Our Civil War Pre-Enactment
Living where I do, on the location of a minor skirmish in the Wilderness Campaign, I’ve been to my share of Civil War re-enactments. I’ve always found it a bit of an odd hobby, to want to play-act such a cataclysm of internecine hatred and killing. But perhaps the point was that we can play at it because it is so firmly in the past.
Now we’re starting to adopt a far stranger national hobby: the civil war pre-enactment.
Factions from the illiberal right and the illiberal left are so eager to begin beating and shooting each other that they just can’t wait, so they are seeking out opportunities to do it.
The city of Portland has become a permanent street fair of civil-war pre-enactment, a place for Antifa and the Proud Boys to regularly go at each other. That’s been going on for a while, and people have just grown to accept it as normal, as a crazy left-coast thing that bubbles along at a low simmer in the daily news but doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the country.
Yet now it is starting to escalate, to become deadlier, and to spread to the rest of the country.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.