The legacy of America’s last Civil War in City Point, Va./Library of Congress
Anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention to the news in this country these days can’t have missed the serious culture war now raging, and if there is someone just emerging from a cave somewhere in the Brooks Range who hasn’t heard about this battle, it is time to pay attention.
Why?
Because there are now in the tubes that connect most Americans to that electronic pipeline known as the internet ominous signs of danger for these un-United States of America.
Were this not worrisome enough, just over half – 50.1 percent – told the researchers they agree that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.”
The country’s last Civil War killed more Americans than any war in which the country engaged before or after, but it was fought for a good and noble causes – to bring to an end the despicable use of slavery and to save the union.
The issues dividing Americans today seem petty by comparison, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t spark that new civil war a majority of Americans seem to think is on the horizon.
No one in the American political realm seems to have paid much attention to these warning signs or to care. The peacemakers appear few and far between, and the warriors many. President Joe Biden just turned up the heat by declaring that his political opponents are “semi-fascists” much to the delight of some in the country’s mainstream media.
Biden’s “abandonment of kumbaya blather around bipartisanship for a blunt assessment of rising fascism in America might become his defining moment,” Bunch wrote beneath the headline.
Indeed it might be a defining moment, but for worse rather than better given there are a lot of totalitarian inclinations showing on both sides of the political aisle in, strangely enough, a country where people are by and large living better than any humanoids in our 300,000-year history on the planet.
And a lot of them appear angry as hell despite this.
The big disconnect
As a simple, objective measure of just how well off our species in the U.S., consider that the Centers for Disease Control reports more than four out of every 10 Americans are now obese in a world where death from starvation or malnutrition was common up until only 100 years ago.
The 1887-89 famine in China killed about 11 million people in a world then home to but a fifth as many people on the planet today, according to Our World in Data, a website maintained by the University of Oxford. Covid-19 has to date killed about half as many globally.
Only a century ago, the Russian famine of 1921-22, driven in part by the policies of the country’s new and totalitarian communist leaders, killed about five million. The two-year tally for Covid-1`9 in that country is one thirteenth of that, according to the Worldometers trackers.
Those Russians again live in a state ruled by a dictator, but more than 40 percent of them might well believe that having a strong leader for Russia is more important than having a democracy. People can rationalize damn near anything and live with it quite comfortably just as easily as they can become swept up in anger for reason good, bad or imaginary.
The cradle went up in flames at the polls after the German left and the German right fought a bitter battle for control of the heart of the country. It was a battle driven by grievances, real and imagined, on both sides.
The conflict that grew through the 1920s caused German democracy to implode in the 1930s even as its economy was recovering from the Great Depression.
Rogoff blames in part the Germany economy, which didn’t recover fast enough from the Great Depression, and the late Oswald Spengler, a German mathematician, philosopher and historian who penned the two-volume Decline of the West in 1918 and 1922.
Spengler argued that, as Rogoff writes, democracy “was a weak and corrupt form of government. (And) capitalism was the opposite of all that was vital among the people, especially since it divided a people into a social class and stoked class-based antagonism.
“Young Adolf Hitler gravitated immediately to Spengler’s pessimistic notions, and Hitler posed a national-socialist-authoritarian answer to the dilemma of civilization’s decline. This response to the issue of Western or German or civilizational or cultural decline became the core appeal of Nazism. On the other side of the political spectrum, communists looked east to the Bolsheviks for a model of how to pull Germany (and the rest of the industrial world) out of the mire.
“Germans on the right become increasingly nationalist, racist, and militant. Germans on the left became increasingly Bolshevized, meaning that they were ready to support a minority, vanguard party in an overthrow of the state. Increasingly, these became the two main ways for Germans to imagine a way out of the cultural, political, and economic morass. Gradually, year by year, the room in the center of the German political landscape got smaller.”
Does anything sound familiar here?
Woke vs MAGA
Today in America we have the woke, heirs to the Bolshevik legacy, trying to “cancel” anyone who disagrees with or even questions their worldview, and the Make America Great Again crowd fanning the flames of a militant nationalism along the largely geographic tribal lines that deeply divide urban and rural America.
There are plenty of grievances to go around on both sides. Some individuals – left, right and center – are treated unfairly in this country every day. On an individual level, injustices happen regularly to people of every race and ethnicity. Life just isn’t fair.
And there might still be pockets of the country where injustices happen at the group level.
But this isn’t the Jew-killing Germany of the Reich years that followed the collapse of the Weimar Republic or even the American South of the 1950s. The country remains a long way from perfect, but it has rid itself of a lot of the worst of the inherent tribalism of the human species or at least it had.
Society seems to be slipping back the other way now. It seems farther from the late civil-rights leader Martin Luther King’s 1`963 dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” and even farther from then Senator, later president, and now former President Barack Obama’s 2004 observation that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America.
These days those Red States and Blue States sometimes look more like warring nations than anything remotely united. And both of them are home to their share of “semi-fascists,” whatever the hell a semi-fascist might be, and their semi-Bolshevist opposition, to continue the Bidenesque stereotyping of the combantants in our culture war.
For those unfamiliar with fascism, which looks a lot like all the other forms of totalitarian government, here is how Webster’s Dictionary originally defined it back near the start of the last century when it was a “thing:” “a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government; – opposed to democracy and liberalism.”
None of which is all that much different from the Bolshevik vision of a “rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined” state theoretically controlled by the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but historically run by a plain, old, ruthless dictator.
One could today define “a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined state” as one ordering its citizens to wear masks and get vaccinated because the state is better at making decisions for them than they are at making decisions for themselves.
And one could likewise define an “authoritarian hierarchical government” as one denying a woman the choice to have removed from her body an organism that could one day become another living, breathing human but is not yet so.
It is more than a little ironic that Americans who believe they should have the right to make decisions as to their personal behavior – as opposed to having the government make those decisions for them – can be opposed to both government-mandated Covid-19 responses and abortion, or vice versa.
But then intellectual consistency is one of the first things to die in a war between tribes.
Tolerance’s death bed
The big problem in this country today is that the tolerance that defined liberalism in its traditional sense for both Republicans and Democrats for decades is dead, and the country’s political stridency echoes that of the fascists and communists of Germany at the start of the 1930s.
“The parties on the left were strong supporters of progressive taxation, government social welfare programs, labor unions, equality and economic opportunity for women. They were less nationalistic, militaristic and antisemitic than the parties on the right. They favored greater government involvement in – and control of -business and industry, and were to varying degrees anti-religious. Still, there were strong differences and major conflicts between the two major leftist parties. The Social Democrats were strong supporters of the Republic and democracy while the Communists were opposed to both, favoring a Russian-style communist dictatorship.
“The parties in the center were the most moderate and the least ideological of the German political parties” until Germany’s culture ware became so intense they were forced to pick one side or the other. They picked wrong and Germany, and then the world, ended up with Adolph Hitler.
America’s two-party system has in modern times been dominated by those Republicans and Democrats “most moderate and least ideological.” There was long the belief that candidates for office had to “move toward the center” in order to get elected.
But there has been a steady shift away from this position over the course of the last two decades with the left favoring ever greater government involvement in everything, the right increasingly rising up in resistance to that idea, and the moderate middle ever shrinking.
In some quarters, this has been defined as a battle between conservatives and liberals, but the liberal wing has been largely replaced by progressives, whose greatest historical accomplishment was to help usher in the 18th amendment ot the U.S. Constitution, the one banning the manufacture, sale and importation of alcoholic beverages.
Wrapped up in their good intentions of saving the country from Demon Rum, they brought in the Prohibition Era.
Historically, she went on to observe, that activities that don’t “harm others, like consensual sexual activity and obscenity, were the province of colonial and local governments. When the union formed, states retained that authority; the Constitution established no overarching national system of criminal or civil law and laid out no moral prescriptions for citizens to follow.
“‘The powers delegated to the proposed Constitution are few and defined,” James Madison emphasized in The Federalist Papers. “[They] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.” With the introduction of the Bill of Rights, the Framers moved still farther away from moralistic legislation by limiting the areas in which the federal government could restrict the actions of the people it governed.”
But the federal government, driven by both right and left, has increasingly crept toward dictating morality and economics to the states.
The Economist, an English publication that has been covering global news for almost 180 years, four years ago described what has happened here as well in parts of Europe as a 25-year shift away from “freedom and open markets….even as China, soon to be the world’s largest economy, shows that dictatorships can thrive.
“Our founders would be astonished at how life today compares with the poverty and the misery of the 1840s. Global life expectancy in the past 175 years has risen from a little under 30 years to over 70. The share of people living below the threshold of extreme poverty has fallen from about 80 percent to 8 percent and the absolute number has halved, even as the total living above it has increased from about 100 million to over 6.5 billion. And literacy rates are up more than fivefold to over 80 percent. Civil rights and the rule of law are incomparably more robust than they were only a few decades ago. In many countries individuals are now free to choose how to live – and with whom.
“This is not all the work of liberals, obviously. But as fascism, communism and autarky failed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal societies have prospered. In one flavour or another, liberal democracy came to dominate the West and from there it started to spread around the world.
“Yet political philosophies cannot live by their past glories: they must also promise a better future. And here liberal democracy faces a looming challenge. Western voters have started to doubt that the system works for them or that it is fair.”
The good old days
In significant part, this shift, at least in the U.S., has been driven by people abandoning the idea of looking forward to that world King once envisioned building in favor of looking back to tally the score on the long, ugly history of American tribalism, and all too often looking back through badly tinted glasses.
There are now people in this country who actually believe the indigenous residents of the North American continent were better off before Christopher Columbus showed up in the Caribbean than their ancestors today are living in the nation that evolved in the wake of the European discovery of Central America.
All that can be said about such a view is that anyone who believes that has never tried living off the land by hunting and fishing with primitive weapons and making fire without matches. Day-to-day survival in even the middle latitudes of North America – forget Alaska – in the 1400, 1500 and 1600s was unbelievably hard.
That the Inuit managed to cling to life around the rim of the Arctic Ocean at the same time is almost unfathomable. It was a cold, hard and short existence. Neurobiologist Stephan Guyenet has calculated life expectancy in Arctic Alaska at 43.7 years in the mid-1800s.
By 2014, it had increased by more than 77 percent to in excess of 77 years, and an infant mortality rate that ranged from 80 to 145 deaths per 1,000 births as late as 1958 has fallen to under seven per 100,000.
But instead of being pleased by how much better the situation has become for everyone under a democratic, capitalist system that the late-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once described as “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried,” many have set off on a “social justice” warpath – some well intended, others not – aimed at tearing it all down and rebuilding something new with no real idea as to what that might be.
The wholly reactionary idea of “defunding the police” would indeed get rid of problems caused by law enforcement, but one has to ask what would happen to the problems policing helps solve. Some communities might actually benefit from more police funding, not less.
Chicago set a record for homicides last year. The 797 dead were 25 more than in 2020, “299 more than in 2019 and the most since 1996. And there were 3,561 shooting incidents in 2021, which is just over 300 more than were recorded in 2020 and a staggering 1,415 more shooting incidents than were recorded in the city in 2019,” the Associated Press reported.
“Other cities have also seen an increase in the number of homicides. But Chicago, as it has in previous years, ended 2021 with more homicides than any other city in the United States, including New York and Los Angeles, both of which had recorded at least 300 fewer homicides than Chicago for the year as of late December….”
It is ironic that both those who want to defund the police in Chicago and those who want more police have the same goal, fewer people dead. But somehow they find it impossible to agree on a program that helps reduce both the number of Chicago residents killed by their fellow citizens – a nation leading 797 last year – and the much, much smaller number shot and killed by police.
Instead they are at culture war, which is sort of where the whole country is today.
Categories: Commentary, News
JFC Craig. Write about something you know about. Being old doesn’t make you an expert on the past or the present. You have Civil War deniers and Holocaust apologists cheering you on in your comments. Kind of a limited audience. You need ideas? I got you. “10mm best mm? Don’t put your foot in its mouth.” or “Half Term Former Governor Loses Election for One Sixth Term Seat” or “New York Post Publishes Racist Hit Piece on Husband of Failed Publisher Alice Rogoff”
And with the speech from obiden proclaiming the maga and anyone else who isn’t in lockstep with this administrations’ agenda is a terrorist threat to our country, WTH. It was their administrations’ like minded people who rioted, destroyed, vandalized, injured, and killed for over two years.
Oh and by the way Mr Clownhead obiden, we are a Representative Republic, not a democracy…..
It was also obidens like minded people who censored everything..
So exactly who are the ones that are a real threat to our freedom and our country again..?
I only found this today 9/2. Lots of good thoughts Craig and you seemed to anticipate Biden’s rant last night. Jeez what triggered that Trump-esque speech to go on about Trumpist threats to democracy? One fascist competing with another? Where does that get us but deeper in the ditch of angry partisanship and tribalism? I don’t want to be as pessimistic as several other commenters here. It is frightening and possibly self-fulfilling to so readily contemplate total collapse and civil war. That seems the lazy way out but I sure don’t know what it will take to restore civility and balance. Probably not more ranting and mud slinging from both sides.
I particularly like your paragraph: [ But instead of being pleased by how much better the situation has become for everyone under a democratic, capitalist system that the late-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once described as “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried,” many have set off on a “social justice” warpath – some well intended, others not – aimed at tearing it all down and rebuilding something new with no real idea as to what that might be.]
For quite a few years I’ve said similar – the folk who feel the boundaries must be forever challenged and torn down with little or no clear goal expressed – what is their ultimate goal or vision for our society?
Your warnings a parallels to Germany are instructive too but I recall reading that Hitler and WW2 were also driven by the terms of surrender from WW1; that were near impossible for Germany to meet. The terms vindictively “rubbed Germany’s nose in it ” served to foster the nationalism and rebellion of Germany.. Note after WW2 the world carefully avoided repeating the mistake and life has been mostly better ever since.
Its interesting you mention the civilizations of pre contact North America. Its too often portrayed as a Shangri-La of love and peace when historical records carefully researched shows it was anything but….. Take the Aztec culture, or history of some of the North American plains tribes. Or most recently the history of Slavery in NW North America recently published by Alaska Landmine. Kum by ya?? Endless raiding and slaughtering of males, abducting women and children, arbitrarily killing a slave so show wealth? Raiding for more sacrifice subjects? There was no racism, tribalism, no “supremist”, no intergenerational trauma from all that? It sounds every bit as brutal as the forever wars of annihilations in the eastern Mediterranean since humans first picked up a stick or rock.
And while we try to make this country more fair to all, can we somehow avoid this rush for vengeance? The impulse is deeply understandable but what will become of it? I haven’t looked very close at it but on the surface, Mandela’s call for truth and reconciliation in South Africa seemed a better track than totally caving to destructive vengeance.
I have to take issue with your characterization of an embryonic human as an “organism that could become” a human living breathing being. It IS a human being. I still have ambivalence over the absolute prohibitions of some states with no provisions for special circumstances. And I don’t condone some pregnancy gestapo investigating every miscarriage etc. Years ago when I first leaned that in some (most?) cases a murderer of a pregnant woman could be charged for 2 murders it got me thinking. How can that be and yet its ok for her to have that baby killed and removed? If a pregnant woman is on her way to an abortion but she and her baby get killed or murdered on the way, should the person responsible be charged for 1 or 2 deaths? How can we pick and choose when the baby is a human and when not? I will err on the side of humanity. The CHOICE in this matter comes before there is potential conception IMO.
One more item comes to mind. I believe we’re now reaping the results of an ever more dumbed down educational system. The emphasis on sports, and a lot of side issues vs “how to think critically”, how to write well, and so on makes me look askance at the claims of greater literacy today. On paper maybe but at very low skill levels maybe; but TRUE literacy ??? I’m not so sure. I include myself in this. I did well in schools but I am not “educated” to the level of many of those of my parents’ and grand parents’ eras.
Overall I really appreciate the thoughts and points in this – a good piece. I hope it gets more folks thinking. I hope it can spur energy, vision and hope to recover, to restore order with a more unified vision on how to make this country better for everybody. With as much liberty as possible. Please keep writing.
Dan , your comment was very informative.
Dan, how exactly is Trump a fascist? You mean lowering gas prices, lower taxes, lower unemployment, stimulating small businesses, and limited government? Not even going to mention those fascist Democrats.. Because if you actually looked up the term younwould see the Obama/Biden Admin.
I hope everybody saw fascist Biden’s Hitler speech with the satanic backdrop? Talk about the “war within”. Disgusting.
Alaska moved to mail-in voting. And at the same time, they dropped signature verification on ballots. How convenient.
These new rule changes will ensure the state becomes the next Oregon or California. Ah, more Democrat utopia. You’re going to love their “Green” fraud. Everything Democrats touch turns to chit.
Republicans just gave the state away. How tragic.
“In the 2020 General Election, voters approved an initiative to establish a Nonpartisan Pick One Primary Election system and a Ranked Choice Voting General Election system. There will be many changes to how we vote and how elections look. As time goes on, this webpage will be updated to include additional educational tools to help prepare you for voting in both new election systems.”
Oh, are you implying voter fraud in 2020? Looks like the Alaskan “red state” electorate had their say back in 2020.
Palin does not like the results, next step blame the process. The voters have spoken, get a life!
“Speaking of freedom without mentioning responsibility sounds absurd to me. The freedoms we take are the responsibilities we assume”. – Antonio Escohotado
Craig, thank you for this post. Sadly, I’m of the opinion that the U.S. has devolved beyond the point where it can be saved from itself. A large segment of our citizens do not have the same set of values that made the U.S. the envy of the world. I’m afraid social media has much to do with this descent as for some reason we seem hard wired to want to battle online with people we do not know and will never meet. And whose opinions we will not change. Also, the 24/7 news cycle, accessible by anyone with a computer or smartphone, allows for lots of mischief when it comes to disseminating a narrative.
Craig, I did the math recently and I figure if I’m lucky, I have about 940 weeks left to live. And, if I am granted that many weeks, I would guess not all of them will be as agreeable health-wise as I’m enjoying at present. So my time is very important to me and I have things I want to accomplish before I go. Nowhere on my list is an item devoting time to trying to change the direction of the U.S. I am a proud American and I think I can best support the ideals of our country by being a decent person and living the values my parents and others instilled in me.
Sorry for the long rant, but you are one of a very few sites I am willing to indulge.
For some reason the unifying leaders who tend towards peace get killed. The leaders who attempt to be ethical apparently get targeted. Jesus, ghandi, MLK,,even Kennedy who had decent intentions and speachs, Reagen was almost done in . Lincoln was done in by a democrat associated socialist. I would say being a great leader is incredibly hazardous and no one really has your back . Our founders said our country would be lost if our citizens didn’t keep an eye on the ethical line. ( similar concept anyway) personally I think the left and the rinos want division so we can be controlled. I think the left would be happy with a huge class of people in poverty where their needs for survival were so great they could be bribed with small hand outs .
Abortion- a hot hot subject that may break the nation. I don’t simpithize with hard liners on either side but the fact remains most abortion occur because a woman and a man made their choice. A responsible human takes responsibility for their actions. Where does that leave the baby human?
This piece by Craig is about as good as it gets! It needs to go into a time capsule and when the S**t really hits the fan, maybe not so many years from now, it should be unearthed and distributed.
Bad things are happening faster than we might comprehend. The mere thought of a civil war is frightening. But it can happen. Look at history. Countries that went through political revolutions seemed to change almost over night. First it’s your firearms. Then your ability to vote. All while the Media paints one side as the problem. Then comes the confiscation of individual’s assets using the ruse of a tax initially. Then your Retirement accounts will be seized and you will get small distributions with the rest of your net worth used to fund those who did nothing to earn it.
When half the country believes it is seriously in danger of losing its liberties and its wealth there is a good chance that there could be a violent uprising.
Craig paints a picture the potential consequences of which are very disturbing but nonetheless could occur.
Thank goodness I am so old and perhaps just a short dementia step behind our President that it will not impact me. But, watch out if you are younger and are not involved because you don’t think it can happen.
The civil war was not fought over slavery IMO, since it was already coming to an end. The main reason the south rose up against the north was over the Federal (central) budget and the taxation that was soon to come. It was essentially fought over money. The southern states did not want to be part of the new “big government” plan that was rising up in Washington. In many ways they saw the failed experiment in bloated budgets and taxing the working class. Slavery was the overlay used by the media to give the heinous war a courageous meaning. The reality was slavery was already starting to get banned internationally and was soon to end in America as well.
“The civil war was not fought over slavery IMO, since it was already coming to an end………”
By 1860, it was all about the hatred developed over the previous half century, and even the economic death of institutional agricultural slavery wasn’t going to cure the unanswered problem of millions of uneducated African slaves freed on this continent.
It was ALL about slavery, complete with all the ‘What Now?’ questions that the nation was facing.
Ditto today. We’ve got millions of young black men killing each other in urban Hells devoid of father figures, and now we’re importing millions of Latino gangsters (also devoid of father figures) from Central America. We can’t even make soldiers out of them like in times past because the military doesn’t want them.
What Now?
The only current answer is to let them break into our homes, steal our guns, and bury them after they kill each other with our guns, because we don’t have enough jail cells to rot them in.
“……an organism that could one day become another living, breathing human but is not yet so……..”
An “organism”. That’s the first time I’ve seen that one. Trust a journalist (or lawyer) to come up with yet another term to use to de-humanize a human fetus. It’s homo sapien, Craig. Not a pachyderm, not feline, not canine, not cetacean. It’s fully human. Living, but yes, not yet breathing. So kill it in the remaining weeks or months of pregnancy before it breathes? How about use human fetuses as bargaining chips with the Left? Maybe we can sacrifice their own fetuses for the security of our political positions? Maybe we can negotiate with them to leave the well documented Second Amendment alone, which is well recorded in black letter constitutional law and repeatedly reviewed by SCOTUS, and deal with criminals as humanity as done for thousands of years if we just let them kill their own babies?
Sure. That’ll work. They’re reasonable.
We are already deep in civil war, Craig; culturally, ideologically, politically, economically, and yes, martially. The street wars, like those during the collapse of the Weimar Republic, have been going on for over two years now. It’s a done deal, Dude. The attempted political recovery (the Trump election and presidency) has run its course, and the open political war that ensued continues today on the mere fear of the Swamp that he isn’t fully gone yet.
The inevitable collapse is on the horizon. TEOTWAWKI. The sooner this monstrosity dies, the sooner we begin rebuilding the next world. May God be with you and yours through the remainder of this journey.
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%205618.pdf
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/germany-nazism-medieval-anti-semitism-plain-sight-180975780/
read hitlers willing executioners
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=130081702981&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjbyYBhCdARIsAArC6LLr8R2f5cvffJL4Mk1HTSTkMGhlq0OiaXxT6_AOE8UZ2gFvSzCFhxcaAiDXEALw_wcB&hvadid=581222629101&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9033982&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=12599861300180041400&hvtargid=kwd-300640889463&hydadcr=22404_10176493&keywords=hitler%27s+willing+executioners&qid=1661951375&s=books&sr=1-1
Watch the rest of Shoah-thnx for watching some.
Anti-semitism in Germany has a long history before 1900. It is comfortable to think the German, Polish, Italy, Chech, French, American…people were duped, but the hatred for the Jews comes from with-in individuals and involves personal choice not simply economic, media or government influences.