The Cold Civil War
Trump and his critics despise each other. All that’s needed now is a spark.
Now folks, I meet with some great friends once a month at a local coffee shop. Some lean far left, some far right, some independent. We always have lively, and yet friendly political discussions.
The last time we met I triggered a vigorous debate.
I suggested that our current situation in this country was similar to what we went through leading up to the Civil War.
I stated that just like slavery, the new issue of late term abortions could be the spark to trigger a new civil war.
Now I can tell you, this raised a lot of eyebrows, especially with a good friend who happens to be African American and who leans to the left.
His first reaction was outrage that I would compare slavery to the current situation. However, like I said, we are friends, and value one another’s opinions. So He allowed me to continue. That’s why I love this guy. He said, “This should be interesting”.
I explained that we first needed to take the issue of morality out of the equation and look at this comparison strictly from a political standpoint. A very hard thing to do.
Don’t get me wrong. Slavery was an abominable practice and a stain on our country’s heritage and it did indeed trigger the Civil War. But let’s take a closer look.
Only one percent of southerners owned slaves at the time of the conflict. Yet when the war broke out, 100’s of thousands of Southerners volunteered to fight for the Confederacy.
Why? Surely they weren’t willing to risk their lives to fight for a bunch of rich plantation owners so they could keep their slaves. There had to be more to it, and there was.
Now follow along and see if you can see what I see in the way of similarities between 1861 and 2019.
Now in 1861, 80% of the South’s population worked on farms. Look at a map of election results. Where are the Trump supporters? That’s right, in the flyover country, the grain belt, rural America.
In 1861, the north had virtual control of all manufacturing in the US. As a result, people, including immigrants flocked to the big cities to find work. So, you had a choice, scratch out a living in the agrarian south, or head to the city to work in one of the thousands of available jobs in manufacturing.
Easy choice. So by 1861, the population of the north outnumbered the south by a 2 to 1 margin.
Have you seen a map of the results from the last Presidential election? Turns out that there are enough people living in NY, California, and Pennsylvania, that, if we simply went by popular vote, instead of the Electoral College, those three states could outvote all of the remaining states in every election and have complete control.
In 1861, half of all foreign born Americans lived in NY, Mass., and Pennsylvania. So the northern population continued to increase.
In 1861, northerners stated that southerners were poor dumb, dirt farmers.
In 2019 Conservatives are referred to as bitter deplorables who cling to guns and religion.
In 1861, the northern politicians were wealthy individuals supported by the railroads and the manufacturing industry. They were in it to make money and could care less about the terrible conditions of the common man working in the factories.
In the South, the only ones with the free time to run for office, were the rich plantation owners who could care less about the other 99% of white southerners who eeked out an existence on small family farms. The sole interest of the plantation owners was to protect the free labor force they found in slavery.
So in 1861, we had politicians who represented big business and southern cotton plantations. The rights of northern factory workers and southern farmers were not a consideration to the members of Congress be they northern or southern. Sound familiar?
Now one final comparison. All of this talk of the Governor of Virginia and the issue of appearing in black face in a college yearbook. Add to this the Kavanaugh debacle. For this I have one word. Hypocrisy.
Members of Congress are great at throwing stones at the other side until the same dirt falls upon them. And yes there is a comparison to 1861.
By 1861 most of the world saw slavery as an outmoded, inferior means of production. That’s right, they looked at it as a means of production. Not a moral issue. What ended slavery in nearly all of the industrialized countries, including England, was the fact that economists realized that in order to sustain an economy you need wage earners who can buy products.
Slaves did not earn a wage and were thus seen as a detriment to economic development. The solution was simple. Pay them and subject them to wage slavery just like the rest of us!
The North saw this happen in England and quickly followed suit. The problem was, Northerners owned a huge number of slaves who worked the docks and the factories.
Now in 1861 you could buy 160 acres of land for $40. A slave brought anywhere from $1500 to $3000.
Northern slave owners were not willing to take that kind of financial hit. So what did they do? That’s right, they sold their slaves to Southerners. A truly cruel practice where husbands and wives and mothers and children were separated, sold, and shipped south to new owners.
Now this took time. So when laws were passed emancipating the slaves of the north. Northern owners were given one year to be rid of their slaves.
In addition, in many states, northerners who owned slave children, born after a certain date, were allowed to keep them till they turned 25, then set them free.
Now those northern slaves who gained their freedom were subject to northern state laws that said they had no citizenship and could not vote.
They were forced to ride in separate RR cars and only on the top of stage coaches. They had to attend separate schools and could not occupy cabins on ships.
They could not dine in white restaurants or stay in white hotels.
The jobs they were able to get were those that no one else would do.
So, when we talk about our current Congress being a bunch of hypocrites, think back to what I just shared with you.
Folks, these are just a few of the comparisons I can make between our current situation and the situation in 1861. I could go on with things like tariffs and foreign relations, but I think you can see where I am coming from.
Bottom line, in 1861 and 2019 we have a have a polarized country led by a polarized Federal Government that is totally out of touch with “We the People.”
Did slavery trigger the Civil War? You bet it did. Was it the only issue. Absolutely not. 99 % of the southerners saw a federal government out of control, wielding tremendous power and now using that power to tell the richest and most powerful southerners, the rich plantation owning politicians, that they were going to take their property, the slaves.
Again, leave morality out of this. That 99% asked themselves, “If they can do that to those rich fat cats, what chance do I have against an all powerful federal government?”
So jumping back to the current situation. If the government can decide to allow late term abortions, Tax me at 70%, take away my guns, force me to drive an electric car, and eliminate the cattle and airline industries, where will it stop?
Shoot folks, any one of those issues could be the spark that triggers the next conflict.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating a modern Civil War.
There is a new term for what is happening and I think it is perfect.
We are in a Cold Civil War.
A fellow by the name of William Smith recently used the term in an article in The Guardian on September 11, 2018.
Smith states that there is a sense that a terrible clash is about to occur.
There are many reasons for Trump supporters to despise the establishment: endless wars in which the brunt of casualties are borne by those from Trump country, grotesque public debt generated by vote buying, a two-tiered educational system that ensures income inequality, pervasive government surveillance, open and lawless borders, and on and on. Our elites bring to mind the French aristocracy under Louis XVI, feigning formality yet, behind the scenes at least, corrupt, incompetent, and ruthless.
Ultimately what is most disconcerting is that the divisiveness is not just about Trump: it’s deeply rooted in two diametrically opposed views. America is no longer one country. These two groups view their national story from totally different stances.
Since the 1960s, America’s leaders have been educated through an immersion in the culturally radical teachings that dominate the curricula of our best universities.
It has become a primary goal of higher education to sensitize the future establishment to issues of race, gender, and class, and to raise awareness of global challenges such as climate change.
Elite education is no longer designed to hand down a common cultural tradition and to serve as a way to teach kids our American heritage.
In our schools today, it is taught instead that America is a great obstacle to the empowerment of oppressed minorities and the central driver of global crises.
A core teaching in the humanities and social sciences is that the Western heritage represents a monstrous oppression myth conjured up by dead European white men, which, has the full support of the Democratic Party.
Trump and his supporters hate that this is happening. They believe that the establishment has taken a knee against its own country.
Trump supporters, unabashedly embrace traditional American history and seek to elevate it by “making America great again.” Globalism, multiculturalism, and political correctness, are viewed quite simply as unpatriotic, an attempt to bleach away the collective memory of the American story.
Trump understands the worldview of his base and capitalizes on it by attacking NFL “kneelers,” the liberal “fake news” media, and those who refuse to say “Merry Christmas.”
At the same time, he loudly rallies around traditional symbols of American authority such as the flag, the police, and the military.
The Liberals and Conservatives live in a different moral universes, and their unrelenting political warfare derives from both groups’ understanding that power flows to those whose narratives the people believe.
William Smith goes on to say “This will not end well, I fear. Goodwill and moderation exist on neither side. It may be that a civil war looms on the horizon. All that’s required now is a spark because every cultural accelerant is now in place.
Given Trump’s demeanor and the viciousness of his opponents, compromise seems unlikely. Most of the American media will blame any conflagration on Trump, and certainly he will deserve some of the fault.
But American elites are the revolutionary children of the ’60s and ’70s, proud despoilers of their country’s history and tradition.
I also, recently read an article by Charles R. Kessler in the October Issue of Imprimus (Hillsdale College)
He brings up another great point as to why we are in a cold civil war.
He states, “One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. To simplify matters we may call this “the conservative Constitution”.
The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called “the living Constitution.” This term implies that the original Constitution is dead—or at least on life support—and that in order to remain relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers.
The idea of the living Constitution originated in America’s new departments of political and social science in the late nineteenth century—but it was soon at the very forefront of Progressive politics.
One of the doctrine’s prime formulators, Woodrow Wilson, had contemplated as a young scholar a series of constitutional amendments to reform America’s national government into a kind of parliamentary system—a system able to facilitate faster political change. But he quickly realized that his plan to amend the Constitution was going nowhere.
Plan B was the living Constitution. While keeping the outward forms of the old Constitution, the idea of a living Constitution would change utterly the spirit in which the Constitution was understood.
The resulting Constitution—let us call it “the liberal Constitution”—is not a constitution of natural rights or individual human rights, but of historical or evolutionary right. Wilson called the spirit of the old Constitution Newtonian, after Isaac Newton, and that of the new Constitution Darwinian, after Charles Darwin.
By Darwinian, Wilson meant that instead of being difficult to amend, the liberal Constitution would be easily amenable to experimentation and adjustment. The point of the old Constitution was to keep the times in tune with the Constitution; the purpose of the new is to keep the Constitution in tune with the times.
Until the 1960s, most liberals believed it was inevitable that their living Constitution would replace the conservative Constitution through a kind of slow-motion evolution.
But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, defenders of the old Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to America’s first principles.
When it became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren’t going away, the cold civil war was on.