of basic civil rights -- and then let the provinces go their own way in most other issues. Don't like the way things are run where you are? Move to a province that's more to your taste. Meanwhile, approaches that work in individual provinces can, after some experimentation, be adopted by the central government, thus lowering the risk of adopting untested policies at the national level. You get the benefits of secession without seceding.

Sound good? It should. It's called federalism, and it's the approach chosen by the United States when it adopted the Constitution in 1789. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."

It's a nice plan. Beats secession. Maybe we should give it another try.

Read more here.