WILL WE REALLY START SHOOTING ONE ANOTHER OVER POLITICS?

I'm reading The Washington Post Magazine's warnings about a possible second Trump presidency. I think most of what we're told to prepare ourselves for -- the politicization of most agencies of the federal government, the end of the Western alliance -- are, unfortunately, quite likely if Trump wins. But I'm not sure about predictions of a shooting war between left and right.

Maybe this could happen:

The election of Trump would not necessarily cause the kinds of people who stormed the Capitol to stand down, just because their goal of elevating their leader has been achieved four years later. “There’s a scenario by which [their aggression] accelerates because they’ve won and they’re emboldened and they have a president who, with a wink and a nod, encourages them not to allow ‘cheating’ and disloyalty at lower levels of authority,” [Stanford University's Larry] Diamond says. The already commonplace threats and intimidation of public officials, civic volunteers and civil servants — election workers, teachers, health-care workers, librarians — could spread and strengthen, egged on by Trump, driving more from their jobs to be replaced by MAGA loyalists.

But I'm not sure the average MAGA loyalist wants to engage in violence so much as intimidation based on the threat of violence. Many of these people greatly enjoy threatening to kill or sexually assault their enemies, but far fewer actually do it (which doesn't mean it isn't terrorism). January 6 was MAGA violence, but much of the worst right-wing violence in America is at the hands of people like the Buffalo and Charleston shooters, who don't consider even the Trump GOP to be sufficiently racist or anti-Semitic. Many election workers and schoolteachers and librarians will probably be intimidated into retirement, but threats might be enough. Remember, we didn't have an uptick in actual right-wing violence after the Mar-a-Lago search, even though some might have predicted that. Most of MAGA would probably want a Republican government to do the killing and avenging.

And I really don't see this happening:

Activated rage would not be limited to Trump supporters. A narrow or dubious Trump victory would inspire massive, potentially violent protests on the left. “Then the MAGA, violent, January 6th-style extremists would take that as the signal to rise up,” Diamond says.

“This is not going to be something that’s just done by one side; that’s why the risk of political violence is so severe,” [David] Becker [of the David Becker Center for Election Innovation & Research] says....

[Timothy] Snyder [of Yale University] ... elaborates on what could ensue: “I think there’s a very important miscalculation going on, on the right, which is that ‘if anyone makes a ruckus, it’s going to be us,’” he says. “Folks on the right think that chaos is a button that they push. ... Another assumption that the right makes which is erroneous is that they’re the only ones who have guns.... They may be carrying more weapons than the other side, but there are so many weapons in the United States, and there are plenty of people who are not on the right who have weapons, and there could be many more very quickly.”

But politicized violence on the left is usually absurd and pointless. Occasionally there are riots, which tend to targeted at commercial buildings, not political targets. Anarchists in black masks sometimes smash and burn things, but again, the property damage rarely has much political impact. (Even burning cop cars is an exercise in futility -- police forces inevitably have bloated budgets and can acquire plenty more cars.) Liberals, generally speaking, don't like violence and wouldn't expect it to do us much good in any case. One guy threatened a Supreme Court justice (before turning himself in) around the time of the Dobbs decision, and maybe there was some vandalism, but the rest of us are just crossing our fingers and hoping we can win the House and two additional Senate seats. And if not, we'll just sigh, because we're used to not getting our way from the political system.

I just don't think Americans will fight even a guerrilla-style civil war. I don't see liberals fighting at all -- it's not our style. The other side is likely to let the GOP do the fighting for them -- and if Trump is sending troops into Portland and San Francisco to round up Antifa members and homeless people, MAGA might be perfectly content to stand down.