A great many Americans do not want their country to become an entirely different country, a socialist polity.

They do not want a government that is master and provider; they want a government that is hired guard.

How many are they? What proportion of the population? The forthcoming election will tell.

(Information for those who have not learnt American History or Civics, such as Americans under fifty-five who attended public schools and courses in “Studies” at university: if the ones who do want America to change into a United Socialist States of America vote for it in a majority by voting for the Socialist Democrats, they will not necessarily win the election. That depends on where they are. If they are mainly in two states, for instance, the free Republic will still be safe. The Electoral College gives power to the smaller states and protects the federal Republic from simple majoritarian democracy.)

Malcolm Pollack writes at American Greatness:

Looking at the yawning rift in American politics—the fundamentally incompatible visions of society and government that the two factions hold, the dehumanizing mutual antipathy that finds freer expression every day, the unforgettable damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power—can any of us imagine some way forward in which Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?  …

“Red” and “blue” have profoundly different visions of the scope and structure of the federal government, and of the role of government in American life generally. …

Red believes that the American founding was a work of astonishing insight and inspiration and that it represents the best compromise yet struck by the minds of men to enable the possibility of ordered liberty and the individual citizen’s pursuit of happiness and prosperity.

Blue seems to believe increasingly that the whole thing was a sinister power-grab by a cadre of rich white males, designed to preserve and consolidate their immoral supremacy, and that the whole thing is so rotten that it should be torn up by its roots and replaced with something fairer and nobler. [No: something that somehow gives you everything you want free – ed] Blue has already revealed that it wishes to see the Second Amendment, the Senate, the Electoral College, and our nation’s borders abolished—and its grievances hardly end there.

We are fighting, then, not over who shall rule over the existing system, nor about whether the United States should be broken up into two distinct nations, but about whether the United States as currently constituted should continue to exist, or should be wholly replaced with an entirely new regime. … [Italicized emphasis in the original]

A characteristic of revolutions is that they rupture the fabric of history. In periods of high civilization, however, that fabric is strong: healthy societies exist not only in the present, but extend both backward and forward in time. The citizens of a robust and prosperous polity are taught from childhood to have a reverent appreciation for what their ancestors have bequeathed them, and a sense of duty to preserve, cherish, and build upon it for generations yet unborn. …

To rupture that fabric is far easier when it is already weakened—and this is precisely what has happened in America, and in the West more generally, over the past half-century. Insofar as the American past is taught or remembered at all today, it is as a litany of sins, deserving not propagation, but denunciation. …

Civil war is nothing to wish for. But under the name of “revolution,” it can be a powerful attractor, especially in an era of pathological presentism. Have we already crossed the event horizon? …

These are dangerous times. …

He foresees the possibility of civil war. He makes no prediction as to its likely outcome.

Right now we can only hope that those who want to keep the United Sates of America as a free Republic will vote in vast numbers in every state for Donald Trump.

We need to be afraid. And armed.