The GOP s War of the Roses | Opinion On 2/1/21 at 5:30 AM EST
As pundits ponder the looming prospect of a Republican Civil War, they instinctively draw dire analogies with the cataclysmic conflict between Union and Confederacy some 160 years ago.
But to gain a more illuminating perspective on the bitter struggle within the GOP, analysts should go back four hundred years further and consider England s violent civil strife between 1455 to 1487, later designated the War of the Roses. In its cloddish pointlessness, its exclusive, self-destructive focus on power and personality to the exclusion of any issues of lasting significance, that medieval bloodbath presaged the take-no-prisoners fight among today s Republicans far more closely than more recent, issues-based struggles like the War Between the States.