[shadowgovt]

It was impossible because one side of the national debate got tired of talking and started shooting, sadly.

Once that happened, it really wasn't up to Congress or the President any longer. The capture of Fort Sumter and declaration of succession moved the conversation from "How much slavery can America tolerate" to "this insurgent government has stolen half of the country's territory." The response to that threat was as self-evident as it would have been if that territory had been taken by another existing nation.

[s1artibartfast]

impossible you say. could the side that started shooting done nothing else either?

It is strange to me that you take such a fatalistic approach to history, where nothing else was ever possible.

of course at some point there is no turning back, particularly after the deed is done.

If nothing else is possible, what does that say about the current state and our choices about our future? what will be will be? might as well stay home watching netflix and see what happens?

[gretch]

What is your definition of "fatalistic"?

As an example to illustrate your definition, do you believe that it was possible to find peace with Hitler and Nazi Germany without having to fight WWII in Europe?

I'll express my answer on the American civil war with the framing of your definition of 'fatalistic approach to history'.

[s1artibartfast]

Chances diminish as events get closer. Do you think the holocaust was unavoidable the day Hitler was born? 100 years beforehand?

I'm objecting to the statement that the civil was was inevitable. Full stop. That nothing could be done differently, by anyone, at any time, to avoid it.

[gretch]

I agree that any future expected event is uncertain. For example, I think there’s a small chance a black hole traveling at 0.1c smashes our solar system overnight and the sun never rises again.

To answer the question, I think the civil war was exactly as avoidable as you think world war 2 was. It’s more a question of semantics at this point, given they are unchangable past events.

[shadowgovt]

I mean... The difference between history and the future is you can't change history. There is no other way it happened; "could have happened" is the realm of speculative fiction.

If we want to turn the stories of the past into questions about what we could do differently right now, that's an interesting conversation to me. "But what if the South had just decided not to get into a shooting war with the North?" is fodder for a stack of books on the "New Fiction" table at Barnes and Noble but not much more.

Turning the lens to the present: I think it is worth noting that decades of negotiation, political horse-trading, and compromises had been attempted prior to the breakout of the War. It isn't that talking wasn't tried, it's that one side got tired of having the conversation every single generation (and were perceiving that the zeitgeist were turning against their position). So one useful question is "What are the divisions in this era that mirror the kind of irreconcilable difference that was 'a nation half-slave and half-free?'" One candidate I could suggest is the question of gun control; I suspect it is not, as practiced in the US, a topic where people can agree to disagree, the Constitutional protection (and judicial interpretation of it) distorts the entire conversation, and I think there's real nonzero risk of one side responding to a sea-change in the zeitgeist conversation with violence.

Which side, I do not yet predict. A major ingredient in the slavery debate was existential fear (the belief in the South that a freed black population would form either a power bloc that would destroy its former masters politically or vigilante posses that would do violence to their former masters). It's one of the reasons John Brown's raid was so terrifying to the Southerners because Brown was a white man who committed political violence in the name of ending slavery; they perceived him as a signal that the North was done talking (even though he was not acting as an agent of the government). In modern America? A lot of Americans are terrified of random gun violence. That kind of terror lowers the bar on willingness to commit violence, because the survival drive runs hot. And, similarly, gun owners are terrified that the government could strip their capacity for self-defense from them and they'd then be vulnerable to violence they could not defend themselves from.

If you're looking for a lesson from the past on how to diffuse such a volatile situation... Unfortunately, I don't think the story of the Civil War will give it to you. That's a story of failing to diffuse it.