Is civil war inevitable?

A metatheme of this blog has been whether or not ideological strife and rigid factionalism in the United States is leading toward open warfare. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote many years ago that as long as war has not broken out it is not inevitable and anyone who feels there is no difference between cold war and hot is either a fool or a knave. In the US there are two concrete examples where severe partisanship and social strife was defused short of open civil war, and one example where intractable division did lead to war. It is far easier to look back on historical facts and interprete causal factors than to identify those factors in the present for predicting future events.
First, in the 1930s there was a divide at least as strong as today. American nationalists and native fascists opposed home-grown socialists and Soviet-influenced communists with a large, angry middle in between. Any instances where violence did occur domestically was chicken-feed compared to what potential there was for open warfare. It could be argued two decisive factors kept the extremes from colliding, labor unions and sympathetic leadership in the federal government. Unions attracted people who wanted to work together for change and mitigated the potential for violence while FDR convinced the populace at large that we could fix problems. These two factors diffused the attraction of violent revolution preached by communists and at the same time diffused the power of reaction to demonize regular people. What was different then was that the financial elite lacked the media to mobilize enough regular folks in defense of their privilege.
Second, the divisions in the 1960s centered around Vietnam and movements for equality, social justice, and minority rights. America was a very different place then, both from today and the Great Depression. Economically, the sixties were practically the best of times. The promise and reality of the decade, and really ever since has been quite unexpected to say the least. As much as Americans romanticize individuality, leaders do have a strong influence on society. Even if prosperity and affluence were a driving force behind the rising expectations of many segments of society, the soaring and possibly utopian rhetoric of JFK played it's part. Violence against leaders, riots, and so on was widespread but still not on the level of a civil war. There was at least the possibility that different groups could still talk to each other. Or maybe it just looks that way because somehow we muddled through. Reaction or backlash largely existed at the grassroots level, disconnected from elites who were still often sympathetic to the New Deal and American ideals of fairness and equality. There simply were not enough fireaters to command a large-scale movement. The free and relatively objective media swayed the middle to the objectives, if not the means of protestors.
The Civil War was another animal entirely. Historians still hotly debate it, as they do the Great Depression and the 1960s. While this subject of comparison deserves a great deal more analysis than I can give it, there are a few aspects of the Civil War that stick out. First the disconnect between rhetoric and reality on both extremes. Second, why average/poor/working class Southern Whites so vehemently defended a system they only tangentially benefitted from, if at all. Third, the role played by a recent war of aggression in subsequent events. The issue, first, last, and all things in between was slavery, no matter how revisionists try to obscure this. The poor whites who actually took up arms to defend their de facto masters in defiance of self-interest or common sense really equate to the teabaggers of today. But, as Niebuhr would be the first to point out, people in a group rarely respond to rationality and pursue interests relevent to that group. Conversely, abolitionists in the North were just as clueless to reality and driven by moral concern without rationally thinking about what comes after slavery. Interests other than justice or even material well-being often trump these collective considerations. The Mexican War was the first time in American history that partisan interests were placed ahead of national interests by a faction holding national office. If you try to analyze the situation objectively (a difficult task indeed) the sectional divide was also between northern elites who wanted "progressive" capitalism, and southern elites committed to entrenched agricultural feudalism. Media was really neither free nor objective, political parties and sectional interests controlled newspapers and used them to express their points of view.
These factors will be explored in subsequent posts. It is morbidly poignant to think a full scale civil war will break out in the anniversary of the first, but events seem to be getting more ominous every day.

WI something dad

I came across this guy's one-man screed machine the other day. It never ceases to amaze. The fact that a guy like this and a guy like me could once have shared the same town and it did not explode. An impressive testament to pluralism. Here is the first line of his "about me" section:
"I'm just a dad and husband who's very worried about the direction this country is going, and decided it was time I got involved."

I can not only sympathize, but agree and identify with this statement. But he goes on to the usual empty slogans of movement conservatism. Redefinition, the malleability of language, and twisting words and ideas for propaganda purposes make communication so incredibly difficult these days. Generalization is a tricky, and sometimes dangerous, business but it is safe to say that most politically involved Americans have given up on it. I have as well for the most part, I try not to engage in dialogue with people I do not know who are obviously conservative. Now, for a guy like the republican dad here and many other Wisconsinites who "stand with walker" they want to engage, but to dominate, not communicate.

His sarcastic, mean-spirited style is reminescent of National Review in the 1950s. Condescending, elitist, and juvenile all at the same time. Maybe I am labeling it wrong, but one thing is for sure, guys that engage in this type of rhetoric have no idea that what they say is incredibly obnoxious. I am sure he is very welcome at family get togethers over the holidays and the most popular guy at the auto shop or factory with his co-workers. That isn't the point though, just that someone clinging so hard to his team can and will shout down anyone who dares disagree. Just one of these clowns shuts down any kind of discussion in any group smaller than a baseball stadium.

Three seemingly random stories from today's roundup

Going through my news feed, these three articles caught my eye. They seem disconnected, but actually hit the three levels of American decline.

First, from MMFA a story about the institution leading the charge. Casting fox news as the de facto leadership arm of the republican party is a change from the more easily understood meme that fox is the gop's propaganda arm. But the shift explains to a great extent the priorities of the "conservative movement" from an organization bent on obtaining power to implement it's will to an organization freed from the responsibility of power for other purposes. A media company profits through the sensationalism that increases audience size and attention, so they have a larger number of minds to sell to advertisers. As one commenter put it, "the jesters have taken over the court." If there is more money to be made as merry pranksters and saboteurs, then just abandon efforts to seriously contest the "election." Especially when so much of the Democratic agenda lines up with the needs of really-existing power.
Next, the power of zealotry. DP? Seriously? Didn't you freelance brownshirts learn your lesson from "teabaggers?" Or does naming your reactionary neofascist organizations after the reality-based community's sexual colloquialisms feed your victom mentality? Internet trolling of progressive news sties is nothing new of course, but this scale of organization is almost jaw-dropping. That a group of zealots could band together to actually affect what we see and are able to easily find is pretty amazing. I was only vaguely aware of how Digg works but always suspected that an outside group could bury stories they didn't like if they could maintain discipline. So this is the second level, the official propaganda and censorship cult leaders at fox are in it to make gobs of cash, while this group exists for the sheer glee of hatred. Beware the extremists willing to carry the water for their masters with no visible compensation.
And finally, the third level. Where power actually lies. This story may be tongue in cheek, it may not even contain any actual news, but it hits on what the agenda really is. And she hits on some pretty relevent ideas. Private banks exist to make profit, not serve the public. So if they can trick you into paying fees and not earning any interest on your deposits, and the ultimate kicker, prevent you from withdrawing your funds, is is such a stretch to think they will not do so?
Such harmony the three levels of American declne exhibit. It is all about cracking open civilization, stirring up anger and zealotry, and making off with the loot by whatever means come easiest to hand. And in the case of netroots stormtroopers, while we can't be sure the evil hand (and money) of koch or mellon-scaife is not behind this crashing of the barricades, on the surface they seem to be censoring and demonizing just for the sheer joy of it and not for material gain. And this one is the most problematic, you can avoid fox news, put your money in a credit union, and shop outside the walmart archipeligo but how do non-movement conservatives build a movement for reality if shadowy, unaccountable forces are censoring the truth?

Ideological Civil War

A colleague forwarded this to me this morning. The caption provided read: "Alright liberals, guessing you're gonna call this freedom of speech. If I see this I will have the freedom to place boot in teeth." And a long string of invective followed in the comment section. The first obvious observation has to be, this is not in the United States. Until we start conquering/annexing African muslim countries and extending the constitutional protections to our colonies the idea that the whole world enjoys freedom of speech is somewhat moot. Americans do not really have freedom of expression either, Congress passes laws all the time restricting what we little people can say or do. Freedom of speech by definition is the unfettered ability to say what others disagree with. Now, the guy posting it and many commenting on it are veterans of our colonial wars, so it is unsuprizing that after mixing with locals who don't like what "we" are doing over there, their hearts are a little hardened. But what the heck does this have to do with Liberals? I guess we didn't cheer loud enough when our Democratic black President assassinated bin laden?

Well, ask a Korean war vet what they think of Koreans. Ask a Vietnam vet what they think of Vietnamese. Dehumanizing epithets are something our soldiers are pretty good at inventing. But again, what does this have to do with American Liberals? What makes a "real american" want to bully and badger fellow Americans into defending this shirt? It is an old trick and something that seems to come naturally to them, but really the manichean duelism that informs it is the hallmark of a small mind. If I like something, then you who disagrees with me must automatically dislike it. If I hate something, then you must automatically defend it. And too many people of whatever stripe fall into the trap in a kneejerk fashion.

Conversely, if I or someone like me says "uh, go to hell you fascist pig this has nothing to do with me" that reaction plays right into the other extreme where the hotheaded bully becomes a helpless victim, terrorized by the all-powerful liberal elite. The whole game is a silly illustration of how hellbent a certain faction of "real americans" are on starting a Civil War based on ideology. I guess Jello Biafra was right when he said the tapestry of factions is weaved throughout the American fabric with no clear place to draw the battle lines. Of course if you started this kind of argument in downtown Madison or some other liberal area, you'd probably get a "get away from me" kind of response. While in the south, they would kill your cat at the very least if you fell into the trap of defending the bloody shirt.

Hypocrisy and incompetence

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/23/the-main-but-not-the-only-reason-to-vote-democratic-the-current-gop-sucks-heres-proof/

I love this quote:
"This country has plenty of money. We’re still the richest single country, by far. But under 32 years of neocon Republican guidance, our government can’t pay its bills, because they operate under the theory that, if you starve the government of money, it can’t spend any. They’ve even gone so far as to refuse to create jobs, which would create more taxpayers, and increase revenues without necessarily raising tax rates. In other words, they don’t want to raise taxes on the rich, but they also won’t create jobs and taxpayers. Yet, they whine about the deficit?
If that’s not basic incompetence, what is?"

This one's pretty good too:
"When Bush Junior was appointed president by the Supreme Court, he immediately enacted the least necessary tax cuts in the history of the republic, and appointed cronies and crooks to fail to oversee the financial system, resulting in immediate return to record deficit spending, even before the economic collapse he caused, by ignoring warnings given to him as early as 2003."

"Unregulated free markets are what keep drug kingpins in business.
Why are we forced to listen to these people? Why are they allowed to have a forum that is at least equal to everyone else, and why doesn’t anyone call them on their rhetoric?"

Vulture capitalism and the gop perfect storm

It is a crazy year when republican candidates even somewhat make the case of what is really killing American society. Of course, primaries are a different animal but usually the gop nominating process does not even get this far before the fanatic right-wing base falls into line behind some would-be mussolini or another. I am still scratching my head over the decision to change the process. Until this year, the republican primary system was winner-take-all so only a few contests were needed before one candidate developed an insurmountable lead. But, maybe for the only time, the delegates a candidate wins are apportioned proportionately. An odd experiment in pluralist democracy from a fantastically anti-democratic organization that usually prizes rigid hierarchy.

It is this change that I would argue is behind the unusually rabid infighting. Especially when each candidate is very flawed and unappealing in various ways to conservatives. To all of us outside the republican party, mitt and newt are simply posterchildren for "the inside." A lot of non-gopers may not quite be able to put a finger on exactly why these very rich and hypocritical men are unsettling. Nor can we count on the Democrats and President Obama to explain it. The opposition party that all-too-often is on the inside or too closely aligned with it will far more likely they go after racism or sexism or gay-bashing/baiting. The social issues that hopelessly divide us are almost comical in comparison to the too-often buried economic issues that can hurt or are hurting just about everyone in America.

That is why it is almost jaw-dropping to see a republican candidate actually let the cat out of the bag. Even if it is a self-centered attempt to tar a single opponent with actual, empirical facts to get the nomination. Newt's documentary "When Mitt Romney Came To Town," however it was made it is "his" baby, is really dangerous to the inside. I guess Newt is at least an example that ego and power, or the pursuit of it, can actually trump the blind obedience to money that usually characterizes the inside.

Here is it is in case you haven't seen it:

Joshua Holland at alternet made a pretty concise summation of how the inside/haves/1%/establishment works in this article. I wish I could add to it, but the best I can do is offer an historical comparison. What leveraged buyout/corporate raiders do, now they are called "private equity firms" is very similar to how the populists understood the economy. There is a famous populist cartoon that shows a cow grazing over the heartland and being milked on the east coast by bankers. It was basically true then, and even more true today. With one exception, gilded age bankers had an interest in keeping the cow alive, sick and skinny, but still able to function. The financial sector still extracts wealth from the heartland, as Holland argues, but today's PE pirates figured out that there is even more profit in fattening up the cow artificially with huge dollups of debt and then slaughtering it,  taking huge fees to butcher the carcass and sell off the choice cuts while leaving huge chunks to simply rot, then moving on to a new cow.

So, I don't know if the vulture is the best anthropomorphic representation for this version of "capitalism" it sure is catchy. Even if the conflation of venture capitalism, which actually has an interest in building a business, with the private equity pirates doesn't line up. What do you expect from an intellectual flyweight like rick perry who actually brought the term up? Anyway, the masters of stupid and easily understood slogans, five second sound bites, and the vicious competition that embodies the "other" American dream of the intentional ignorant have something to bat around a bit for the dumbed-down audience. It might even penetrate the compartmentalized and ideologically shielded minds of republican primary voters/cheerleaders/sports fans. I guy can hope.

Getting closer all the time

As usual, the GH is always the last to know.
The world is a dangerous place, always has been. Any time you have two or more people assembled there is going to be conflict. It is simply a matter of how the conflict is expressed. I had heard of Anonymous before but this is the first video I have seen. The delivery is new, but the message has been around for quite some time. Jello Biafra warned about this very sort of thing going back at least to his spoken word "I blow minds for a living." In fact, if you didn't know that album was from 1991, you might think it just came out. So, history repeats itself.

The relevant question is "why?" Why do people in power hit on this "let's round people up and toss them down a hole in secret forever" schtick so frequently in human history? More relevant for the US is, which state is the natural or traditional condition? Repression of dissidence flares up often in the land of the free, the first nation to actually write down what each citizen's rights are. The Alien and Sedition Acts, suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, Palmer Raids, internment of Japanese-Americans to name a few.

I have stated before that I wrote my thesis on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr. Both of these intellectuals thought and wrote a great deal on these questions. Schlesinger felt that the flareups of repression where aberations, like society getting drunk, doing something stupid, and regretting it in the morning. So the natural state of American society was to be free and respect individual rights and liberties. He used the analogy of drink to explain the ferocity of businessmen's resistance to reform as well. A case of political "delirium tremens" in response to every effort of the people to increase social and economic justice. Normally a crisis triggered the bouts of repression and demoguagery, later, when the crisis passed, corrective measures tended to increase the security of individual rights. I say tends, perhaps not, but to really address the empirical history of each episode would take much more space and research.

Niebuhr, on the other hand, had a more pessimistic interpretation. He argued that it was the natural tendency of any social group in power to repress interests other than their own. In a time of internal crisis, where the social group in power is threatened, it is dispiciable that the elite would respond this way but not really suprizing. What is suprizing is that the traditional defenders of freedom are demoralized, disillusioned, lethargic, and scattered. Enter Anonymous, a secretive organization that may or may not be the necessary countervailing force. Whatever they are, it is not a suprize that they are using the same technologies to fight back against the Children of Darkness. The CoD use television, telecommunications, and so on to surveil and suppress every other group in society.

I still have hope that a stable American society can be restored without vicious repression or coercion. What shape the delirium tremens would take this time is anyone's guess. But I cling to Niebuhr's belief that stability is much more durable when a tolerable justice gives the broad population an investment in maintaining that society. This must be achieved by a reduction in the privilege of the very top.

Or else, what is getting closer is the nightmare scenarios of Robocop, The Running Man, Soylent Green, and all the other movies that scared the bejeezes out of me as a kid. Because honestly, the Anonymous broadcasts are a great aspect of fiction, much less fun in reality.

Omens

I wish I could say I am not a superstitious person, but I do believe sometimes there are signs from a greater power around us. Call it God, nature, the zeitgeist, or whatever you like. Maybe it is a throwback to the ancients who attempted to divine guidance from natural phenomena. Don't get me wrong, probably 99% of events are driven by the conscious actions of people, but there are always things we cannot account for. This is more individual than social, have you ever wondered why good or bad things happen to you or others around you for seemingly arbitrary reasons? Can I get away with saying "fate" sometimes has a hand in the unfolding of history?

The weather lately had me very worried. I'm sure it is just an old wives' tale (forgive the expression) that a very cold winter proceeds Democratic presidential victories and vice versa. But the warm weather seemed like a bad omen. I sputtered something to that effect recently and I wish I hadn't. Now however, there has been snowstorms like crazy and plenty of low temperatures. I am not going to sacrifice a goat or something to look at its entrails but maybe I misinterpreted things.

Maybe the unseasonably mild weather was fate throwing us a bone to collect enough recall signatures before the snow really started. Or maybe Al Gore is really right and it was just a coincidence. Either way, a little hope that the people of Wisconsin have a chance to change their minds and throw this bum walker out of a job goes a long way.