The Coming Revolution
“The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.”– Stephen Marche
Today’s quote comes from the jacket in Stephen Marche’s new book. I hate to spoil everyone’s fun. I haven’t read it yet. The topic seems interesting enough, but I have a backlog of books on my nightstand that I got for Christmas and I haven’t broken into those yet.
Marche is a Canadian. He can certainly opine from a safe distance about the coming destruction of America. My sense is that this is somewhat similar to the collective works of Karl Marx. Everyone is familiar with his “Communist Manifesto”, but I was thinking more along the lines of Das Kapital. It was always my understanding that he felt the revolution was what would be and not necessarily what should be.
What he did not see is that other forces would rise up to prevent the inevitable revolution between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Unions and progressive politicians prevented his revolution and brought the change needed through more peaceful means. We certainly can hope that something or someone intervenes before we go down that road.
Of course, the tag line above is what Simon and Schuster sees as the money line. There is no official definition in literature for the money line. English teachers may call it a theme statement or the main idea. It is the one line people remember. I don’t need to know how this will happen. There are any number of ways it can happen. The real question is who would be involved in such a civil war. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit so nicely into a tag line we can use to sell thousands of books.
Our last civil war was the north versus the south. That seemed easy enough. The battle lines were fought over slavery, but what is so fascinating from 64,000 feet is seeing how people have tried to distort and deflect that over the intervening decades and century. Slavery became “states rights.” A simple fight over the “right” to own other people turned into some high-minded affair over the exact understanding of federalism.
So, where are the fault lines in this coming civil war? I suppose geography could come into play. Cities and rural areas seem to vote radically differently these days. However, the fault lines don’t seem to be fraying on those lines alone. It could be right versus left. That would make a lot of sense as the political parties seem to be moving further and further away from each other.
Yet, when compared internationally, the parties are not nearly as far apart as we are led to believe. Plus, there are examples that the difference in parties is not necessarily the only thing to consider. Sometimes there are coalitions between the parties that can be a positive or negative force. At any rate, preventing a civil war can be daunting when we can’t identify where the fault lines actually are.
It isn’t as easy as vaccine versus not vaccine. It isn’t as easy as racist versus not racist. It isn’t as easy as progressive versus conservative. It’s not as easy as fact versus fiction. However, there are commonalities between all of those things. At the end of the day we could simply label one side as individualistic and the other side of pluralistic. Yet, even those terms are not absolutely precise. Labeling one side as selfish and the other as selfless is a little self-serving. It might be just that easy. Either way, the who is far more fascinating than the what.
Marche is a Canadian. He can certainly opine from a safe distance about the coming destruction of America.
Not really a safe distance. As former prime minister Pierre Trudeau put it
Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
At least one Canadian academic is sounding the alarm. The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare
I tend to think this is rather unlikely but we worry.
1I’ve never liked the term selfless. And I have never thought that it’s accurate. There’s a lot of self-interest in caring about others, from both an emotional and practical point of view, IMHO. Also, you do have to take care of yourself in order to be able to help others. Remember who’s the first to put on an oxygen mask in the event of an airplane emergency. The parent.
2How bad are things? One harbinger of our plight would be the number of old guard conservatives now bemoaning the current QOP they helped create. Hypocrites bearing just a smidgeon of truthiness. Beware. They are not reformed by any definition of the word. They are more like whiny brats offended that ol’ Morton C. Blackwell rejected them for the ***king moron** and the Qcumber whack-a-doodles. They do not want democracy back. That’s a ruse. They want their power back.
Voting is one fix. Next is to roll back every lying ruling John Roberts has been behind such as Citizens United, voting rights; the whole lot of “I won’t bat or pitch, I’ll call balls and strikes” travesties John Roberts launched.
C’mon Congressional Democrats. Expand the SCROTUS and whack the conservatives. Sooner, not later.
3IMHO the divide is a very old and simple one. Dig down past the BS, like rural versus urban and small versus large government that are stand-ins for the underlying fault, and you get to perhaps the oldest of divides. This predates the constitution.In fact the constitution was written in such a back and forth manner to paper over this fault.
It all comes down to two opposing views of who a government listens to:The oldest version is that the government represents the people who own the property. Originally wealthy, white, land owners. These were the movers and shakers of their day. It was taken as read that (life, God, providence) had selected these people and that they would naturally run things.
The other view was that all men, originally conceptualized as the above white land owners, would vote and this was implicitly used to paper over the difference. As was the use of the term Republic. The later much more legitimately, and durably, than the former.
Over time the ‘all men’ coding broke down. People who were at first willing to just enjoy some level of economic participation, and not being stepped on by royalty and religion, started to want a bit more.
Perhaps the first were poor white folks. Franklin pointed out that with an informative press and education there was no reason not to include them. So easy enough.
But then there were the Irish, who were not considered educable, or white. And the Italians, and the freed blacks and women and …
None of these were deemed worth consideration the the words “all men” were written down. The founding fathers, like McConnell, implicitly didn’t consider these groups ‘real’ Americans, or simply wanted to, skate fast over thin ice to hurry to stand up a nation, as AL said; “Wart and all”.
Both slavery and the creative vaguery included in the phrase “all men” were left unsettled. It took the civil war and the inherent contradictions between the contributions of the working poor, often brown, people to highlight the flaw. The Gilded Age brought it into high relief.
FDR and the New Deal suppressed the economic contradiction for forty years and that time allowed the focus to work on the racial side. The New Deal didn’t apply to most majority black professions and farm labor.
It has been said that near the end MLK was moving toward a general labor strike that would highlight the economic side and the excessive influence of money on government. Some say that’s why he was shot.
IMHO most other issues are proxies for this one. Keep in mind that when people talk about this they use the language provided by the media. A media which is owned outright by billionaires. Billionaires that control perceptions, that make and break candidates, that lionize or vilify people at will, that decide what and how people think.
Just a thought.
4Many decades ago before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I read an article by a Russian analyst that predicted that the United States was going to fall apart because capitalism promoted greed and selfishness as the highest civic virtue. The author suggested that the only thing holding the country together was the threat posed by the USSR.
5Rich people control this country.
They make the MAGA troops dance if it gives them a tax break.
The top 10% own 90% of the stocks in America.
Look what happened to the market yesterday when fears of war in Ukraine with Russia took hold. The market crashed 1000 points for a time. That’s for a distant war.
Can you imagine the effects on markets if there was a civil war, not north-south, but within every state?, Roads would be blockaded, businesses closed, commerce would grind to a halt. Stocks would be as worthless as Confederate currency. If the wealthy can prevent civil war, they will. There’s no money to be made on a domestic war as in foreign wars, only money to lose, and a lot of it.
6These rubes who think it would be just great to have a civil war/secede should consider where they will put grandma and grandpa when they no longer have Social Security/Medicare and the NYC brokers will no longer wire funds from IRAs handled there to this new insurgent country.
7@Rick I agree that the wealthy will control what they can. But they may have let it go too far.
8Whoa. The Lincoln project just went there.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1485978541183356928
9Vic @9, All I can say is WOW!
10Best political montage ever put together, the final long fade-in image at the end says it all.
My father predicted pretty much the entire sequence.
He let me stay home from school and watch the McCarthy hearings, and he explained how Joe came to power.
But that was long ago, in a country far away…
11The Lincoln Project piece pretty much sums up what all of us already felt about trumpf and where we’re at. The visions of Jan 6 are burned into my mind and that the civil war has already started. May not be as cut and dried as our country’s historic civil war, but the division is real. There are areas of many (most) states that have already seceded from the majority of the population, like where I live. I didn’t feel like this before 2015 when trumpf descended down his escalator. This is real and is supported by 99%+ of an entire political party.
12Obviously selfish vs. selfless was a crass dividing point, but essentially you are trying to find something that ties together a disparate group that has somehow disconnected itself from polite society. The crime of a two-party system is that it requires unlike people with competing interests to form coalitions.
The problem with the conservative coalition is that it is inherently easier to maintain. Their interests are radically different just like on the progressive side, but the answer to every question is the same: no. That’s an easier coalition to hold together. Even if the Mancins and Sinemas of the world were rational actors progressing with good faith they still might represent a constituency that wants vastly different things than the others.
13“The problem with the conservative coalition is that it is inherently easier to maintain.”
Bingo.
14Just one more little thing and maybe another . . . So many of the manufacturing plants in the South are owned by off-shore companies and frankly this country is where they see their biggest profits. They are not about to pull out and go all the way home. They are going to use their “power” just like the stock market in New York City. Mexico et al below the border are not eager to see an end-times flood of people from the a U.S. at war with it self. Inasmuch as such a tide would bring some really big bucks, the middle america countries can’t handle things now let alone with an overflow of more people. As for Canada, the neighborliness would evaporate damn soon. Their dollar value vs the US dollar is one problem. Another would be those yahoos who want to automatically rename the country and fly only Old Glory on the flag pole. As a kid when visiting the Canadian side of my family, I was always damn sad/embarrassed/mad when some idiot Yank (this entire country is called Yank in Canada and has nothing to do with blue or grey uniforms) insulted the Maple Leaf and demanded let alone expected to get away with it. Canada likes their culture of lawfulness, good manners and hockey. And ten to one those nitwit Yanks insulting the Maple Leaf have no idea that Canada fought in World War II alongside of us, especially on D-Day! i would give you 10 to one odds that their eyes go blank from ignorance when you mention World War II
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