Let's talk about Bleeding Kansas.
In the 1850s, while they were still territories being Incorporated into the United States, it was a hotly debated question whether Kansas and Missouri would be free or slave states. The planter class of the deep south and Tidewater states wanted to expand slavery, as it would reinforce their own base of power. Slavery was explicitly rooted in white supremacy, because this both rationalized the bondage of other human beings and served to maintain the political power of a very small, very well-to-do elite in a place and time with widespread rural poverty.
The different factions that set up shop in these Border States spent the better part of a decade engaging in the sort of bloody partisan ambushes seen within living memory in Syria, Iraq, and the Balkans. While everyone remembers the great big Blue vs. Gray battles of the Civil War, this is where that war really began, years before the slave states marched their uniformed forces on Fort Sumter. The planter class gave tacit approval to the pro-slavery partisans in Kansas and Missouri because their terrorism served to frighten away abolitionists who might vote to remain free and also for the grim reality that a dead abolitionist is one less voice calling for abolition.
There are clear parallels we can draw today between the pro-slavery gangs in the Border States and the spree shooting terrorism of the Trump era. Like the hand-wringing over citizenship and borders, slavery was built on an ideology of white supremacy. Because without that sense of superiority, too many people might recognize how the current economic system benefits only a few at the very top - the planters then, the billionaires now. During the Civil War proper, this ideology collapsed in on itself with the rebel soldiers finding their superior whiteness no match for the superior industry and logistics of the Union Army, especially while their families starved back home due to 1) Confederate inefficiency and 2) an explicit system of superiors and inferiors, where the plantation master in his family were always well-cared for but anyone not born into this de facto aristocracy had to scrape by. Had they not had the satisfaction of being white, and therefore the better and more civilized race, they might too quickly have turned on the very planters whose economic system debased free labor.
However - and this is the big difference between then and now - the abolitionists engaged in politically motivated killing just as enthusiastically as the pro-slavery partisans. Most famously, John Brown engaged in ambushes and outright mass murder before leading his ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry. Despite the pundit class always spinning scare stories, Antifa has not killed a single person. Bleeding Kansas 2.0 is - so far - entirely one-sided. And worst of all, there's no real opposition to this terrorism within the nominal government. Where America of the 1850s had a fractious but dedicated political culture of abolitionists and Know Nothings and Radical Republicans all vying for the soul and future of the country, the modern United States has a few social deomcrats unwanted by their own party on one side and craven careerists making up the other much larger side. And then there's Trump, a more incompetent narcissist than even Jefferson Davis.
