Conservative political scientist F.H. Buckley wrote a provocative book. The title says it all: American Secession. As he wrote at Fox News:

If you despise most of your fellow Americans, don’t be surprised if they tire of you. If you want to cancel our history and heroes, maybe you’re telling them they need their own country.

If you pretend that your policies trump the constitutional rules of the game, maybe you just want your own country, separate from America. But if that’s not really what you want, perhaps it’s time for you to chill.

Buckley sees clearly that the left is the major villain here. Engorged with all the power it wielded while Obama was in office, along with its total conquest of our media and academia, the left could not accept Trump’s 2016 victory as legitimate. You know, the way the South couldn’t accept the victory of Lincoln in 1860 without a single Southern electoral vote.

The Left Chose Sabotage, Not Secession

But today’s Democrats realized what 1860s Democrats didn’t. Open secession backfires. Especially when most of the private firearms in the country, and sympathies of the military, are with your opponents.

Instead, the left branded itself as the “Resistance,” as if Trump voters were Wehrmacht soldiers who’d marched down Pennsylvania Avenue after a winning invasion. The left elites hunkered down and resolved to sabotage our government and punish GOP voters, to teach them an unforgettable lesson. Vote wrong, and the country will suffer. Bad proles! Bad!

They sent a message, which they’re still sending now, with the extra force of the lockdown:

We’re absolutely ruthless in our grasp at power. We’re willing to lie, hurt the country, slander the innocent as traitors, rapists or racists, and call our opponents murderers for disagreeing with us. You Christians and conservatives won’t go that far. So you will lose. You might as well make things easier on yourself and America, and admit it.

As The Borg used to say on Star Trek:

Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

We’re Coming to Take Your Kids

What else can it mean when Harvard conducts a conference whose agenda is banning homeschooling? When Harvard magazine publishes an article warning that parents are unfit to teach their own children, lest they pass on their bigoted religions? They think we’re unfit parents, and want to pass laws which, if we violate them, would lose us parental custody.

Can we live in the same country as people like that? Can they share one with us?

Fit Parents Don’t Subject Their Kids to the Sex Industry

Because let’s be candid. People who take their kids to Drag Queen Story Hour so sex industry professionals can sexualize them, and plant the seeds of gender dysphoria in their minds … are these fit parents to us?

I don’t think so. I wouldn’t just outlaw Drag Queen Story Hour. If I could win over the voters, I’d declare it child abuse, and grounds for losing custody of children. I’d treat likewise any “gender transition” treatment of children. And the kind of explicit sex education offered at many public schools? That’s child abuse too. The teachers who offer it ought to be placed on the sex offender registry, kept hundreds of feet from children.

The Common Ground: Now No Man’s Land

Is there a truce possible between two halves of the country, when each side thinks the other so morally depraved they’re a threat to innocent kids, even their own? It’s not about having different religions. For 200 years we took our kids to church or not, or to synagogues, and agreed to differ. That’s how a healthy, pluralist society works. It’s about not wanting any form of sharia (Muslim or Catholic or Darwinist) that imposes blind faith in its creed as a precondition for full American citizenship, including parental rights.

But the men who founded our country, and governed it till around 1960, used to agree on basic truths of natural law, knowable by reason. They agreed that a basic, tolerant Christianity with its mores anchored our view of the common good. They agreed that unborn life is sacred, marriage is between one man and one woman, and homosexuality is an unfortunate aberration: at worst a deadly sin, at best a heavy cross. Certainly nothing comparable to a person’s race or religion, which we must respect. They agreed that children’s innocence ought to be protected, and parents’ rights deferred to — except in really extreme cases of physical or sexual abuse.

Great Awakening, Fundamental Transformation, or Civil War

Well, now our rulers don’t believe any of these things. And they think that parenting by our beliefs amounts to abuse in itself. And we think the same way about their beliefs. How will this end peacefully?

Just two ways. They convert us, or we convert them. America cannot continue like this, half-slave, and half-free. Each half thinks the other half is enslaved to wicked madness. One side is right, the other is wrong. There’s no happy middle ground any more, as there wasn’t in 1860.

Either America will fall to the forces of materialism and hedonism, and liquidate the dissenters, so we become a “normal” country as doomed as Belgium… . Or, we will see a Great Awakening of faith, of the kind that brought America together in the 1750s and 60s, and made our independence plausible in the first place. (See Eric Metaxas’ powerful new book Seven More Men to learn how George Whitefield’s preaching helped create the American nation.)

There’s no third option that doesn’t involve something a lot like the Spanish Civil War.

Get praying, folks. Pray like your life depends on it. It does.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.