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April 5, 2007
Of Course You Know...
Fran Porretto is contemplating civic religion and the possibility of civil war. It's a topic, or really a set of topics, that has been on my mind for some time, and there are about half a dozen takes I need to get all of the various parts out. For now, I'd just like to respond to Fran's thoughts, and in particular to discuss whether the breakdown of the American polis portends worse.
I read a book some years ago, by an Australian author whose name I have sadly forgotten (along with the title), about why wars start. In order to know why war breaks out, he posited, one must know why peace breaks out. If we cannot know why peace comes, how can we understand why war comes? His conclusion, after much evidentiary exploration, was that war occurs because of a conflict of needs coupled with a difference of opinion on the consequences of war. If Iran, today, believed that taking 15 British sailors hostage would result in the immediate destruction of their Navy and ports, and possibly the nuclear destruction of Iran in toto, the odds of their capturing those sailors would be nil. On the other hand, if you think the enemy will refuse to fight, or lose if they do, you would be more likely to take action, as Iran has done (apparently with a correct reading of the situation).
So the questions as I see them, from a standpoint of disintegration of the polis in response to a progressive collapse of the civic religion over the last 130 years, is whether one or more of the four significant American subgroups will decide that they will fight at any cost, and whether the others will give way.
Digression: Those four groups, by the way, are the progressives/radical Leftists/Left-wing statists, the evangelicals, the originalists (not just libertarians, but small government conservatives and similar groups as well), and the institutional statists. The originalists held sway through the end of the Civil War, but Reconstruction brought the puritanical progressives into prominence. They gained power until they had it all, well into the FDR years. After that, the natural power seekers and hangers on (the institutional statists) took over, and have been in charge since. The evangelicals formed as a bloc under the social pressures following the 1960s and the capture of many institutions by the progressives with institutional statists in support, and began by the 1990s to wield significant influence with their insistence that moral rigidity and conformance was the answer to the problems caused by the moral ambiguity of the institutional statists and the moral decrepitude (by that time) of the progressives.
Anyway, I think it's clear by now that the unchallenged power of the institutional statists is at an end: the progressives have taken over the Democratic Party, and have made serious inroads into the far-right of the Republican Party (not evangelicals by and large, but puritanical moralists combined with reactionary megalomaniacs — the Buchananites, for example) in the last decade. The reasons they were able to do this are numerous, and irrelevant to this discussion, but I would think that a serious look at how teachers are trained, and what they believe, in connection with educational outcomes from primary and secondary educational institutions, would be a good place to start. Nonetheless, there has been a power shift among the elite towards the progressives. The progressives are not yet in unchallenged charge, but clearly they aim to be, and they might even succeed, at least for a time.
It is also clear that the progressives as a whole, from the anthropogenic global warming zealots and the netroots and the professional protesters to the abortion-by-decree absolutists and the health-care-free-for-all absolutists and the communist absolutists, have defined the enemy (anyone who shares their cultural roots, but not their contempt for their cultural roots), have defined their endpoint (total control of society), and have decided that destroying the entire system that created and enriched them (in order to take control of the aftermath and guide us to a brighter tomorrow) is their moral duty. They are willing to fight, and so far that has taken every form except widespread violence in support of their causes. Note the word "widespread:" there has been a great deal of localized and targeted violence. If the progressives decide to escalate into mob violence the way the brownshirts did (not out of the question, though only really likely if they suffer a really large political marginalization without also being reduced in numbers), would the other groups resist?
The institutional statists would not: they are heavily invested in the State and its corollaries (and thus themselves, of course) as all-powerful bringer of all wants and desires, but they are no more prepared to tolerate large-scale violence than they were during the riots of the 1960s that taught the progressives to fight in the first place. Indeed, a fairly large faction of the institutional statists, the center of the Democratic party in its political and media forms, actively applaud the progressives because they see the progressives as ultimately enriching their own (the institutional statists' own) power, while not being able to actually wield the power they wrest from the other institutional statists and the originalists.
The evangelicals might be willing to fight, but likely not. Despite their antithetical position to the progressives, and despite progressive propaganda about theocrats and so on, the reality is that the evangelicals are moral absolutists, but not very committed to violent means of imposing those moral absolutes. They think we should all agree with them, but they aren't willing to force the issue the way the progressives seem close to.
The originalists would fight, tooth and nail, and are well armed to boot. But the reality is that 5% of the population that cares cannot beat even 30% of the population that cares, and has State power on its side, with the rest of the populace not actively engaged (except rhetorically).
Therefore, the odds of civil war as our polis breaks down are small. The odds of repression, tyranny and decline, sadly, are quite a bit higher.
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Comments
Excellent post.
A couple of comments:
First, the Republicans as a whole are -- in my opinion -- a part of the Institutional Statists. Also, they are really a part of the post-New Deal "liberal" continuum that has governed us to this day, just a more "conservative" segment of it. You can find evidence for their "Institutional Statist" mindset by the way the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns have been conducted -- namely, half-assed with a lot of pulled punches as was the Vietnam War.
As to the future and the possibility of a "civil war," I think you are correct. However, I think that there is another likely alternative:
The "self-employed" segment of our society, after having reached a nadir around 1990, is growing again, and is heavily populated with people who want not only to opt out of big companies, but big governments as well. Another phenomenon occurring these days is the fact that large segments of the current American population are allowed to flout the law (illegal immigrants). I think other people will take the cue that if they can do so in large enough numbers as well, they could -- in effect -- form a separate society that lives more by originalists principles. The government(s) (they are plural, after all) will tolerate this because these "virtual gypsies" will be an important segment of the economy, just as drug cartels are in some other countries.
Our goverments, after all, tolerate drug use (cigarettes and alcohol) and gambling because these are also significant sources of revenue. While the whole idea of forming an "underground society" (actually, a new layer or segment of the one that already exists) is to also have an underground economy and avoid taxation, governments would be forced to accept the fact that -- while they will find it difficult to tax the "originalists" directly -- they will have to collect revenues from other segments of society buoyed up by the vibrant economy boosted by the originalists.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at April 9, 2007 5:44 PM