re: #56 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

And whole swaths of the country that refuse to recognize Hillary as their legally and fairly elected President…shades of 1860 all over again…

That is something I am afraid of. Trump will likely not concede this election when he loses, and his voters and supporters in congress will take that as a cue to paint Hillary as illegitimate and illegal. I wonder if we are watching the beginning of the nation actually unraveling. A number of observers have said we are in a ‘cold’ civil war. 20 years from now, we may be able to look back and point to this year as the point where we could no longer function as a United States after all.

I hope to God not…but the civic norms that tie us together simply no longer exist. Sociologists have been pointing out we tend to see each other as actual mortal enemies instead of fellow Americans we disagree with (and God knows we keep seeing conservatives fantasizing about actual combat and shooting us as traitors)

We can no longer even agree on basic empirical facts since the other side gets information from inside an enclosed alternate reality and are fed a daily dose of conspiracy and outrage.

How do we keep working as a country if the election outcome cannot be agreed on? We have never been down that road in our history. Will Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel actually break ranks and declare Hillary as the lawful President, and would that make any difference to the millions of voters who loathe her beyond reason and want her imprisoned or dead?