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By Kyle Sammin
There has always been loose talk of civil war in certain corners of the online media world. People who believe, for whatever reason, that America’s differences are too vast to bridge and that separation — even to the point of war — is the only solution.
After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tumult of Covid and the George Floyd riots, multiple attempts on Trump’s life in 2024, and now Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the would-be separatists are no longer laughing. And their numbers, on both sides, are growing.
We’ve counseled in these pages the need to step back from the brink of destruction, noting Abraham Lincoln’s appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” He spoke those words to a nation on the razor’s edge. A month later, the rebels fired on Fort Sumter and a bloody civil war began. We, in 2025, are not so far gone as all that. But it bears repeating that the lines between Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, left and right, must never be allowed to harden into the battle lines between friend and enemy.
Why It Matters. Opponents of liberal democracy have been spreading the seeds of that lie wherever they could for years now. While it once grew on the left alone, now it has found purchase on the right, as well. It is not surprising that this kind of thought has increased since Kirk’s death, because it is fundamentally a politics of secular despair.
Lincoln, again, shows the way. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he said in that same inaugural address. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”
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