The true divide in our ongoing civil war is not geographical but political.  It is between those who covet the power to control others and those who want to be left alone.  Within this context, the geography comes into view: it is a conflict between metropolitan Washington, D.C. and the whole rest of the country.  And it had already been started some years ago during the Obama presidency.

The battles are being fought in the media, the courts, and legislative chambers and occasionally boiling over into the streets.  Agents of the state are becoming increasingly more obvious in their efforts to suppress dissent.  Political crimes have emerged as an ostensible new class of offense...where nothing is stolen and no one is actually harmed, but resistance to authoritarian control threatens the well-being of those who covet power.

2020 election results by county.

How can such a small area dominate so vast a continent?  They have the power, or at least they think so.  When the eleven Confederate states seceded, 70% of the officers of the U.S. Army joined them.  For a while then, the tail managed to wag the dog.  Then the larger picture began to take shape.

It was into today's milieu that emerged one Donald J. Trump as a perceived reckless iconoclast — smashing the idols of authority regardless of the consequences.  After all, apple carts were meant to be upset.  And while the authoritarians have used every weapon in their arsenal, Trump's stature has grown.  Thus, the shoddy tactics being used against him have morphed into clichés, losing much of their effectiveness.  Even fear, the most reliable tool in the box, is no longer getting the job done.

First, we were endlessly harangued about how we're to blame for subtle trends in the weather.  Then a strange virus of possible man-made origin is portrayed as an emergency requiring significantly more authority on the part of obviously fallible officials.  Statistical deception was employed to the point of reductio ad absurdum. 

Add to this the attrition of key members of the media.  Bari Weiss, formerly of the N.Y. Times; Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone; and Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, are three of the more notable defectors away from the Orwellian nightmare of modern journalism.  There are pro-state authoritarians scattered throughout the nation — just as the Confederacy had supporters in the Union, though they were mostly along the border regions.  The difference is that today's statists have typically been trained by a corrupt education establishment.  Over time, some will realize how they've been misled. 

This conflict is hardly contained within the United States.  But socially stratified Europe and Asia were especially more vulnerable to the dogma of Marxist class struggle than the bourgeois paradise we call America.  And thus, Americans are more familiar with freedom and are hence more hostile to tyranny.  The complaint and the alarm are that the forces of authoritarianism have succeeded as much as they have in the last few decades.  Systematic indoctrination in the class rooms accounts for much of this; and from there, it has spilled out through the media.

Ideas and information are the true weapons in this struggle.  This explains why the other side is so hell-bent on manipulating the language.  Yeah, and we're wise to that, too.  They are so superficial that they actually believe that such nonsense as banning gendered pronouns will be taken seriously.