[See Also: French Socialists to Postpone Civil War Plan as Cartel Shuts Out National Front]

I mean, I know. It's Salon, it's almost too easy. But still.

The rise of dictators-in-waiting Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz has left political observers bewildered. How did the establishment wing of a dominant American political party end up with a radical extremist carrying the party’s banner? Will the Republican Party split and die? More important, how will this crisis play out for the nation? [Extremism ends in civil war: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and a right wing insurgency the GOP can no longer control, by Heather Cox Richardson, December 13, 2015]

Catch that there? Not only Donald Trump, but now Ted Cruz is a "dictator in waiting?" How? What does this even mean? After all, it's the current President of the United States who seems to be the one governing by fiat.

And what "bewildered" political observers? We've been waiting for this for years. Peter Brimelow was practically John the Baptist in predicting the rise of Trump. "All it would take to get this issue into politics is one speech..."

Never mind. Richardson tells us Southern Democrats, in response to the rise of anti-slavery rhetoric and the Republican Party, escalated their rhetoric to the point where the Democrats could no longer contain it. As a result John C. Breckinridge became the candidate of the "extremists," and when Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, Richardson tells us what happened next.

But those men had never experienced a war and had no idea what they were signing up for. They launched a war that looked nothing like the one Breckinridge’s men had promised. Rather than being a romp that reinforced white southern dominance, the American Civil War took 620,000 American lives and left the South shattered.

Today the parties have swapped sides, but the pattern is the same. Once again, political leaders have for years used inflammatory rhetoric to bolster a system that favors the very wealthy. Once again, their rhetoric has created an insurgency that they cannot control. Once again, that insurgency appeals to Americans who have never actually had to grapple with what it might mean to fight for an ideology.

Inflammatory rhetoric can only come from the Right apparently. Even though millions of whites voted for Barack Obama in the hope of achieving racial reconciliation, almost everyone agrees race relations are far more poisoned than they were before his election. Explicit appeals against whites have become mainstream. Thanks to Black Lives Matter, we have what is essentially a low level insurgency simmering in cities around the country and cops being murdered in the streets. College campuses have become unhinged hotbeds of unconcealed hatred towards whites. But the real problem, of course, is Donald Trump. Notice how the "system that favors the very wealthy" is identified with Trump and Cruz. However, Cruz is at least pretending to oppose mass immigration (for now) and Trump has defined his candidacy by his opposition to the invasion of America. There is no policy more regressive and more destructive of American workers than mass immigration. And yet, there is not a leftist in America who doesn't want to enable a literally unlimited supply of cheap labor if it means screwing over the United States and those white workers they hate with such genocidal fury. What exactly is the conclusion here? If people keep supporting Trump, Richardson is going to have the government kill us? Or that because Trump exists, it somehow means civil war? It's incredible how defenders of the multicultural system in both France and America are falling back on the argument that if someone who might restrict immigration is elected, millions will die in an orgy of bloodshed.

Uh huh. And what does this have to do with, well, anything?Several points.But there's one finally thing of all of this. Like Lindsey Graham when he's trying to act like a butch Commander in Chief, it's hard to take a leftist, from Salon of all places, invoking the specter of a civil war that American right wingers will somehow lose. It's the right-wingers who have all the guns and love training with them.

And for some reason, it's the leftists who keep making veiled threats of violence and war, usually from their "safe spaces" where they are protected against speech they disagree with. If they get their war, what do they think is going to happen?

To use a meme that even average Republicans love circulating on Facebook and Twitter: