The American Dream?

America Edging Closer to Civil War?

Clearing out my desk and having a general tidy-up, I uncovered an article by Niall Ferguson from last October. (You seriously mean you have not tidied your desk since last October?) Before anyone puts me in the Pigpen stockade, I must point out that I have done some tidying – just not enough to get to the bottom of the pile. (aside) I remember when I was a hard-working teacher, the Head sometimes would come into my room – take one look at my desk (piled high with exercise books, bits of paper and the detritus of a hard day at the chalk-face) and comment on the untidy look of my desk. At such times he would, unwisely in my view, comment that in his office his desk was always immaculate. I simply could not avoid pointing out that the nature of his desk simply showed that he did not have enough work to do. I managed to do so with such good humour as to avoid being trash-canned.

I digress.

Niall was arguing that there is a kind of cultural war being fought on social media. He goes on, “Of course the culture war is no more of real war that the trade war with China.” He goes on to relate that in the news at that time was the fact that pipe-bombs had been sent to some of the President’s most vocal critics.. Clinton, Obama, Soros and DeNiro to name but a few. A Florida man, Cesar Sayoc, 56, was arrested. His van was covered with pro-Trump bumper stickers including one reading “CNN sucks”. “Trump owns this” declared a normally sober Washington correspondent. Ferguson did not agree - pointing out that a direct causal relationship between the two acts is just silly.

That people on both sides of the political divide use hyperbole and inflammatory language is not at issue. The do – on both sides of the Atlantic. And, social media simply amplifies the opportunities to do so. Both alt-right extremists and left wing nutters are more than capable of inflaming any otherwise inconsequential situation. But, leading to a civil war?

Ferguson contends that scaremongers who fantasise that all left-leaning Americans may emigrate to Canada (far too cold!) and right-wing gun nuts may secede from the Union rather than submit to even modest Second Amendment reform are over-stating the case.

He reflects: the historian Victor Davis Hanson has warned that we are “at the brink of a veritable civil war” and, therefore, we all need to pay attention. His comments are designed to warn reasonable voters of the dangers of extremism.

His historical analysis quoting the 1850’s (When congressmen routinely entered the House and Senate armed with pistols and swords and “The Caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts, in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders, including a relative of Brooks. The beating nearly killed Sumner and it drew a sharply polarized response from the American public on the subject of the expansion of slavery in the United States. It has been considered symbolic of the "Breakdown of reasoned discourse" that eventually led to the American Civil War.”) - Wikipedia

Niall goes on: “the most troubling analogy I heard last week was between the 2020 Presidential election and that of 1860. Lincoln was in a four-way race in 1860. If a center-ish, say Ohio Governor Katich runs on a third-party ticket and the Democrats nominate a progressive (say) Sanders or Harris and if Trump seeks re-election (almost a certainty) we could have a somewhat similar situation.

The parallels are not comforting. The 1860 election simply confirmed that there was no way to reconcile the two polar opposites. The issue of slavery had made them irreconcilable. Lincoln’s election simply brought the situation to it’s logical end.

You may argue that there is no single issue like slavery to unite behind in today’s culture war. But, the person who drew Niall’s attention to this was none other than Steve Bannon.

Nuff, said?