Eugene Robinson’s column, “Trump’s racism makes him corrosive to national fabric,” (Nov. 7), argued that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was wrong to suggest that an inability to compromise led to the start of the Civil War. Then Robinson paradoxically described various previous compromises that actually avoided war.

Nevertheless, Robinson and Kelly are both wrong. Issues and disagreements do not start wars. People do.

Curiously, the people who started that war in 1861 were all Democrats who, when American voters refused to endorse the expansion of slavery demanded by the Democratic Party’s platform in the election of 1860, decided to form their own slave-holding nation. Thus, the Confederacy, for its entire (thankfully) brief life, was the leasehold of the Democratic Party. To quote a source I respect, “There were no Republicans in the Confederate army!”

Sadly, as if foreordained by a dreadful national fate, the final bloody measure of our Civil War would not be poured until the day that the Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was shot by the Democrat, John Wilkes Booth.

Today’s marxist-socialist Democrats seem to recklessly to emulate their slave-holding ancestors, taking this nation to the very edge of chaos as they hysterically topple statues of famous Confederate Democrats. Like Robinson, they shriek that something dishonorable happened, while quietly forgetting that they are the ones who did it!

Lou Palone

Waterford