The 'cold civil war' in the U.S.: The common space required for civil debate...(MARK STEYN)

MacLean's, Toronto, Ontario, Canada ^ | 22 October 2007 | Mark Steyn

[dufekin]

William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word "cyberspace," way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:

Alejandro looked over his knees. "Carlito said there is a war in America."

"A war?"

"A civil war."

"There is no war, Alejandro, in America."

"When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?"

"That was the 'cold war.' "

Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. "A cold civil war."

Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun's vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.

"You don't follow politics, Tito."

That's quite a concept: "A cold civil war." Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it's tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author's formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'd dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Someone else says, "America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government." Etc. But it's that one phrase that makes you pause: "A cold civil war."

Or so you'd think. In fact, it seems to have passed entirely without notice. Unlike "cyberspace" a quarter-century ago, the "cold civil war" is not some groovy paradigm for the day after tomorrow but a cheerless assessment of the here and now, too bleak for buzz. As far as I can tell, April Gavaza, at the Hyacinth Girl website, is pretty much the first American to ponder whether a "cold civil war" has any significance beyond the novel:

What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as "[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation." In that respect, is the current political climate one of "cold civil war"? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election ...

Indeed. A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.

Obviously the vast majority of Americans are not foaming partisans. It would be foolish to adduce any general theories from, say, Mr. "Ed Funkhouser," who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, "who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?" An hour and a half later he realized he'd forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: "you are a f--kin' moron. and probably queer too!" No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse. Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the "regime change" and "inside job" types have set the pace.

But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies. In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop's Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn't exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things -- the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus -- but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained -- the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance -- but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.

Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:

Hollywood's latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?

A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper -- "Taser this: F--k Bush" -- and the Denver Post hails him as "the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious." Anyone audacious enough to write "F--k Hillary" or "F--k Obama" at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?

Speaking of which, Columbia University won't allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you're bebottoming.

It's curious to encounter the soft-left establishment's hostility to the state. Go back to that line of Gibson's: free peoples develop "Stockholm Syndrome" about government all over the world, not least in Stockholm. It seems a mite inconsistent to entrust government to manage your health care and education and to dictate what you can and can't toss in the trash, but then to fret over them waging war on your behalf. Perhaps the next president will be, as George W. Bush promised, "a uniter, not a divider." Perhaps some "centrist Democrat" or "maverick Republican" will win big, but right now it doesn't feel that way.

Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain's Harold Macmillan famously replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Yet in the end even "events" require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. "The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we're doing here," one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review's Rich Lowry this week, "in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact." As Lowry remarked, "This is the lonely war" -- its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front. In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation." The "cold civil war" may be another "consensual hallucination," but for many it's more real than "the lonely war."

[JillValentine]

America, 2007 is frighteningly similar to Spain, 1936.

The Soviet-sponsored May Day celebrations drove a lot of conservatives over the edge.

[JillValentine]

That’s exactly what happened in Chile in 1970. Allende was elected with about 35% of the vote, with the other 65% split between centrist and rightist candidates. And Allende, of course, failed to take a hint and governed as if he’d won in a landslide, ramming radical Marxist policies into government.

[LibLieSlayer]

I agree.

LLS

[LibLieSlayer]

I think we will have a battle at the Convention if that is so... it has been decades... but it could be the safety valve that saves us... if needed.

LLS

[Jim Noble]

I think we will have a battle at the Convention if that is so... it has been decades... but it could be the safety valve that saves us... if needed.

I don't think there is any current candidate who is acceptable to both factions of the party.

[bvw]

A fraudulently elected legislature in 1855 by ballot injections by slavers in raids from the slave states, eventually remedied, barely, in Wynadotte 1859 after many tribulations -- the Free Staters won, the South withdrew from the Federal Union, Kansas then went from Territory to a State in the Union.

We can count on fraud in many states this coming election. Can we hold it down? Or will it be done as boldly in daylight as in Kansas in those days, or as boldly as Hillary now stands dancing in the rain of Chinese money, with none demanding she be fined and the money claimed as proceeds of criminal and even seditious conspiracy and bribes?

Are we free enough to withstand the Chinese slavers?

[stephenjohnbanker]

BUMP

[exit82]

Thanks for taking the time to educate me on 1855 Kansas.
There was a lot of violence in Kansas as well, if I recall my history.

I agree with you about the fraud issue. It was an issue in 2000, but the GOP was too “gentlemenly” to confront it.

They also failed to do in 2004.

Hillary’s support bases are all in the major cities, whixh are Democratically controlled.

I lived in NJ for many years—election fraud in the inner cities was raised to an art form there.

Then after all of our hard work to overcome the Dems and voter fraud to lect a Republican governor, Christie Todd Whitman, she turned out to be a worthless RINO.

The comment about the “Chinese slavers” and their influence in 2008 is very prescient.

And why not—it worked for them with the last Clinton Presidential candidate.

[khnyny]

Allende = Clinton?

IMHO, it would be a mistake to have a third party candidate. That’s how Bubba won the first time around.

[Sherman Logan]

systematic disarmament of the enemies of the Left.

I'm sure there are plans to accomplish this, but public opinion and actual policies in recent decades have mostly moved in the other direction.

Concealed carry "shall issue" is now legal in the vast majority of states. 20 years ago Florida was the first state to adopt this policy.

Public support for gun control has dropped a great deal in the same period.

[Publius]

Two years ago I wrote The Splintering of the Democratic Party, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Albert Gore take a shot at the Green Party nomination. That's more likely than a Nader-Paul alliance.

I wouldn't be surprised to see both parties splinter and the election decided in the House.

[FreedomPoster]

Big CWII ping.

This article lays it out better than most.

dufekin’s post 6 is a nice succinct summary, as well.

[Carbonado]

“The separation between the conservative red states and the liberal blue cities is a profound chasm; the two sides increasingly operate off different perceptions of reality and different reasoning processes”

I believe that this is absolutely true, but I also believe that the divide, while it is real, isn’t anywhere near 50-50 as I think many would assume.

I believe that about 35% of the population is of the “red state of mind” and will express themselves as such publicly and vote accordingly.

There is another 35 or so percent that is of that red state of mind but chooses to remain silent because of the Liberal hegemony in the MSM, which frames the public debate on most issues in such a way that to oppose the Lib positions is presented as an affront to decency and fairness. They don’t want others to say bad things about them, so they go along. They can easily be persuaded by a coherent conservative argument if someone will make it.

Then there are the True Blue Libs of the NYT and WAPO variety (almost all in large urban areas) that make up less than 30% of the population or less.

It is the power of the Liberal controlled media from Hollywood to music to “journalists” that have power way beyond their numbers due to their control of the public debate.

And that is the real war.

[Doomonyou]

Besides, I've done a bit of wordsmithing myself.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah...So when is the next one gonna be done? ;)

[FFranco]

In the Spanish Civil War, nearly all the army went with the Nationalists, while most of the navy remained loyal to the republic. That probably made a big difference in the end result, though help from Hitler and Mussolini didn’t hurt the Nationalist cause.

During the US Civil War, the army split according to state loyalty. Most of the navy stayed with the North. Probably because most of the navy’s officer corps and seamen came from northern states where there was more of a seagoing tradition. As I recall, at the beginning people were generally allowed to leave their units and move to the opposite side withouth interference.

My impression of the US military today is that nearly all the officers are conservatives. There might be more liberals among the enlisted personnel. It would probably be hard to guarantee the military’s adherence to either side.

[Fishrrman]

“That’s exactly what happened in Chile in 1970. Allende was elected with about 35% of the vote, with the other 65% split between centrist and rightist candidates. And Allende, of course, failed to take a hint and governed as if he’d won in a landslide, ramming radical Marxist policies into government.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1751504/posts?page=34#34

- John

[FreedomPoster]

OK, I wasn’t paying attention, and thought I was getting the original ping from my normal Mark Steyn ping list. Sorry for the double ping, CWII folks.

[FreedomPoster]

Don’t miss post 11. Gibson is behind the curve.

[Screaming_Gerbil]

Civil War II Bump

[Fishrrman]

There is another 35 or so percent that is of that red state of mind but chooses to remain silent because of the Liberal hegemony in the MSM, which frames the public debate on most issues in such a way that to oppose the Lib positions is presented as an affront to decency and fairness. They don’t want others to say bad things about them, so they go along. They can easily be persuaded by a coherent conservative argument if someone will make it

I've coined a term for these voters:
The "waving wheat". (A FR/Fishrrman original)

They are the wishy-washy independents and undecideds, unable to make up their own minds, who bend and wave en masse in the direction of the prevailing political winds.

Which direction they lean towards depends on who's making the most "political wind". Obviously the mainstream media has long been the "windmaker", but the internet may be changing that.

I sense that currently, those political winds seem to be blowing in the democrats' direction, but I hope I'm proven wrong or that they shift a little back towards our side. We shall see.

- John