Are Democrats Slouching Towards Fort Sumter?

In 1860 Democrats asserted that their states could nullify Federal law, and then orchestrated violence to try to make that stick. Today's Democrats are running the same playbook.

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NOTE: This is not a scare story or clickbait. This is the reality on the ground: Democrats are running the same playbook in Minnesota (and last year in Los Angeles, and throughout the “summer of love” in 2020) that they ran in 1860. The Constitutional and legal arguments are identical. The only difference is this: in 1860, Democrats sought to carve out their own one-party nation in the South. Today, they hope to provoke the overreaction by Federal law enforcement that they calculate as necessary (a) at least to win back Congress, or (b) to bring about actual revolution.

Either way, where once they sought one-party rule in a section of the country, now they want it all.

And that, my friends, is what they mean by “Our Democracy”. — RDM

by Victor Davis Hanson
February 10, 2026

In the months before the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, there were lots of sharp divisions in the North about the proper reaction to t…