Chuck Carmichael

I just caught up on some of the recent posts from @DataRepublican, and they’re chilling—not primarily because they outline a violent uprising, but because they reveal a strategy of manufacturing a constitutional crisis in which states declare the federal government illegitimate. What’s alarming is the sheer ignorance and hubris of the people treating this as a workable path. They appear to believe such a rupture can be contained or directed, yet they show little understanding of either American history or the practical consequences of delegitimizing the federal order. The people driving this approach are largely led by academics who have never borne responsibility for real-world outcomes, military officers who couldn’t produce a coherent strategy to win a twenty-year war, and former intelligence officials whose records inspire little confidence. They seem prepared to sacrifice institutional stability—and the young idealists who would be drawn into the resulting chaos—while remaining safely removed from the fallout themselves. What they fail to grasp is that the Constitution is not merely a set of rules that can be voided by state declaration. It is bound to the oaths of those sworn to defend it and to the habits of a population raised on the Bill of Rights. America is not Europe, China, or any other society in which a central authority can be nullified with limited resistance. Attempts to engineer a crisis of legitimacy will not remain a matter of legal posturing. They will collide with people who take their oaths seriously, and the resulting contest over authority is unlikely to stay bloodless. The American Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Roughly 2% of the population died—men, women, and children—in what was, by historical standards, a relatively conventional war fought between uniformed armies. Scaled to today’s population, that figure approaches 7.5 million dead. A modern breakdown in which states and the federal government treat one another as illegitimate would almost certainly be worse: a grinding conflict fought in neighborhoods, towns, and cities, where the line between friend and enemy would be unclear and ordinary life would become impossible. Anyone of consequence would carry a target, and trust would collapse. This is not a call for violence. It is a plea to avoid the conditions that make violence probable. Many of us have seen what war actually does, and we understand the cost that would be imposed on the next generation because some believe their preferred political outcome can be forced by creating a crisis of legitimacy. Trump leaves office in two years. If the goal is to alter the constitutional order, the Framers already provided the mechanism for doing so. Use it. Do not manufacture a crisis that invites states to treat the federal government as illegitimate while others pay the price. As Sherman put it: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”