Michael Vlahos, who teaches at SAIS, sees one of three outcomes for America. Excerpt:
Read Full Article »1-Secession: Some agreed — whether polite or desperate — coming apart of the old Union into local, state, or other-based constitutional entities, perhaps still federated, if more loosely than a nation. While this arrangement is increasingly acknowledged by commentators as potentially avoiding the worst of civil war, its realization nonetheless requires a form of civil war. There is no avoiding war.
2-Blue triumph: The ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social revolution as well as a political transformation: The full outcome must likely reconstitute our constitutional order in ways unrecognizable to us today.
3-Thermidorian Reaction: Exhausted by civil conflict, American society takes a modest counter-revolutionary turn, in which repudiated old traditions are [at least partly] reinstated, and a measure of political toleration and overall equipoise returns to national life, along with constitutional accommodations and firewalls to forestall another descent into civil strife.
