The culture war turns hot

No, he is not my president, and no, this is not my government.

I've suggested before that there is no longer an "American nation", that the US is now two mutually-hostile nations superimposed on the same territory.  I emphasize the word "superimposed" because the division is not really geographical.  There is a strong urban-vs-rural element to it, and whole states are misleadingly called "blue" or "red" depending on which culture has the numerical majority, however slim, but in practice both "blue" and "red" cultures exist almost everywhere in the US.

For Blue America, the Trump regime is not a government but more like a foreign occupation.  Trump's bullying and threats toward the governors of Michigan, New York, and Washington, and his earlier malign neglect of disasters in California and Puerto Rico, reflects this.  So does the regime seizing medical supplies ordered by our governors and diverting them, and Moscow Mitch suggesting that "blue states" should declare bankruptcy rather than expect further help from the federal government -- which is primarily funded by our tax revenue, because our culture and the cities it dominates are the real engines of the economy, on which Red America has been battening like a lamprey for generations.

It is time to recognize reality.  The Bible-thumpers, reactionaries, racists, and miscellaneous paranoid morons comprising Red America are not our fellow countrymen.  They voted for Trump largely because he would "own the libs" and inflict pain on us.  They are our enemies, they hate us, and they are actively waging aggressive war against us.  I have nothing in common with this horde of gibbering barbarians.

This division didn't start with Trump.  It goes back at least to the Civil War.  We beat them then, at huge cost, and we should have completely crushed them and forcibly reformed their politics and culture, as we did with Germany and Japan after World War II.  Instead, over time the internal enemy gradually metastasized through the whole territory of the United States, bringing the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and creationism in the schools and a bitter-end resistance to gay rights and women's independence -- and, in the last few decades, an infestation of increasingly stupid and deranged politicians culminating in Trump.

But even if the division has existed for generations, Red America's hysterical vilification of Obama during his presidency, and then their imposition of Trump on the country, have widened it into an unbridgeable chasm and destroyed whatever sense of common American identity did manage to exist before.

As I've pointed out before, partitioning the US is not the solution.  The two populations are too intermixed across its whole territory for any such division to be practical.  But we outnumber them, and the gap is widening as each new generation grows up more cosmopolitan and less religious than the one before.  They can only win on the national level by anti-democratic practices like gerrymandering, vote suppression, and an increasingly-open alliance with the Putin gangster-state.  Any Republican administration is a minority-rule administration.  If we win full control of the government this November, we need to be ruthless in restoring real democracy by eradicating these practices.  Red America's other device for inflicting minority rule, the Electoral College, can't be similarly abolished because it would take a Constitutional amendment -- but we are already undermining it by colonizing red states, and that will continue.

There must be no more self-delusion or mincing of words.  We will win in the end, but we need to accept the reality that we're in an all-out struggle with a real enemy that hates and despises us -- a continuation of the Civil War by other means and under new conditions.