Civil War II: Who's Really Picking A Fight, Here?
Civil War II: Who's Really Picking A Fight, Here?
If the people who see a civil war instigated by the Right as a real danger to America, then they’re not doing a very good job of deescalating tensions.
James Pogue threw cold water on the Regime’s civil war “fever” in this splendid essay published in Unherd:
I moved recently to a remote part of Northern California, where in a couple weeks an election will decide whether or not allies of the local militia take control of the county government. It’s a fraught situation, in a part of the country that’s often described by journalists, myself included, as being on the verge of civil war.
This can be a hard thing to explain. Just before I sat down to write this, I was at a bar where a liberal guy invited a not-so-liberal guy out to the parking lot. The liberal showed off a fly rod he’d built, and the redneck showed off a not-at-all-legal belt-loaded gun that he’d built. They came back smiling. Everyone mostly gets along fine. The incidents that seem to show overt cracks in the social order are very rare — occasional spats at restaurants or threatening visits to trailers, county board meetings moved online for safety.
They’re usually non-violent, and so wrapped up in the baroque Facebook-driven personal drama that colours life the rural American West these days that any honest observer has to wrestle with questions about whether or not they portend a real breakdown. The numbers of people involved are tiny. The divides aren’t really about Trump, race, class. They aren’t really about anything that fits into mainstream America’s understanding of why civil violence feels so possible in this country, unless you count the fact that basically everybody around here has guns.
Luckily, America has an influential class of professionals who make a living explaining situations like this. These are our extremism-watchers, and I should say here that I’m one of them. Today extremism-watching is a boom industry, and I was fortunate to have got in on it early, before Trump was elected, because now the race to establish yourself in the field can look frantic. The people who manage to do it tend to have long academic or government experience. The best way for them to get attention on Twitter and spots on NPR and cable news is by offering evidence that alarms the political and media class. And that class is naturally most alarmed by evidence that confirms its already-existing fears about what is going wrong in America.
The result is that there’s a very real professional incentive not to get to know your subjects too closely, lest you discover something that muddies up the story. And so the people who make the best living by describing America’s descent towards civil violence tend to be those with almost no personal knowledge of the armed rednecks they think are leading us there.
It’s nice to see some push-back against people like Prof. Barbara Walter, mentioned in Pogue’s essay and currently on a media blitz, who are laying the risk of civil war entirely at the feet of the Right. There’s no question that a tremendous amount of fear, loathing, and, yes, money, is involved in the threat assessment industry. As I mentioned a few posts back, there’s no mention of left-wing extremists as posing a risk of sparking a civil war, despite their long-established track record of frequent political violence.
Prof. Barbara F. Walter
As an academic, Walter ought to have at least a passing familiarity with left-wing radicalism. She has likely never encountered a right-wing radical, however, at least not the kind of people who populate the militias who occupy her concerns. They simply don’t exist within her bubble. Her judgments of the “threat,” as with that of every other academic or journalist concerned about the Right kicking off a civil war, is from afar, based not on actions but on personal fears, prejudices, and even hatred of those not like her and hold vastly different views about what this country is and what it ought to be.
It’s ironic. Those of us who live in metro America are more likely to encounter left-wing political violence than we are to run into the right-wing variety. Right-wing militias and those who hold “extremist” views tend to either not live in the metros or, if they do, live on the peripheries. Yet, the left-wing threat is considered non-existent while the threat from afar is considered most urgent. Perhaps this isn’t that different from the Regime’s attitude towards crime: it’s part of living in a big city, so quit your whining and get used to it! And no, you can’t have guns, no matter how many the criminals have!
And this is the danger of civil war fever. The Regime is responding to what it perceives as a threat and attaching nefarious descriptors to justify serious action against it. Pogue explains:
This becomes a very important bridge in the book, suggesting that if we have a civil war it will surely be an ethnic one, organised in opposition to a diversifying America. The thesis of the book becomes that the entire Right-wing radical fringe is oriented around ethnic identity, and that ethnic resentments — organised by “ethnic entrepreneurs” like Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, who helped kick off the wars in the dissolving Yugoslavia — are the source of most civil wars since the end of the Cold War.
Ethnic resentment only partly explains many major recent civil conflicts, including the wars in Libya and Afghanistan (both of which were instigated by US military action), but it will serve for ours. She suggests that by using phrases like “shithole countries” and proposing a wall, but also by pulling out of international agreements and starting a “trade war” with China, Donald Trump “did exactly what Tudjman did,” and “what Hutu extremists did when they characterised Tutsis as cockroaches and Hutus as the chosen people.” The Republican party itself, she says later, “has become like the Serbian Radical Party in Yugoslavia.” This is a party whose longtime leader was directly involved in ethnic cleansing.
It’s probably pointless to wonder whether saying Republican politicians act “exactly” like génocidaires is a meaningful way of looking at what’s happening in this country. Because this is how the extremism micro-industry’s incentive structure works: it would have been impossible for her to get a book deal, get reviewed, go on talk shows, get paid, and build a career had the situation not been dire and, to some degree, radically simplified.
But this simplification creates an epistemological problem. There is no incentive at all to feed America’s policymakers and media narrative-shapers information that doesn’t alarm them, or that would give them a complex moral picture of America’s radical fringe, which is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon. Even if our urban thought leaders wanted to get a fair sense of what was going on in their restive hinterland, how could they get good information?
Walter’s suggestion is that they hire researchers and intelligence professionals who will approach the radical Right as if it were Isis or the Taliban. “If we are to avert civil war,” she writes, “we must devote the same resources to finding and neutralising homegrown combatants as we do to foreign ones.”
The race/ethnicity “card” works because of America’s own sordid history on the matter. Therefore, nothing will mobilize the public better than to label a prospective enemy as racists and ethno-nationalists, because Americans are very sensitive to such characterizations. And, at a time of severe political polarization, drawing a straight line between the Republican Party and the Serbian Radical Party, unfortunately, receives quite a few nods of agreement, especially if it comes from the mouth of an academic or journalist.1
No matter how one feels about the Republican Party, characterizing it as anywhere in the league as the Serbian Radical Party, which was founded by a convicted war criminal, is so absurd it deserves no further comment. There’s just no comparison. But even ridiculous remarks and outright lies can be accepted as truth if it comes from the right sources. After all, if the Experts say so, it must be true, right?
The reality is, the people viewed as threats to democracy and lusting for the blood of metro Americans are neither. Rather, they’d prefer to be left alone. Yes, some of them might have political views metro Americans may find bizarre or distasteful (for that matter, as an American living in a metro area, many who live where I do hold political views I find bizarre and distasteful. It cuts both ways). However, their overall worldview remains the same as it’s always been: rugged individualism, as Pogue observes, combined with political, if not social, libertarianism. For people who pose such a clear and present danger to democracy and metro Americans, they sure seem determined to get away as far as they can from it all!
Again, the perception of “threat” (a term I use very loosely) is both class-based and ideological. Here’s Ross Douthat of The New York Times throwing his own bucket of cold water on the civil war blitz:
Overall, the academic and journalistic literature on America’s divisions offers a reasonably accurate description of increasing American division. The country is definitely more ideologically polarized than it was 20 or 40 years ago; indeed, with organized Christianity’s decline, you could say that it’s more metaphysically polarized as well. We are more likely to hate and fear members of the rival party, more likely to sort ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities, more likely to be deeply skeptical about public institutions and more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs — like the belief that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election — that undercut the basic legitimacy of the opposition party’s governance.
At the same time, the literature suffers from a serious liberal-bias problem, a consistent naïveté about the left and center’s roles in deepening polarization. For instance, in the Bush and Obama eras there were a lot of takes on the dangers of “asymmetric polarization” — the supposed ideological radicalization of the Republicans relative to the Democrats. Across most of the 2010s, though, it was clearly liberals who moved leftward much more rapidly, while Republicans basically stayed put — and yet somehow the perils of that kind of asymmetry get much less expert attention. [bold mine]
You get that? The Left became more extreme and radical (see the tweet below), but, according to the intelligentsia, it’s the Right we need to worry about!
More:
Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at 25 deaths within a year” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s.
That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism.
As I’ve said time and time again: by the time a civil war arrives in this country, this country will have been beaten down so badly you won’t be able to tell the difference.
However, Douthat does say the country is facing serious problems that need not be intensified by declarations of war against people who aren’t down with the Regime’s designs for America:
I am very aware that I’m always the columnist making some version of this calm-down argument, sometimes to a fault. So I want to stress that the problems that undergird the civil-war hypothesis are serious, the divisions in our country are considerable and dangerous, the specific perils associated with a Trump resurgence in 2024 are entirely real.
If the people who see a civil war instigated by the Right as a real danger to America, then they’re not doing a very good job of deescalating tensions. If people like Barbara Walter really believe the American Right to be motivated by racial/ethnic animus, they ought to concede it’s they who started the fire and are fueling it. Ed West explains on his Substack:
It is perhaps not surprising that so many Republicans feel this way when their opponents repeatedly tell them so. When Democrat senators gleefully announced that: ‘The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party’, or when New York Times op-eds boast about ‘replacing’ them.
The nature of America has drastically changed in one lifetime, becoming something far more ideological and utopian, compared to what it once was. At the time that Northern Ireland was descending into war, the United States was in many ways just another country. As Christopher Caldwell wrote: ‘Americans understood themselves as they always had — as essentially a European country, displaced westward’, a country ‘combining… wealth, cultural homogeneity, and relative equality of status and income’. It then had its lowest foreign-born population share since the Republic was founded, and the largest sources of migration were Italy and Germany.
The Experts would agree: America is no different from any other country when it comes to demographic change. So, why do things proven to exacerbate social conflict and create instability?
The New York Times quoted two academics, Maureen Craig at N.Y.U. and Jennifer Richeson at Yale, whose paper Majority No More? found that ‘White Americans considering a future in which the white population has declined to less than 50 percent of the national population are more likely to perceive that the societal status of their racial group — in terms of resources or as the “prototypical” American — is under threat, which in turn leads to stronger identification as white, the expression of more negative racial attitudes and emotions, greater opposition to diversity, and greater endorsement of conservative political ideology, political parties, and candidates.’
Similar papers have been quoted showing that, when presented with a future where they become a minority, white Americans become more nationalist, conservative and tribal – but what is surprising is that anyone finds this surprising.
…
In multicultural democracies people tend to vote along ethnic and confessional lines, and as America has become more multicultural so have its voting patterns followed a similar trajectory, with the Democratic Party an alliance of minorities and the rich (who are, as Amy Chua put it, a sort of minority in themselves). In contrast, Republicans now enjoy a 40-point lead among white men without a college degree. Diversity is only one of 10 drivers of polarization cited by Jonathan Haidt, yet it is also the only one which is an article of faith among one party, and the country’s elite. [bold mine]
Citing research showing that usage of the term “racist(s)/racism” in the media skyrocketed last decade, Rod Dreher, one of my favorite writers, asks, Did America become 300 percent more racist after 2014? Or is it more likely that liberal elites self-radicalized, and began telling themselves stories that fit their ideological priors?
It’s unfortunately true there are likely millions of Americans who genuinely believe we all became more racist after 2014. If you’re one of them, feel free to stop reading, I wish you well. But, if you’re not one of them, is it a stretch to say that racial/ethnic tensions today are largely, if not entirely, the product of a concerted effort by the Left to inject greater race-consciousness into the public and all our institutions? And, if you believe America isn’t all that exceptional and that terrible things that happened in the Balkans or Northern Ireland can happen here, then demographic change, combined with the injection of racial consciousness and unbelievably divisive rhetoric, including from our president, could certainly have a destabilizing impact on this country, can it not?
The narrative being crafted by Barbara Walter and the elite class is this: America is at risk of a new civil war because Whites, especially White males, feel threatened by demographic change. It’s probably true that Whites do feel threatened on some level, as any majority race in any country would if faced with demographic upending. Imagine, for instance, if you went to Japan or South Korea and told the residents of these countries that they’d be replaced by people from foreign lands importing different cultures. Anyone who believes the Japanese or Koreans would gleefully welcome such a prospect doesn’t know anything about anyone.
But civil war? If the elites really believe they’d fight a war over ethnic identity, the elites need to remember there are at least two belligerents to every conflict. And, right now, the left-wing elites, not the right-wing militias, are the ones picking the fight.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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The Serbian Radical Party is a far-right political party whose leader, Vojislav Šešelj, was convicted of war crimes committed during the 1990s Yugoslav Ward. Slobodan Milošević, once characterized as the second coming of Hitler by the U.S., described Šešelj as “the personification of violence and primitivism.”