Rearguard actions and consequences

With the recount of votes in Wisconsin underway and news that Trump's victory margin in Pennsylvania is shrinking as absentee ballots are counted, many Clinton voters are taking heart and hoping the electoral college will agree with the popular vote and install Mrs. Clinton as the 45th president this month.  A word of caution is in order.  Actually several words.  Although the Founders envisioned the electoral college as a corrective to prevent people like Donald Trump from becoming the highest elected official by using their collective wisdom to vote for the best candidate, over time, the purpose has been eclipsed by an unthinking fealty to the candidate who claimed the most votes in their particular state.  This gives states with small populations (think Wyoming) outsize power in presidential elections.  No matter.  this is the system we have validated by over 200 years of practice.  Should Hillary somehow miraculously prevail in enough recounted states to validly claim election I believe we would face a civil war in these United States.  This would make the donnybrook of Bush vs. Gore look like a church picnic.  While I would not shy from support of the winner of the popular vote if the electors validated her win, I think the country would literally be torn apart by the strife which would result.  We live in a divided nation where it is a proven fact nearly half the population is too apathetic to vote, a quarter lives in a fact based pluralistic society and almost as many lives the experience of a patriarchal, sexist, xenophobic order and is willing to go down fighting for it, regardless of legal niceties.   It could get very ugly and I doubt the nation, as we know it, would survive.