Tomorrow will mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. I was reading a CNN article entitled “4 ways we’re still fighting the Civil War”. It quotes author David Goldfield as saying: “The erosion of the center in contemporary American politics is the most striking parallel between today and the time just before the Civil War.”

I also saw that California Governor Jerry Brown has apparently been drawing parallels between the divisions in the Civil War period and the present day.

I don’t know; it’s true the country is divided, but I don’t think this is close to the most divided it has been since the Civil War. I’ve been re-reading Rick Perlstein’s excellent book Nixonland and I’d have to say that there seems to be much less politically-motivated violence now than there was in the 1960s.