The Permanence Of The Great Divide
What we have instead are partisan political identities that are increasingly coming to supersede all others.
Pedro Gonzalez of Chronicles Magazine wrote a brief, but interesting thread about the Spanish Civil War. The whole thing is worth reading, start to finish, but I wanted to share these highlights:
Gonzalez finishes with this:
A number of commentators have drawn parallels from the Spanish Civil War to our current moment. As always, the parallels range from incompatible to imperfect, but the one parallel that does stick is that the SCW was a conflict where the flashpoint was political, not ethnic nor religious. It was an ideological clash that ended in a shooting war, as did the Russian Revolution in 1917, setting the stage for the emergence of the Soviet Union.
I mentioned some entries ago the Democrat-Republican divide may be emerging as a hard split in the U.S. Ideology and politics tend to be a weak form of identity, due to its fluid nature compared to other forms of identity. For example, your political views can change over time, but you cannot change your ethnic identity. However, wars are ultimately fought for political reasons. Political differences are likely to serve as the casus belli for a prospective future American internal conflict, rather than ethnic or religious differences.
Long-time readers know that I do not predict a civil war for this country. At least, I don’t predict anything near the intensity of the Russian and Spanish civil wars. What ought to be concerning is the share of Americans who think a civil war is coming just keeps on growing. Here are the results from a survey conducted in August:
Civil war talk has gone mainstream. It’s no longer the refuge of fringe commentators and survivalists. In fact, it’s never been a hotter topic than it is right this moment. For some, there seems to be a startling sense of resignation that it’s going to happen and there’s no way or even reason to stop it. Given the results of the 2022 mid-term elections, I can’t blame anyone for feeling this way, even if I don’t believe it’ll really happen.
Why? For all the talk of a “Red Wave,” something far less dramatic, yet deeply worrying, occurred. Given how badly things have gone for the Biden administration almost two years in, precedence suggested the Republican Party would score a resounding victory in the mid-terms as they did in years past. Instead, despite some notable wins, the picture forming is of a polity - and country - more divided than ever. The old rules seem to no longer apply. This mid-term doesn’t appear to have been a nation-wide referendum on the Left’s performance, but rather a reaffirmation of which side of the divide Americans stand. This is a troubling sign for the country going forward.
It’s easy to take democracy for granted when things are going well, but it’s during a crisis the value of democracy becomes most apparent. America is in the midst of a long emergency, but instead of seeking change as they once did, Americans seem to be seeking refuge behind partisan lines. Even with a fair number of independents out there, it doesn’t seem many votes are up for grabs at this point, something I first observed back in 2020. How people feel about the way things are going in the country is becoming increasingly irrelevant with respect to the way they’re voting. Or maybe they’re not as aware of the danger as we’ve been led to believe. The reality is the situation is far more stable than many, especially on the Right, have tried to argue, and that stability is intersecting with increasing levels of polarization, creating a strange dynamic where we might think something’s wrong, but picking the other side is unfathomable because they’re likely to be even worse.
There’s always been a disparity between what Democrats and Republicans see as the great issues of the moment, but on many, it seems like the two sides are living in two different realities:
Scott McKay further explained the dynamic in The American Spectator:
There are so many utterly horrid Democrats who will remain in office after this election that it should be offensive to average Americans. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of believing there must be wholesale corruption in American elections, but the problem with going there is that there must be proof before it’s actionable.
Until some is presented, we’ll have to deal with something very unpleasant. Namely, here’s the truth that we on the Right are going to have to accept: the American electorate in 2022 is awful.
And the axiom about the cycle that involves weak men and tough times is a real thing, and we are in the worst quadrant of that cycle.
We are still in the time in which weak men make tough times. We have not gotten to the point where tough times make tough men.
But get ready because those tough times will do their work. Perhaps for quite a long while.
Somehow, the Democrats and their pals in the legacy media managed to convince a large swath of Americans that we’re not in a recession. Four in five Americans are unsatisfied with the economy, a large majority seem to be furious about gas prices, people say crime is out of control, and yet barely half of the country — if that — are motivated to unload the horrid leadership that caused those issues.
Look at the state New York is in, and yet the voters there overwhelmingly chose to retain [Kathy] Hochul?
What this shows is a solidification of the dividing lines which became increasingly apparent during the last decade. Americans have strong opinions about economics, race, religion, and everything else under the sun, but currently, it all comes down to which side of the spectrum they feel an affinity towards. And yes, we’re increasingly reaching a point where not picking a side isn’t an option. If you don’t, a side will be picked for you, by virtue of your family, personal associations, where you live, what industry you work in, etc. I don’t like guilt by association any more than the next person, but a consequence of becoming a more illiberal society is just that - we’re defined less as individuals and more by the company we keep.
I keep thinking back to this tweet which I shared some entries ago:
Americans have no shared culture, not anymore. People like President Joe Biden insist the U.S. remains a civic nation united by a common creed, but either nobody seems to know what the creed is, nor is my creed the same as that of someone else. The American identity is fleeting, open-ended, coming to mean whatever one wants it to mean at any given point in time. What we have instead are partisan political identities that are increasingly coming to supersede all others. Even race, sexual orientation, and religion are increasingly tied to these political identities and cannot stand on their own without them. I’ve said before we aren’t as divided a society as we often seem, but the one thing Americans appear increasingly unable to tolerate are political differences. Maybe not to the point where we’re hurting each other, but we can’t imagine living with them, either.
In other words, if you think the hyper-polarization can’t get any worse, you’re in for a nasty surprise. If America’s this badly divided now, imagine what happens when living conditions deteriorate and they most certainly will. Back to Scott McKay:
But gas prices will skyrocket thanks to the Biden administration’s running out of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The true shortage of both crude oil and refined petroleum products will soon become unmistakable.
And it’s going to be a cold winter in America, and a rough time coming.
You only think it’s rough now. You have no idea how bad things can get. When the diesel fuel runs out and the trucks don’t move, and the shelves go empty, and the layoffs come, perhaps you’ll think of 2022 as the good times.
To be sure, a lot of people were making the same predictions a year ago and the worst hasn’t happened yet. Maybe things don’t get bad that quickly. The point here is that bad as we think it is now, it can certainly get worse and, again, it likely will. We are nowhere close to a breaking point as so many commentators, especially on the Right, have claimed. There are no indications the situation is improving any time soon, with inflation most certain to become chronic. Once more, if we’re pointing fingers at each other now, what do you think we’re going to do as life becomes more expensive and uncertain with no relief in sight?
One last bit from McKay:
The responsibility of the American public was to deliver an utter rebuke to the Left and the Democrat Party that the Left runs, and the 2022 election was not a rebuke.
How you can perform so manifestly awfully in running a country like the United States of America over the past two years and not suffer a rebuke from the American public is mystifying. But the Democrats will perform even more manifestly awfully over the next two years.
The lesson of the 2022 mid-terms? Expect more of the same. Don’t expect resounding victories except in places where one party dominates over the other. Expect the margins for victory to be narrow, with some offices and seats flipping back and forth every election. American politics will increasingly resemble that of Latin America, where turn-out is routinely in the 60 - 80% range, but nothing ever changes despite tremendous public participation in democracy. Expect more gridlock and paralysis in government as the two sides spend even more time trying to impede and obstruct the other. If you think nothing gets done now, things are just getting warming up. In fact, the zero-sum nature of the two-party system guarantees a level of dysfunction that simply cannot be overcome by voting or through vigorous exercise of democracy.
The dysfunction will increasingly concentrate real power in the hands of two entities: the chief executive, also known as the president, and the managerial state. One is elected, the other isn’t, but with the right person in the White House, Washington’s permanent bureaucracy can run the country whether it’s explicitly told what to do or not and with the American people’s approval or not. Kind of makes you wonder what the purpose of Congress is, doesn’t it?
Why did I bring up the Spanish Civil War at the start of this entry? The SCW is a worst-case scenario where a two-sided political divide becomes so deep and so fraught, the only way to resolve the impasse is for one side to win outright through violence. Irreconcilable opposing worldviews transformed politics into a zero-sum, existential struggle where the very presence of an opposing side becomes a matter of life or death. I’ve said before diversity acts as an impediment towards the outbreak of widespread violence and America’s got plenty of diversity, but when a society becomes divided into two well-defined partisan sides, the risk elevates. At the least, employing force against the other side doesn’t seem totally beyond the pale, even if things don’t ultimately escalate to the level of a full-bore civil war like Spain endured.
An increasing slide towards authoritarianism. A country splitting itself into two mass political factions. How does this end? Rod Dreher has an idea and I’m afraid to say he’s not off the mark:
What else is there? We could well live to see a radical right political movement following the implosion of this Weimar-like culture, but no sane conservative can possibly want a replay of 1930s Germany. Reading Hannah Arendt’s 1951 study The Origins Of Totalitarianism is deeply unsettling, given how almost all the signs she identified as precursors to totalitarianism are vividly present in contemporary America. It could be that having failed to conserve anything from the past, American conservatives of the near future will face a battle to conserve truth, faith, and moral sanity while the ignorant armies of the radical left and post-Christian right clash in the long night ahead.
Mind you, Germany didn’t fight a civil war. Actually, they kind of did, in the late 1910s after the end of World War I and the empire collapsed, but this was still a far cry from the hell on Earth that characterized the SCW. The point is that not even powerful, relatively stable (rule-of-law intact) societies are immune from conflict. At the moment, the situation in the U.S. remains tranquil post-elections: there haven’t been major outbreaks of violence and voters appear to be conducting themselves in civil fashion, which is nice to see. But the unease in the air is palpable, at least for me. The 2022 mid-terms may stoke less passion, but it may prove most significant in what it revealed about the state of the union.
What about 2024? If 2020 was any indication, ‘24 is sure to be even more fraught. Then ‘28. Then ‘32. Each election will see voters clamber for stronger leadership, either to hurt the other side or to forge unity. The stronger the leader, the more likely a red line is to be crossed. For now, it’s the Left that remains in firm control, even as their grip in the House and Senate appear tenuous, though that’s something that’ll become increasingly irrelevant going forward.
As the Left becomes more powerful, the only recourse will be for the Right to answer with authoritarianism of their own. The great right-wing boogeymen of Spain’s Francisco Franco or Germany’s Adolf Hitler don’t emerge in isolation, as a bunch of discontents who show up to ruin everyone’s democratic good times. They are a reaction, if excessive, to authoritarianism from the other side, instability, and revolution. We may be far from a truly existential political crisis, but in keeping with the title of this blog, you can see it from here.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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That little war in Germany in the 1910's wasn't that the Jewish Communists attempting to start a revolt against their rightful government? Just saying: what goes around comes around.