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

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:

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

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.

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:

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."

“If the GOP nominates a socon, then I think there will be a GOP liberal-RAT conservative “unity” ticket (think Bell-Everett), and there MAY be a right-wing Nader equivalent, as well (think Breckenridge). If the GOP nominates a liberal, there will be a conservative insurgency.”

While I agree that there may be a conservative insurgency if a socially liberal candidate is the GOP nominee, I respectfully disagree on the other predictions.

Those who would vote for Giuliani, either because they genuinely support him, or so that Hillary may be stopped, would NEVER field a third-party, or splinter, candidate - which would, of course, get Hillary elected.

Only the socons would split from the party if a Giuliani-type was the Republican nominee. Everyone else would rally ‘round the nominee no matter who it is, imho.

Such is my dread of a Hillary presidency that I consider myself a “dead-cat” Republican*, in that I’d rather vote for a dead cat than the 2008 Democrat nominee. Dead-cat Republicans have no more problem voting for Rudy than they do Huckabee, because their goals are clear: KEEP THE DEMS OUT OF THE WHITEHOUSE IN 2008.

Most Republicans are dead-cats. Only the most passionate socons are not. So the party splits only with a Rudy nomination, as I see it.

*Apologies to yellow-dog Democrats.

Pat Buchanan called it “a war for the soul of America” at the 1992 Republican convention. He was scolded by the elitist media.

The (elder) Bush circle was disgusted; but Pat was right.

Today, the Bush gang is still clueless.

a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Hey! That's my line. George Norry.

The latest from CoasttoCoastAM -- Bush black ops people will nuke a U.S. city (the regular guest said his sources indicate that it will be Las Vegas), Bush the Evil will blame Iran, Bush the Evil will then annihilate Iran completely. Pufff! Gone.

Ya remember the B-52, missiles hubbub? Hee hee. Black ops, USAF insider ruse to make off with at least one of the missiles, another expert guest said. Don't be surprised, there's a mushroom cloud acomin' some place.

Norry is not a MorOn.org, dailycuss type; he's basically conservative and links to right wing sites. The best I can figure -- given my age and all -- is he's a FDR Democrat. Proud American, patriotic but boy! how FDR Democrats hated Republicans.

We came very close to having deadly, destructive race riots as the events unfolded in Florida, election 2000. Only Al Gore himself stopped efforts to provoke riots.

It gave the election to IMO the winning candidate, Mr. Bush. Otherwise, Gore would surely have become the president.

You remember MSM employees reporting daily on the problems that blacks experienced and also the MSM employees constantly reported on "The will of the people"? At the time -- given my age and memory of the 1960s and the nature of the dispute -- I wondered, when will the rioting start?

"The will of people" with rioting of course meant that Bush must bow out else the rioting will continue, spreading to cities all across the nation.

Next time there will be no one willing to stop the rioting except of course us Americans of all colors.

Enter the ILLEGAL ALIENS. The Left will likely use as many of them as they can stir up next time there's a chance to "Bring it all down, man."

we may have a new civil war before Hillary’s first term is over.

I used to think Bill Clinton was going to start a civil war, but I was mistaken. I think a major preventative factor in that was his scandals. He was too distracted to truly rule as the dictator he could have been.

That, and I don't necessarily think he was ultimately driven by power. I think he was a troubled kid who thought it would be cool to be the most powerful man in the world so he could get the chicks he couldn't get in high school (look at some of Hillary's pictures as a young woman).

politics in its most primitive, unthinking, tribal form.

I saw a poster on DU this morning calling out his fellow DU'ers for hating people he didn't know (in reference to some of them wishing for parts of California to burn to the ground because they hate the rich).

Everyone on the thread chimed in and said that no one who would do such a thing should call themselves a Democrat. I wanted to sign up, knowing I would be immediately banned, and say "I'm a Republican that you don't know - do you hate me?".

Their closed minded thinking and hypocrisy are incredible, and incredibly dangerous.

Excellent post, BTW. I read it after I posted my comments.

Most would look at your comments about the Jews in Nazi Germany, roll their eyes and move on, but you are absolutely correct in your analysis of that situation. I've had the same thoughts myself.

Look at my tag line, then go look at the website. If "progressives" held the reins of power tightly enough I am convinced they would systematically eliminate conservatives because we stand in the way of "progress". It's been the rationale of genocidal monsters throughout history.

Many similarities between the fight against slavery then, and the fight for survival as a free moral nation now. Elections in Jersey show that "morality" is scoffed at as an issue. What New Jerseyians want are "effective" political operators. And they do get them, while morality is ignored or laughed about.

When there was outright slavery, people understood the moral component of political issues. When people and their politics no longer care about moral issue, then freedom becomes lost.

Yet slavery is back in the US, big time. It is a form of indentured servitude. A very comfortable prideful form. It is being captured for life in debt. It is even in being a salaried employee, with withholding and medical plans and pensions. Those are sinecures -- yes, a very plush form of slavery, but still a form thereof. And if unionized the slaves vote the line the master lays out -- not in totality, but in much stronger measure then freemen would.

Thanks for this great thread. The fissures of this political divide go deep.

It got me thinking - I found this thread from yesteryear:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1453903/posts

From a 1950 preface to a book on Constitutional government:

“The National Education Association, theoretically representing the teachers of the country, had for years been passing resolutions favoring whatever was before the public of un-American import, especially for getting the imperial Government at Washington, through “Federal aid,” to take over the shaping in school of American ideas. Under the cloak of “academic freedom” men in the universities belittled those who wrote the Constitution and pronounced their work faulty and outmoded. The schools, while neglecting to give thorough courses in our history, and especially in constitutional history or the history of Liberty, admitted objectionable textbooks and periodicals.”

Those were the good old days, eh!

Thanks for posting one of Mark’s best yet.

Many of us have been noting that we are in the Cold War Phase of Civil War II as Travis McGee noted.

Your comments below define as you note the chasm between us and the liberals:

“Unlikely. 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. The difference is as stark as night and day: capitalism versus socialism, Judeo-Christian morals versus atheistic moral relativism, American exceptionalism versus United Nations membership, victory as annihilation of terrorists versus victory as denial of terrorists.”

“I don’t know that it’s even theoretically possible now to unify the two sides of this chasm. Heck, The New York Times today published an editorial declaring that high taxes yield economic competitiveness. I don’t know any Oklahomans, now enjoying the lowest tax rate in the country, who could take such a contention seriously. But New Yorkers believe it. So we need to raise taxes to resuscitate the flailing economy, or we need to maintain or lower taxes (and drill for oil) to continue the prosperous economy.”

I think the Spanish Civil War holds many parallels. For example, it gave the world “The Fifth Column” of hidden subversives already in place within a city. Another similarity I believe is in the split between religious conservatives and secular progressives. That just leaps out at me. Also, a lack of defined front lines in the early stages, with the Spanish Civil War being an almost anarchical free for all melee at times.

I've seen a poll on a fairly sane-sounding leftist site asking whether Bush will cancel the 2008 elections. I have no idea how the notion came up, and little idea how pervasive it is - but apparently a non-trivial number of people think so.

Indeed, I've seen a lot on both sides looking for a fight - and I've posted as such for a long time. Worth repeating: each side has a language, lingo & banter which defines how they think about the opposition ... and which the opposition cannot comprehend as applicable, relevant, or even parse. Catchy phrases (of dubious accuracy, or even lexical meaning) spread rapidly, people revel in the demonization of their opponents, and reasonable discussion is rejected in favor of shouting matches. There is no sense of engaging others in debate, just a self-reinforcing desire to portray differing views as evil ... with the eventual conclusion that this evil must, of course, be physically eradicated.

Yes, it's happening on both sides. When, at the end of the carnage, someone asks "Why?", remind them that the answer was "because of largely trivial differences."

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