"Does anybody ever mention the FBI as being real assistance whatsoever except for marginal cases? No, they've turned into the American Gestapo. They have to be defunded. They say, oh, this is dangerous talk. No, it's not. " We are a threat to the American state."
If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, that's because there's a sizeable group of right-wing Americans who say that's exactly what they believe they're doing.
In both of those past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people. On the other side, there were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake.
During the Revolutionary War the anti-democracy folks were called Tories or Loyalists, because they were loyal to the British king and believed that the best form of government was a kingdom, and that letting average people participate in democratic governance would lead to disaster.
That was solidly a third, perhaps even half, of the people then living in North America: they were willing to fight and die to keep America part of the United Kingdom.
Those who opposed democracy on this continent and wanted to stay part of Great Britain had a lot of history on their side.
For most of the 7,000 years of recorded human history at that point, governments had been run either by kings who seized power through violence, or priestly theocrats who claimed that their authority to rule came from their God. (In most cases, regardless of who ended up on top, there was an unholy alliance between the two.)
The British United Kingdom was just the latest, in 1776, in a long series of kingdoms that ruled every part of Europe; the Greek experiment with democracy was 3000 years old at that time, and the Roman experiment with a republican form of government had failed almost 2000 years earlier.
There were a lot of reasons back then to think that a democratic republic would be a terrible mistake.
The main one was that it hadn't worked in thousands of years, and the ancient Greek and Roman experiments were considered by many "- most, actually "- to have been failed experiments.
People believed so strongly either in the Loyalist necessity of a royal family, or the Founders' hope of a people engaged in self-rule, that families were literally torn apart, brother killing brother, neighbors turning firearms against each other.
By the time of the Civil War, 80 years after the Revolutionary War, there was still a debate about whether democracy was anything more than some kind of liberal, airy-fairy idea that really didn't work out all that well.
But this time, those Americans who took up arms against democracy were not fighting on behalf of a church or a king. They were fighting to support the morbidly rich, the oligarchs of the deep South.
As I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, between 1820 and 1860 the South underwent a radical consolidation of wealth and property.
The invention of the Cotton Gin and its adoption in the early 1820s allowed the few plantations wealthy enough to purchase one to effectively wipe out their smaller competitors and then, after bankrupting them, pick up their land for a song.
As a result, by 1860 virtually all of the most productive land, wealth, and political power of the South was consolidated in the hands of just a few thousand families.
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