https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-26/glenn-reynolds-civil-war-has-already-begun-america
What Comes After A Yard Sale?
by Capitalist Exploits - Mar 16, 2019 8:03 am
Elon Musk's got a few questions to answer
Glenn Reynolds: "Civil War Has Already Begun In America"
by Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/26/2018 - 10:40
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Authored by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, op-ed via USA Today,
Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen experiences at restaurants suggest a 'soft' civil war is well underway. It will get worse unless we learn to stop hating each other.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty Images)
The other day, author Tom Ricks asked whether we’re heading toward a civil war. "I don’t believe we’re to Kansas of the 1850s yet. But we seem to be lurching ... in that direction,” he wrote.
Ricks was commenting on “What Democratic rage would look like,” a Bloomberg opinion column that quotes political scientist Thomas Schaller as saying, "I think we're at the beginning of a soft civil war. ... I don't know if the country gets out of it whole."
That sounds pretty serious. The column by Francis Wilkinson presents a catalog of things Democrats are mad about — from the existence of the electoral college to Trump’s “propaganda apparatus” — and predicts that if Democrats lose the midterm elections, there will be hell to pay. (And Republicans, you know, could make a similar list of their own complaints.)
Well, actually this sort of thing seems to be well underway. Hollywood has basically turned its products, and its award shows, into showcases for "the resistance." Americans are already sorting themselves into communities that are predominantly red or blue. And in heavily blue Washington, D.C., Trump staffers find that a lot of people don’t want to date them because of their politics.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was even kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, because the owner and employees disliked her politics. This seems like a small thing, but it would have been largely unthinkable a generation ago.
And, in a somewhat less “soft” manifestation, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was bullied out of a restaurant by an angry anti-Trump mob, and a similar mob also showed up outside of her home.
Will it get worse? Probably. To have a civil war, soft or otherwise, takes two sides. But as pseudonymous tweeter Thomas H. Crown notes, it’s childishly easy in these days to identify people in mobs, and then to dispatch similar mobs to their homes and workplaces. Eventually, he notes, it becomes “protesters all the way down, and if we haven't yet figured out that can lead to political violence, we're dumb.”
Apparently, some of us are dumb or else want violence. As Crown warns, “We carefully erected civil peace to avoid this sort of devolution-to-a-mob. It is a great civilizational achievement and it is intensely fragile.” Yes, it is indeed fragile, and many people will miss it when it’s entirely gone.
Political contempt is the problem
Marriage counselors say that when a couple view one another with contempt, it’s a top indicator that the relationship is likely to fail. Americans, who used to know how to disagree with one another without being mutually contemptuous, seem to be forgetting this. And the news media, which promote shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making the problem worse.
What would make things better? It would be nice if people felt social ties that transcend politics. Americans’ lives used to involve a lot more intermediating institutions — churches, fraternal organizations, neighborhoods — that crossed political lines. Those have shrunk and decayed, and in fact, for many people politics seems to have become a substitute for religion or fraternal organizations. If you find your identity in your politics, you’re not going to identify with people who don’t share them.
The rules of bourgeois civility also helped keep things in check, but of course those rules have been shredded for years. We may come to miss them.
America had one disastrous civil war, and those who fought it did a surprisingly good job of coming together afterward, realizing how awful it was to have a political divide that set brother against brother. Let us hope that we will not have to learn that lesson again in a similar fashion.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-walker-second-civil-war-20170820-story.html
Are we headed for a second civil war?
By Jesse Walker
Aug 20, 2017 | 4:00 AM
Counter-protesters tear a Confederate flag during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. on Aug. 12. (Shaban Athuman / Associated Press)
A cliché is haunting America — the cliché of a second civil war.
"America is currently fighting its second civil war," conservative columnist Dennis Prager declared in January. "Is a Second Civil War in the Making?" the left-wing website Alternet asked a few months later. In March, Foreign Policy polled various national security figures on the likelihood of a new civil war; the panel put the chances at about 30%. Now the New Yorker has posed the same question to several Civil War historians, who replied with ominous comments such as, "It did not happen with Bush v. Gore in 2000, but perhaps we were close. It is not inconceivable that it could happen now."
Not inconceivable? That's a low bar. It's certainly possible to imagine America returning to the violence of the 1960s and '70s, and beneath the overwrought language, that's what some — though not all — of these civil war prophets seem to have in mind. But a near-future war with two clear sides and Gettysburg-sized casualty counts is about as likely as a war with the moon.
These "new civil war" stories frequently take a bait-and-switch approach. They invoke the violence at demonstrations like the rally in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, where a man reportedly sympathetic to Nazism drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman. In the same breath, they discuss the broad divisions separating "red" America from "blue" America. If you flip quickly between small violent clashes and big political disagreements, those big disagreements will look bloodier.
The two purportedly warring sides don’t command as much loyalty as those red/blue maps imply.
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But that's an optical illusion. The polarization between alt-right fascists and antifa leftists is not the same as the polarization between Republicans and Democrats. It isn't even the same, though there is more overlap, as the polarization between the people at a Trump rally and the protesters outside. (For all the much-publicized moments of violence in last year's presidential campaign, the vast majority of both the pro- and anti-Trump crowds were peaceful.)
The division between ordinary Republicans and Democrats has itself been overstated. Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina has argued compellingly that the rise in red/blue polarization is mostly limited to the political class: politicians, activists, donors and the like. In those cases, he wrote in a paper published last year by the Hoover Institution, surveys and other data "capture our intuitive understanding of the concept of polarization: the middle loses to the extremes." But the political class is pretty small — about 15% of the country, Fiorina estimates.
Outside that world, people tend to hold a patchwork of beliefs that don't always fit easily into categories like "conservative" and "liberal." It is not at all unusual for public opinion to simultaneously shift leftward on one issue (say, health insurance) and rightward on another (guns). Those red/blue maps may seem to show a nation divided against itself, but by using just two colors, they obscure an enormous variety of opinion.
And while the country is filled with reliable Republican and Democratic voters, much of that reliability reflects what political scientists call "negative partisanship." Put simply, that means their votes are driven less by love for one party than by fear and hatred of the other one. In the last election, a large share of Donald Trump's support came from people who did not like him but found the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton more terrifying; much of Clinton's support came from people whose position was the exact opposite.
The atmosphere that produces negative partisanship can fuel a paranoid loathing of the other party's members. In its most concentrated form, it can drive people to aggressive violence. This is the sort of ill feeling that pundits invoke when they talk about a new civil war.
But that atmosphere also means that the two purportedly warring sides don't command as much loyalty as those red/blue maps imply. Think back to last year's election again. Both of the big parties were shaken by insurgent candidates, and one was unable to block the insurgent from winning. With both major parties picking their least popular nominees in recent memory, third-party and independent candidates had their strongest showings since Ross Perot's campaigns. And this time, unlike in Perot's day, the third-party vote wasn't dominated by one popular personality.
For only the fourth time since 1916, two alternative candidates — Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party — earned more than 1% of the presidential vote nationally. Yet another candidate, independent Evan McMullin, captured 20% of the ballots in Utah. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wasn't even running, still got enough write-ins to claim nearly 6% in Vermont. Even in the electoral college, seven voters couldn't bring themselves to back their parties' nominees and instead cast write-ins. And as usual, millions of people stayed home. American politics are structured in a way that naturally tends toward two-party rule, but many Americans are clearly chafing at those constraints.
That's not a nation of would-be warriors. It's a nation of would-be deserters. What if they started a second civil war and nobody came?
Jesse Walker is books editor of Reason and author of "The United States of Paranoia."
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https://www.marketwatch.com/story/w...icas-disunion-turns-into-civil-war-2018-11-07
Opinion: What are the chances that America’s disunion turns into Civil War?
Published: Nov 7, 2018 10:19 a.m. ET
Strong rhetoric and violence on both sides of the political spectrum are reaching a fever pitch
By
IanMorris
Getty Images
Is the United States on the brink of a new civil war?
According to Newsweek magazine’s polling, a third of all Americans think such a conflict could break out within the next five years, with 10% thinking it “very likely to happen.” Plenty of experts agree. Back in March, State Department official Keith Mines told Foreign Policy magazine: “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” He rated the odds of a second American Civil War breaking out within the next 10-15 years at 60%.
October’s awful events — pipe bombs sent to leading Democratic politicians and supporters, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh — have only amplified these fears. “We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860,” my Stanford University colleague Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in the National Review.
The historian Niall Ferguson, another Stanford colleague, suggested in The Sunday Times of London that if someone were to design a “Civil War Clock” comparable to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” the designer would probably now be announcing that it is “two minutes to Fort Sumter.”
Ferguson himself is more upbeat, thinking that “the time on the civil war Doomsday Clock looks more like 11.08 than 11.58.” It seems to me, though, that all these speculations are deeply misleading — so much so, in fact, that the main thing they illustrate is how not to use the past to understand the present.
How a Divided Congress Could Defy Gridlock
Similarities, differences and broad patterns
There are certainly some striking similarities between the American political scene in the late 2010s and that of the late 1850s. Both periods saw extreme polarization over issues of intense economic and emotional importance. At both times, the country divided geographically, with more urban and educated regions leaning one way and more rural and less educated regions the other. In both periods, highly partisan media inflamed passions, sometimes brazenly peddling “fake news”; and at both stages, the country was recovering from a severe financial crisis.
It is all very alarming — but that does not put us minutes away from Fort Sumter. In the nearly four years that I have been writing columns for Stratfor, I have repeatedly drawn attention to a distinction that logicians like to make between “formal” and “relational” analogies. A formal analogy involves finding similarities between a case about which we know a lot (such as what happened in the United States at the end of the 1850s) and one about which we know less (such as what is just beginning to happen in the United States at the end of the 2010s), and extrapolating from them to variables that cannot be observed in the less well-known case — concluding, here, that if polarization, sectionalism, financial problems and political violence produced civil war in the 1850s, they will have the same result in the 2010s.
The problem with formal analogies is, of course, that no two cases are identical. The modern rage over globalization and its discontents does not come close to the moral intensity of the 19th-century arguments over slavery, while the consequences of the 1857 financial meltdown were nowhere near those of the 2008 collapse.
Even more striking, the forms of political violence in the two periods are very different. The 1850s experienced nothing like last month’s pipe bombs, the 2017 shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and three others or the 2011 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others; and the 2010s have seen nothing like U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks’ near-fatal 1856 attack on Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate, let alone the “Bleeding Kansas” insurrection of 1855-56 or John Brown’s raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
The devil is in the details, which means that differences are just as important as similarities when we try to learn from the past. But how do we weigh up the pros and cons of comparisons? This is where the second kind of analogy comes in. Rather than cherry-picking convenient similarities and either ignoring or arguing away inconvenient differences, relational analogies begin from broad patterns in multiple well-known cases and proceed by understanding how a less well-known case fits into the larger structure. So, rather than wringing our hands over how much 2018 resembles 1860, we should be looking at how civil wars began in a wide range of different contexts, and then asking how well the late 2010s fit into that pattern.
Sufficient and necessary causes
The most obvious point is that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package is not just shared by 1850s and 2010s America. It was also common in many other eras that ended in civil war. The English Civil War of 1642-51, for instance, was preceded by decades of comparable disturbances. The population split into “court” and “country” factions (nowadays more familiar as “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads”). Each had its own geographical base and religious affiliation, with High Church Royalists and Puritan Roundheads literally ready to mutilate and burn each other over their differences.
Distrust of institutions was even worse than in 2010s America: Royalists accused Parliamentarians of blasphemy and corruption, while Parliamentarians replied that Royalist corruption was even worse, and was magnified by the royal court’s sexual deviance and willingness to sell the country to foreigners. Throughout the 1630s, financial crises paralyzed government and political violence mounted. Pro-Parliament mobs murdered bishops and besieged royal favorites in their mansions, and, in the 17th-century equivalent of sending anthrax spores through the mail, a leading Parliamentarian received a package containing a rag soaked in pus from the sores of a plague victim. He suffered no ill effects — then as now, biological terrorism was difficult to do well — but within a year, the two sides would fight their first pitched battle.
The Roman Republic provides another classic case. In the 50s B.C., the political elite was deeply divided between what Romans called populares — men such as Julius Caesar, who presented themselves as champions of the masses — and optimates such as Pompey the Great, who claimed to stand for virtue, tradition and the nation as a whole. Webs of patronage and debt bound much of the population to one faction or the other. Escalating financial crises ruined cities and regions, and entire provinces lined up behind strongmen who claimed to be able to save them — Gaul with Caesar, Italy with Pompey. Politicians fortified their homes against mob violence, street gangs regularly stopped elections from being held and assassination became almost commonplace. The civil wars that began in 49 B.C. would leave millions dead.
However, although England and Rome provide alarming formal analogies, things get more complicated as soon as we start looking for relational analogies. While the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package regularly leads to civil war, it does not always do so. In Rome, for instance, the package was in some ways even more prominent in the 130s B.C. than in Julius Caesar’s day. Tiberius Gracchus, usually seen as the first popularis politician, tried to cancel the debts of poor farmers and redistribute elite properties to them. A constitutional crisis ensued, splitting the ruling class. To conservatives, Gracchus seemed to be rallying the impoverished peasants of Etruria against Roman urban interests to make himself king. In political violence going far beyond Brooks’ assault on Sumner, a meeting of the Roman Senate in 133 B.C. ended with conservatives breaking up the wooden benches on which they sat and using the pieces to beat Gracchus and 300 of his followers to death. Twelve years later, his brother Gaius also died in political violence over much the same issues. Yet civil war did not erupt in either case.
Similarly, following Henry VIII’s break with the Roman church and dissolution of the Catholic monasteries in the 1530s, England experienced just as much polarization, regionalism, financial crisis and political violence as it would in the 1630s. However, it did not tip into civil war, although it came close. The United States was arguably almost as divided and haunted by political violence in the 1960s as in the 1850s, yet it too escaped civil war. We can only conclude that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was not a sufficient cause for civil war in Rome, England or the United States.
Nor was it a necessary cause. In Rome and England at least, civil wars broke out in the absence of polarization, regionalism or financial crisis (although political violence is, by definition, always part of civil war). In A.D. 69, which became known as “The Year of the Four Emperors,” multiple civil wars convulsed Rome, but they were driven almost entirely by generals’ ambitions to seize the throne. Similarly, between 1135 and 1153, England was torn apart by such severe civil wars that the period came to be called “The Anarchy.” The violence was so extreme, one chronicler recorded, that “Men said openly that Christ and his saints slept”; yet the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was largely absent in the 1130s. A royal succession crisis and fragile state institutions were all it took.
The polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package that 2010s America shares with 1850s America can be present without leading to civil war, and civil wars can break out without the package being present. We can only conclude that these forces are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for civil war. The dark prophecies of a second Civil War within the coming decade might well be nothing more than bad scholarship.
It’s the Army, stupid
So, the obvious questions: Why do the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package and civil war sometimes go together and sometimes not, and will they go together in America’s short-term future?
Fortunately, the answer to the first question was worked out long ago, by the Roman historian Tacitus. Looking back on the Year of the Four Emperors some 50 years after the event, he recognized that “Now was divulged the secret of the empire — that emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome.” What he meant by this was that although the empire’s political institutions were all concentrated in the city of Rome, if the armies out in the provinces decided to intervene in the political process, they always had the final say. Rome lurched into civil war in 49 B.C. because Caesar and Pompey each had armies to back their political ambitions. It did so again in A.D. 69 because no fewer than four rivals found themselves in this position. It did not lurch into civil war in 133 B.C., though, because its mighty armies remained aloof from politics.
England stumbled into civil war in 1642 because it had no standing army at all. When relations between the Royalists and Parliamentarians broke down, each could safely set about raising its own armed forces with no fear that Leviathan would intervene and stop them. This was Thomas Hobbes’ central point in his 1651 masterpiece Leviathan; only a powerful government with terrifying armed force can scare people straight and deter them from using violence to pursue their own ends. Things had been even worse in 1135, because in addition to there being no strong central army, dozens of barons had their own private armies, which they gleefully unleashed on rivals. In the 1530s, by contrast, despite the mass uprising in defense of Catholicism known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the barons largely remained loyal to Henry VIII and civil war was avoided.
When relations between Northern and Southern states broke down in 1861, the United States had more in common militarily with England in 1642 than with any of the other cases discussed here. It did have a professional army, but it contained just 16,367 men, and 179 of its 197 companies were stationed west of the Mississippi, so far from the initial areas of fighting as to render them irrelevant. In any case, one in five of the U.S. Army’s officers promptly resigned their commissions to join the Confederate states and thousands of noncommissioned men simply deserted and followed them. The government in Washington effectively had no army to enforce its will, and both sides — like King Charles I and the English Parliament in 1642 — had to set about raising forces almost from scratch.
Nothing could be less like the United States’ position in 2018. It has the most powerful and professional armed forces the world has ever seen, and there is absolutely no doubt about their loyalty to the legitimate government or commitment to the principle of civilian command. American soldiers, sailors and airmen do have political opinions, but they currently can be relied on to put their duty first. The United States therefore has far more in common with Rome in 133 B.C. than with any of the other cases. Even if U.S. senators start killing each other with chair legs, the armed forces will not take sides, other than to implement orders — so long as the orders are legitimate and legal — from their elected commander-in-chief.
When we look at the recent civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, or at places such as Egypt where civil war has been averted, nothing matters so much as the stance and strength of the armed forces. We have to conclude that the American Civil War Doomsday Clock does not stand at two, or even 52, minutes to midnight. The very idea is ridiculous. So long as the armed forces remain true to their highest traditions, it will not matter how angry the American people get or how badly their politicians behave. There will be no second Civil War.
Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist. He is currently Stanford University’s Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and serves on the faculty of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has published 12 books and has directed excavations in Greece and Italy.
This article was published with the permission of Stratfor.
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New American Civil War? Some people think it’s already begun
Published time: 26 Jun, 2018 17:13 Edited time: 12 Jul, 2018 09:12
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© Jonathan Bachman © Reuters
Well, some people think the seeds of a new Civil War have already been sown — and in a recent article, University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds argued in a USA Today column that this new war is indeed “well underway.”
Reynolds was echoing similar comments from political scientist Thomas Schaller who wrote in a recent Bloomberg column that America is “at the beginning of a soft civil war,” and author Tom Ricks who agreed that the country seems to be “lurching” in that direction.
Much of the recent disquiet has been spurred on by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies and the decision to separate children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, but things have been bubbling up since Trump took office 18 months ago.
1. ‘God is on our side!’
© Mike Segar © Reuters
Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) caused a huge stir last week when she encouraged critics of the White House’s immigration policies to go out and harass members of the Trump administration in public. Waters made an impassioned call for citizens to ensure there would be “no sleep, no peace” for White House officials.
"If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere," she said.
But her comments were so extreme and incendiary that it prompted a former secret service agent to call them “dangerous” and warned they “go beyond breaking the norms” of civil discourse and criticized her for “endorsing mob-rule to satisfy a political goal.”
Not long after Waters’ comments, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia because she works for the Trump administration.
READ MORE: God is on our side! Maxine Waters calls on restaurants, gas stations to boo Trump admin
2. ‘Surround their homes and schools in protest!’
Celebrities are getting in on the action, too, encouraging Americans to take to the streets in the millions to protest the Trump administration.
Last week, comments by actor Peter Fonda put the secret service on alert when he suggested that Trump’s 12-year-old son Barron should be taken from his mother Melania and put “in a cage with pedophiles” and that citizens should “surround the schools” of administration officials’ children in response to the child-separation policy.
Somewhat less dramatically, other Hollywood figures have called for protests and change. Actor John Cusack accused the Trump administration of “fascism” and “torturing” children — while musician Serj Tankian wrote on Instagram that the US is in a state of “utter regression” and that it is time for a “peaceful revolution.”
3. Confederate monuments controversy
© Bryan Woolston © Reuters
The fierce debate over the removal of confederate monuments and symbols across the US epitomizes the current political and social divide and the competing interpretations of American history, with one side believing the monuments revere figures who fought to maintain slavery while the other side believes they honor great patriots.
When white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black Americans attending a prayer service in Virginia in 2015, it prompted a movement to have Confederate monuments removed from public spaces across the country. More than 100 publicly-supported monuments and symbols have been removed since 2015 — but not without controversy and counter-protests. While monuments are being removed across the US, other groups are pushing for new ones to be erected.
Last year a ‘Unite the Right’ rally called in protest at the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia turned violent when a protester drove a car through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing activist Heather Heyer.
4. Media wars, polarization of opinion
All of this social discord is playing out, magnified, on Americans’ TV screens in a way that appears to be exacerbating the problem. Eager to up their ratings, news networks invite the most polarizing of guests for daily screaming matches to be beamed into people’s homes. Far from the days of simply favoring one news channel over another, now if Americans don’t like how something is reported, it instantly becomes “fake news” or “propaganda.”
In his article, Reynolds wrote that news media which “promote shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making the problem worse” and reminisced about a time when Americans could disagree with each other without hating each other.
5. Stratification of society
© Orlando Ramirez - USA TODAY Sports © Reuters
While all this is being played out on TV screens and social media, those at the fringes of society are feeling the effects of a sick system perhaps more than anyone. The socio-economic stratification of American society appears more obvious than it has at any time in recent years.
Inequality and rampant police violence against African-Americans prompted the NFL kneeling protests, which turned into a nationwide controversy between Americans who are proud of their flag and national anthem and all they stand for — and those who believe true freedom and justice have not yet come to America. A devastating opioid crisis, one of the highest child poverty rates in the world, and a strict adherence to policies which make the poor poorer and the rich richer, have all helped take anger in America from a simmer to a boil.
Reynolds wrote that part of the problem now is that Americans don’t feel social ties which transcend politics. It’s all us vs. them — and nothing in between. He argues that churches, fraternal organizations and neighborhoods used to cross political lines, but that this America has “shrunk and decayed” and people are increasingly finding their identity only in politics.
READ MORE: Trump says NFL players who don't stand during national anthem ‘maybe shouldn’t be in the country’
Marriage counselors, Reynolds explains, say that a relationship is doomed to fail when the couple begin to view each other with contempt — and in America today, there seems to be nothing but feelings of contempt felt on both sides of the political spectrum.
What Comes After A Yard Sale?
by Capitalist Exploits - Mar 16, 2019 8:03 am
Elon Musk's got a few questions to answer
Glenn Reynolds: "Civil War Has Already Begun In America"
by Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/26/2018 - 10:40
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Authored by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, op-ed via USA Today,
Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen experiences at restaurants suggest a 'soft' civil war is well underway. It will get worse unless we learn to stop hating each other.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty Images)
The other day, author Tom Ricks asked whether we’re heading toward a civil war. "I don’t believe we’re to Kansas of the 1850s yet. But we seem to be lurching ... in that direction,” he wrote.
Ricks was commenting on “What Democratic rage would look like,” a Bloomberg opinion column that quotes political scientist Thomas Schaller as saying, "I think we're at the beginning of a soft civil war. ... I don't know if the country gets out of it whole."
That sounds pretty serious. The column by Francis Wilkinson presents a catalog of things Democrats are mad about — from the existence of the electoral college to Trump’s “propaganda apparatus” — and predicts that if Democrats lose the midterm elections, there will be hell to pay. (And Republicans, you know, could make a similar list of their own complaints.)
“I don't know exactly what that would look like," Wilkinson writes. "But liberals have a great deal of cultural, academic and economic heft, stretching from Hollywood to Harvard. Just this week, some Hollywood powerhouses flirted with leveraging their cloutagainst the Trumpist Fox News. There are endless variations on such a power play. If Democrats opt to use their power more aggressively — breaking rules - Schaller's soft civil war hardly seems unlikely.”
The civil war is already startingWell, actually this sort of thing seems to be well underway. Hollywood has basically turned its products, and its award shows, into showcases for "the resistance." Americans are already sorting themselves into communities that are predominantly red or blue. And in heavily blue Washington, D.C., Trump staffers find that a lot of people don’t want to date them because of their politics.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was even kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, because the owner and employees disliked her politics. This seems like a small thing, but it would have been largely unthinkable a generation ago.
And, in a somewhat less “soft” manifestation, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was bullied out of a restaurant by an angry anti-Trump mob, and a similar mob also showed up outside of her home.
Will it get worse? Probably. To have a civil war, soft or otherwise, takes two sides. But as pseudonymous tweeter Thomas H. Crown notes, it’s childishly easy in these days to identify people in mobs, and then to dispatch similar mobs to their homes and workplaces. Eventually, he notes, it becomes “protesters all the way down, and if we haven't yet figured out that can lead to political violence, we're dumb.”
Apparently, some of us are dumb or else want violence. As Crown warns, “We carefully erected civil peace to avoid this sort of devolution-to-a-mob. It is a great civilizational achievement and it is intensely fragile.” Yes, it is indeed fragile, and many people will miss it when it’s entirely gone.
Political contempt is the problem
Marriage counselors say that when a couple view one another with contempt, it’s a top indicator that the relationship is likely to fail. Americans, who used to know how to disagree with one another without being mutually contemptuous, seem to be forgetting this. And the news media, which promote shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making the problem worse.
What would make things better? It would be nice if people felt social ties that transcend politics. Americans’ lives used to involve a lot more intermediating institutions — churches, fraternal organizations, neighborhoods — that crossed political lines. Those have shrunk and decayed, and in fact, for many people politics seems to have become a substitute for religion or fraternal organizations. If you find your identity in your politics, you’re not going to identify with people who don’t share them.
The rules of bourgeois civility also helped keep things in check, but of course those rules have been shredded for years. We may come to miss them.
America had one disastrous civil war, and those who fought it did a surprisingly good job of coming together afterward, realizing how awful it was to have a political divide that set brother against brother. Let us hope that we will not have to learn that lesson again in a similar fashion.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-walker-second-civil-war-20170820-story.html
Are we headed for a second civil war?
By Jesse Walker
Aug 20, 2017 | 4:00 AM
Counter-protesters tear a Confederate flag during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. on Aug. 12. (Shaban Athuman / Associated Press)
A cliché is haunting America — the cliché of a second civil war.
"America is currently fighting its second civil war," conservative columnist Dennis Prager declared in January. "Is a Second Civil War in the Making?" the left-wing website Alternet asked a few months later. In March, Foreign Policy polled various national security figures on the likelihood of a new civil war; the panel put the chances at about 30%. Now the New Yorker has posed the same question to several Civil War historians, who replied with ominous comments such as, "It did not happen with Bush v. Gore in 2000, but perhaps we were close. It is not inconceivable that it could happen now."
Not inconceivable? That's a low bar. It's certainly possible to imagine America returning to the violence of the 1960s and '70s, and beneath the overwrought language, that's what some — though not all — of these civil war prophets seem to have in mind. But a near-future war with two clear sides and Gettysburg-sized casualty counts is about as likely as a war with the moon.
These "new civil war" stories frequently take a bait-and-switch approach. They invoke the violence at demonstrations like the rally in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, where a man reportedly sympathetic to Nazism drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman. In the same breath, they discuss the broad divisions separating "red" America from "blue" America. If you flip quickly between small violent clashes and big political disagreements, those big disagreements will look bloodier.
The two purportedly warring sides don’t command as much loyalty as those red/blue maps imply.
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But that's an optical illusion. The polarization between alt-right fascists and antifa leftists is not the same as the polarization between Republicans and Democrats. It isn't even the same, though there is more overlap, as the polarization between the people at a Trump rally and the protesters outside. (For all the much-publicized moments of violence in last year's presidential campaign, the vast majority of both the pro- and anti-Trump crowds were peaceful.)
The division between ordinary Republicans and Democrats has itself been overstated. Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina has argued compellingly that the rise in red/blue polarization is mostly limited to the political class: politicians, activists, donors and the like. In those cases, he wrote in a paper published last year by the Hoover Institution, surveys and other data "capture our intuitive understanding of the concept of polarization: the middle loses to the extremes." But the political class is pretty small — about 15% of the country, Fiorina estimates.
Outside that world, people tend to hold a patchwork of beliefs that don't always fit easily into categories like "conservative" and "liberal." It is not at all unusual for public opinion to simultaneously shift leftward on one issue (say, health insurance) and rightward on another (guns). Those red/blue maps may seem to show a nation divided against itself, but by using just two colors, they obscure an enormous variety of opinion.
And while the country is filled with reliable Republican and Democratic voters, much of that reliability reflects what political scientists call "negative partisanship." Put simply, that means their votes are driven less by love for one party than by fear and hatred of the other one. In the last election, a large share of Donald Trump's support came from people who did not like him but found the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton more terrifying; much of Clinton's support came from people whose position was the exact opposite.
The atmosphere that produces negative partisanship can fuel a paranoid loathing of the other party's members. In its most concentrated form, it can drive people to aggressive violence. This is the sort of ill feeling that pundits invoke when they talk about a new civil war.
But that atmosphere also means that the two purportedly warring sides don't command as much loyalty as those red/blue maps imply. Think back to last year's election again. Both of the big parties were shaken by insurgent candidates, and one was unable to block the insurgent from winning. With both major parties picking their least popular nominees in recent memory, third-party and independent candidates had their strongest showings since Ross Perot's campaigns. And this time, unlike in Perot's day, the third-party vote wasn't dominated by one popular personality.
For only the fourth time since 1916, two alternative candidates — Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party — earned more than 1% of the presidential vote nationally. Yet another candidate, independent Evan McMullin, captured 20% of the ballots in Utah. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wasn't even running, still got enough write-ins to claim nearly 6% in Vermont. Even in the electoral college, seven voters couldn't bring themselves to back their parties' nominees and instead cast write-ins. And as usual, millions of people stayed home. American politics are structured in a way that naturally tends toward two-party rule, but many Americans are clearly chafing at those constraints.
That's not a nation of would-be warriors. It's a nation of would-be deserters. What if they started a second civil war and nobody came?
Jesse Walker is books editor of Reason and author of "The United States of Paranoia."
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https://www.marketwatch.com/story/w...icas-disunion-turns-into-civil-war-2018-11-07
Opinion: What are the chances that America’s disunion turns into Civil War?
Published: Nov 7, 2018 10:19 a.m. ET
Strong rhetoric and violence on both sides of the political spectrum are reaching a fever pitch
By
IanMorris
Is the United States on the brink of a new civil war?
According to Newsweek magazine’s polling, a third of all Americans think such a conflict could break out within the next five years, with 10% thinking it “very likely to happen.” Plenty of experts agree. Back in March, State Department official Keith Mines told Foreign Policy magazine: “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” He rated the odds of a second American Civil War breaking out within the next 10-15 years at 60%.
October’s awful events — pipe bombs sent to leading Democratic politicians and supporters, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh — have only amplified these fears. “We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860,” my Stanford University colleague Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in the National Review.
The historian Niall Ferguson, another Stanford colleague, suggested in The Sunday Times of London that if someone were to design a “Civil War Clock” comparable to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” the designer would probably now be announcing that it is “two minutes to Fort Sumter.”
Ferguson himself is more upbeat, thinking that “the time on the civil war Doomsday Clock looks more like 11.08 than 11.58.” It seems to me, though, that all these speculations are deeply misleading — so much so, in fact, that the main thing they illustrate is how not to use the past to understand the present.
How a Divided Congress Could Defy Gridlock
Similarities, differences and broad patterns
There are certainly some striking similarities between the American political scene in the late 2010s and that of the late 1850s. Both periods saw extreme polarization over issues of intense economic and emotional importance. At both times, the country divided geographically, with more urban and educated regions leaning one way and more rural and less educated regions the other. In both periods, highly partisan media inflamed passions, sometimes brazenly peddling “fake news”; and at both stages, the country was recovering from a severe financial crisis.
It is all very alarming — but that does not put us minutes away from Fort Sumter. In the nearly four years that I have been writing columns for Stratfor, I have repeatedly drawn attention to a distinction that logicians like to make between “formal” and “relational” analogies. A formal analogy involves finding similarities between a case about which we know a lot (such as what happened in the United States at the end of the 1850s) and one about which we know less (such as what is just beginning to happen in the United States at the end of the 2010s), and extrapolating from them to variables that cannot be observed in the less well-known case — concluding, here, that if polarization, sectionalism, financial problems and political violence produced civil war in the 1850s, they will have the same result in the 2010s.
The problem with formal analogies is, of course, that no two cases are identical. The modern rage over globalization and its discontents does not come close to the moral intensity of the 19th-century arguments over slavery, while the consequences of the 1857 financial meltdown were nowhere near those of the 2008 collapse.
Even more striking, the forms of political violence in the two periods are very different. The 1850s experienced nothing like last month’s pipe bombs, the 2017 shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and three others or the 2011 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others; and the 2010s have seen nothing like U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks’ near-fatal 1856 attack on Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate, let alone the “Bleeding Kansas” insurrection of 1855-56 or John Brown’s raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
The devil is in the details, which means that differences are just as important as similarities when we try to learn from the past. But how do we weigh up the pros and cons of comparisons? This is where the second kind of analogy comes in. Rather than cherry-picking convenient similarities and either ignoring or arguing away inconvenient differences, relational analogies begin from broad patterns in multiple well-known cases and proceed by understanding how a less well-known case fits into the larger structure. So, rather than wringing our hands over how much 2018 resembles 1860, we should be looking at how civil wars began in a wide range of different contexts, and then asking how well the late 2010s fit into that pattern.
Sufficient and necessary causes
The most obvious point is that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package is not just shared by 1850s and 2010s America. It was also common in many other eras that ended in civil war. The English Civil War of 1642-51, for instance, was preceded by decades of comparable disturbances. The population split into “court” and “country” factions (nowadays more familiar as “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads”). Each had its own geographical base and religious affiliation, with High Church Royalists and Puritan Roundheads literally ready to mutilate and burn each other over their differences.
Distrust of institutions was even worse than in 2010s America: Royalists accused Parliamentarians of blasphemy and corruption, while Parliamentarians replied that Royalist corruption was even worse, and was magnified by the royal court’s sexual deviance and willingness to sell the country to foreigners. Throughout the 1630s, financial crises paralyzed government and political violence mounted. Pro-Parliament mobs murdered bishops and besieged royal favorites in their mansions, and, in the 17th-century equivalent of sending anthrax spores through the mail, a leading Parliamentarian received a package containing a rag soaked in pus from the sores of a plague victim. He suffered no ill effects — then as now, biological terrorism was difficult to do well — but within a year, the two sides would fight their first pitched battle.
The Roman Republic provides another classic case. In the 50s B.C., the political elite was deeply divided between what Romans called populares — men such as Julius Caesar, who presented themselves as champions of the masses — and optimates such as Pompey the Great, who claimed to stand for virtue, tradition and the nation as a whole. Webs of patronage and debt bound much of the population to one faction or the other. Escalating financial crises ruined cities and regions, and entire provinces lined up behind strongmen who claimed to be able to save them — Gaul with Caesar, Italy with Pompey. Politicians fortified their homes against mob violence, street gangs regularly stopped elections from being held and assassination became almost commonplace. The civil wars that began in 49 B.C. would leave millions dead.
However, although England and Rome provide alarming formal analogies, things get more complicated as soon as we start looking for relational analogies. While the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package regularly leads to civil war, it does not always do so. In Rome, for instance, the package was in some ways even more prominent in the 130s B.C. than in Julius Caesar’s day. Tiberius Gracchus, usually seen as the first popularis politician, tried to cancel the debts of poor farmers and redistribute elite properties to them. A constitutional crisis ensued, splitting the ruling class. To conservatives, Gracchus seemed to be rallying the impoverished peasants of Etruria against Roman urban interests to make himself king. In political violence going far beyond Brooks’ assault on Sumner, a meeting of the Roman Senate in 133 B.C. ended with conservatives breaking up the wooden benches on which they sat and using the pieces to beat Gracchus and 300 of his followers to death. Twelve years later, his brother Gaius also died in political violence over much the same issues. Yet civil war did not erupt in either case.
Similarly, following Henry VIII’s break with the Roman church and dissolution of the Catholic monasteries in the 1530s, England experienced just as much polarization, regionalism, financial crisis and political violence as it would in the 1630s. However, it did not tip into civil war, although it came close. The United States was arguably almost as divided and haunted by political violence in the 1960s as in the 1850s, yet it too escaped civil war. We can only conclude that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was not a sufficient cause for civil war in Rome, England or the United States.
Nor was it a necessary cause. In Rome and England at least, civil wars broke out in the absence of polarization, regionalism or financial crisis (although political violence is, by definition, always part of civil war). In A.D. 69, which became known as “The Year of the Four Emperors,” multiple civil wars convulsed Rome, but they were driven almost entirely by generals’ ambitions to seize the throne. Similarly, between 1135 and 1153, England was torn apart by such severe civil wars that the period came to be called “The Anarchy.” The violence was so extreme, one chronicler recorded, that “Men said openly that Christ and his saints slept”; yet the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was largely absent in the 1130s. A royal succession crisis and fragile state institutions were all it took.
The polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package that 2010s America shares with 1850s America can be present without leading to civil war, and civil wars can break out without the package being present. We can only conclude that these forces are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for civil war. The dark prophecies of a second Civil War within the coming decade might well be nothing more than bad scholarship.
It’s the Army, stupid
So, the obvious questions: Why do the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package and civil war sometimes go together and sometimes not, and will they go together in America’s short-term future?
Fortunately, the answer to the first question was worked out long ago, by the Roman historian Tacitus. Looking back on the Year of the Four Emperors some 50 years after the event, he recognized that “Now was divulged the secret of the empire — that emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome.” What he meant by this was that although the empire’s political institutions were all concentrated in the city of Rome, if the armies out in the provinces decided to intervene in the political process, they always had the final say. Rome lurched into civil war in 49 B.C. because Caesar and Pompey each had armies to back their political ambitions. It did so again in A.D. 69 because no fewer than four rivals found themselves in this position. It did not lurch into civil war in 133 B.C., though, because its mighty armies remained aloof from politics.
England stumbled into civil war in 1642 because it had no standing army at all. When relations between the Royalists and Parliamentarians broke down, each could safely set about raising its own armed forces with no fear that Leviathan would intervene and stop them. This was Thomas Hobbes’ central point in his 1651 masterpiece Leviathan; only a powerful government with terrifying armed force can scare people straight and deter them from using violence to pursue their own ends. Things had been even worse in 1135, because in addition to there being no strong central army, dozens of barons had their own private armies, which they gleefully unleashed on rivals. In the 1530s, by contrast, despite the mass uprising in defense of Catholicism known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the barons largely remained loyal to Henry VIII and civil war was avoided.
When relations between Northern and Southern states broke down in 1861, the United States had more in common militarily with England in 1642 than with any of the other cases discussed here. It did have a professional army, but it contained just 16,367 men, and 179 of its 197 companies were stationed west of the Mississippi, so far from the initial areas of fighting as to render them irrelevant. In any case, one in five of the U.S. Army’s officers promptly resigned their commissions to join the Confederate states and thousands of noncommissioned men simply deserted and followed them. The government in Washington effectively had no army to enforce its will, and both sides — like King Charles I and the English Parliament in 1642 — had to set about raising forces almost from scratch.
Nothing could be less like the United States’ position in 2018. It has the most powerful and professional armed forces the world has ever seen, and there is absolutely no doubt about their loyalty to the legitimate government or commitment to the principle of civilian command. American soldiers, sailors and airmen do have political opinions, but they currently can be relied on to put their duty first. The United States therefore has far more in common with Rome in 133 B.C. than with any of the other cases. Even if U.S. senators start killing each other with chair legs, the armed forces will not take sides, other than to implement orders — so long as the orders are legitimate and legal — from their elected commander-in-chief.
When we look at the recent civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, or at places such as Egypt where civil war has been averted, nothing matters so much as the stance and strength of the armed forces. We have to conclude that the American Civil War Doomsday Clock does not stand at two, or even 52, minutes to midnight. The very idea is ridiculous. So long as the armed forces remain true to their highest traditions, it will not matter how angry the American people get or how badly their politicians behave. There will be no second Civil War.
Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist. He is currently Stanford University’s Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and serves on the faculty of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has published 12 books and has directed excavations in Greece and Italy.
This article was published with the permission of Stratfor.
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New American Civil War? Some people think it’s already begun
Published time: 26 Jun, 2018 17:13 Edited time: 12 Jul, 2018 09:12
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© Jonathan Bachman © Reuters
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Well, some people think the seeds of a new Civil War have already been sown — and in a recent article, University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds argued in a USA Today column that this new war is indeed “well underway.”
Reynolds was echoing similar comments from political scientist Thomas Schaller who wrote in a recent Bloomberg column that America is “at the beginning of a soft civil war,” and author Tom Ricks who agreed that the country seems to be “lurching” in that direction.
Much of the recent disquiet has been spurred on by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies and the decision to separate children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, but things have been bubbling up since Trump took office 18 months ago.
1. ‘God is on our side!’
© Mike Segar © Reuters
Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) caused a huge stir last week when she encouraged critics of the White House’s immigration policies to go out and harass members of the Trump administration in public. Waters made an impassioned call for citizens to ensure there would be “no sleep, no peace” for White House officials.
"If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere," she said.
But her comments were so extreme and incendiary that it prompted a former secret service agent to call them “dangerous” and warned they “go beyond breaking the norms” of civil discourse and criticized her for “endorsing mob-rule to satisfy a political goal.”
Not long after Waters’ comments, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia because she works for the Trump administration.
READ MORE: God is on our side! Maxine Waters calls on restaurants, gas stations to boo Trump admin
2. ‘Surround their homes and schools in protest!’
Celebrities are getting in on the action, too, encouraging Americans to take to the streets in the millions to protest the Trump administration.
Last week, comments by actor Peter Fonda put the secret service on alert when he suggested that Trump’s 12-year-old son Barron should be taken from his mother Melania and put “in a cage with pedophiles” and that citizens should “surround the schools” of administration officials’ children in response to the child-separation policy.
Somewhat less dramatically, other Hollywood figures have called for protests and change. Actor John Cusack accused the Trump administration of “fascism” and “torturing” children — while musician Serj Tankian wrote on Instagram that the US is in a state of “utter regression” and that it is time for a “peaceful revolution.”
3. Confederate monuments controversy
© Bryan Woolston © Reuters
The fierce debate over the removal of confederate monuments and symbols across the US epitomizes the current political and social divide and the competing interpretations of American history, with one side believing the monuments revere figures who fought to maintain slavery while the other side believes they honor great patriots.
When white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black Americans attending a prayer service in Virginia in 2015, it prompted a movement to have Confederate monuments removed from public spaces across the country. More than 100 publicly-supported monuments and symbols have been removed since 2015 — but not without controversy and counter-protests. While monuments are being removed across the US, other groups are pushing for new ones to be erected.
Last year a ‘Unite the Right’ rally called in protest at the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia turned violent when a protester drove a car through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing activist Heather Heyer.
4. Media wars, polarization of opinion
All of this social discord is playing out, magnified, on Americans’ TV screens in a way that appears to be exacerbating the problem. Eager to up their ratings, news networks invite the most polarizing of guests for daily screaming matches to be beamed into people’s homes. Far from the days of simply favoring one news channel over another, now if Americans don’t like how something is reported, it instantly becomes “fake news” or “propaganda.”
In his article, Reynolds wrote that news media which “promote shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making the problem worse” and reminisced about a time when Americans could disagree with each other without hating each other.
5. Stratification of society
© Orlando Ramirez - USA TODAY Sports © Reuters
While all this is being played out on TV screens and social media, those at the fringes of society are feeling the effects of a sick system perhaps more than anyone. The socio-economic stratification of American society appears more obvious than it has at any time in recent years.
Inequality and rampant police violence against African-Americans prompted the NFL kneeling protests, which turned into a nationwide controversy between Americans who are proud of their flag and national anthem and all they stand for — and those who believe true freedom and justice have not yet come to America. A devastating opioid crisis, one of the highest child poverty rates in the world, and a strict adherence to policies which make the poor poorer and the rich richer, have all helped take anger in America from a simmer to a boil.
Reynolds wrote that part of the problem now is that Americans don’t feel social ties which transcend politics. It’s all us vs. them — and nothing in between. He argues that churches, fraternal organizations and neighborhoods used to cross political lines, but that this America has “shrunk and decayed” and people are increasingly finding their identity only in politics.
READ MORE: Trump says NFL players who don't stand during national anthem ‘maybe shouldn’t be in the country’
Marriage counselors, Reynolds explains, say that a relationship is doomed to fail when the couple begin to view each other with contempt — and in America today, there seems to be nothing but feelings of contempt felt on both sides of the political spectrum.
