Us Liberal Elites have spent a lot of time and effort speculating on how tragic our future will be if Trumpism is not thoroughly repudiated and discredited. But we should keep in mind that even if it is (thoroughly repudiated and discredited) there will still be a lot of very scared, angry, disappointed, ignorant and violent people left in this country itching for revenge, and ready for destruction and violence if they can’t get it.

The North won the Civil War, too, but the issues that brought it on were never fully resolved, and eventually came back to haunt us. I think that there can be little doubt that much of what divides Americans today can be traced directly back to the mid-nineteenth century–and perhaps much further back than that.

At the risk of over-simplifying, much of the horrible divisions now threatening to tear our country apart are the direct result of the suitability for, and introduction of, plantation agriculture into the Southern English colonies. Too many Crackers were just too damned lazy to pick their own cotton. The small farm, merchant and craftsman culture of the northern colonies may be how we prefer to think of ourselves, but half the nation was a feudal economy dominated by a landholding aristocracy, and fitfully maintained by a tenant and sharecropping class that was promised a piece of the pie but never really got it.

Even if Trumpism dies a natural death, our problems may not be over.