The Second American Civil War

Two articles in the past two days, about the Civil War we find gathering up around us like a tidal wave.

But first, evidence:

SHOCK POLL: 1 in 3 Californians now support secession...

One in every three California residents supports the most populous U.S. state's peaceful withdrawal from the union, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, many of them Democrats strongly opposed to Trump's ascension to the country's highest office. 

The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it around the time Scotland held its independence referendum and voted to remain in the United Kingdom.

I will testify that it has become decidedly unpleasant to be a Trump-supporting Conservative in Southern California. I have to keep my mouth shut about my beliefs everywhere I go, almost all the time. Once in awhile, I find myself relatively alone, in a room, or a corner, with one or two other people who I know to be more like me. But even then, half the time we have to whisper in code for fear of betraying ourselves to others within earshot.

Everyone around me is inured, marinated in Leftism. My children have learned little else, from their schools, from their peers, from the media, from the internet. I have been called a "racist" by members of my own family. I have to whisper my own opinions behind cupped hands to other like-minded family members at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

No one has given any thought to the fact that it JUST MIGHT BE racist to call me a racist for being a white person who is a Conservative.

I mean, right?

If I were a brown person who leaned Conservative, I would not be called a racist. But because I am white, I am, to them, a "racist."

They judge me by the color of my skin. Giving me a name, a category, a box to live in within their shallow minds, because of my lack of pigmentation. They report me to their comrades. The pall descends and crowds around me. I am slowly becoming a non-person. I may occupy the same space, but I am to be ignored.

I am being disappeared.

If you don't think resentment builds up over time, you have not lived with the relentless slow drip of insult, and presumptuous ideological ownership over mindspace; the Leftist Privilege of a totalitarian Leftist culture like Southern California.

I dream of making a run for it, of fleeing across the border to Arizona, or Texas, anywhere but here. But I fear I may be too old by now. In my middle age, I just may carry too much the odor of the ideological prison within which I live. I'm neither fish nor fowl.

I think it must be obvious to anyone who has read this site that I am not a typical Conservative. I am a Conservative with the behavior or a Leftist. That is because I am what I am; a Southern Californian, born and bred. And I can not not be what I am.

From Dennis Prager:

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War. 

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War. 

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents' offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War. 

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

AND THEN THERE'S THIS:

The Long Civil War,

From The Z Man:

John Derbyshire was the first person I heard use the phrase “cold civil war” to describe the culture war in American society and politics. His argument, if I recall correctly, is that the Civil War may have ended, but a cold version of it has festered ever since, largely over the issue of race, but other issues are part of it. 

The result has been the Blue side of the conflict, the good whites, imposing their will on the Gray side, the bad whites, using the “transcendent morality” of racism as the main weapon. It is a good way of looking at things. 

The recent hysteria about the bogeyman of racism, for example, is almost all coming from suburban white women, who live in all white neighborhoods. They don’t really care about blacks in a practical sense. Their real concern is the specter of bad whites holding opinions the good whites find unacceptable. It’s what caused them to go bonkers over Bush and then force the ridiculous Barak Obama on us. The bad whites needed to be taught a lesson and put in their place, which is at the bottom of the social order. 

The whole red state/blue state business that got going with the 2000 election was another manifestation of this. The bad whites voted for Bush and tended to live in awful places like the South and Midwest. The people who voted against Bush lived in cool paces like New York and LA. 

This was made more obvious in 2008 when the states not going for Obama were conspicuously Southern. More than a few lefties noted that the Old Confederacy did not vote for Obama and everyone knew what that meant. 

Now that this Progressive Awakening is sputtering to a comical end, the Left is increasingly convinced that the nation is headed for a civil war. 

The reason the Official Right was willing to join arms with the Left in opposition to Trump last year was their belief that Trump was leading some sort of rebellion of the bad whites against the benevolent rule of the good whites. 

Now that Trump has been installed as ruler, the same people are imagining a counter rebellion by the good whites, like the cat ladies, who waddled into DC on Saturday. The only thing they were missing was having the geriatric Madonna lead the crowd in singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It is easy to dismiss it, as the Left is prone to these sorts of histrionics whenever they don’t get their way. 

Even so, what we may be seeing is not a new civil war or even a continuation of the Civil War. Maybe what we are seeing is the final, long delayed end of the Civil War. The political realignment we are witnessing is not the start of anything, but the end of a long cycle of American history that started in the 19th century with the Hartford Convention. 

After several delays, we are reaching the final denouement. If you think of America in terms of The American Nations model or maybe the Nine Nations model, the last 200 years can be looked at as a long hegemony of Yankeedom over the rest of the country. 

Following the Civil War, the South was excluded from having a say in how the nation was governed. The Midwest and Mid-Atlantic were subordinate to the Yankee ruling class, while the West was simply not a factor. This remained the case into the 20th century, as America went from provincial backwater to an industrial power. 

The 20th century should have been when this post Civil War arrangement began to fall apart as the South rebuilt and the West joined the Union. Instead, the Great Depression, two world wars and the Cold War locked everything more or less in place. 

Nixon’s “southern strategy” to win the presidency was an early sign that the old order was unstable. The necessities of the Cold War kept things in place, but the dominance of the old Yankee elite was showing it’s age as far back as the 70’s. 

Look at something else. The Conservative Movement got going strong in the 1960’s and came into its own in the 70’s. The election of Reagan made conservatism the alternative to liberalism, but it did not change the regional alliances in the country. 

Up until very recent, conservatism was strongest in the South, but it had no Southern leaders. The GOP, the alleged home of the Right, remains a party of Southern voters, but Yankee leaders. 

The Trumpening has mostly been about the long overdue eviction of the Bushies from party leadership. Perhaps what we are witnessing is the start of a process where America returns to being a collection of regions more or less cooperating only on the big issues like national defense and trade. 

On those items, perhaps the national ethos returns to something like the John Quincy Adams model, rather than the Theodore Roosevelt model. 

A lot of what Trump says about foreign policy and trade may be a reaction to the neocon debacles of the last three decades, but they are also an echo of the pre-Civil War consensus. 

One final thing. The Left is suddenly talking about the need to restore powers to the state as they face a federal government controlled by their sworn enemies. There are many on the Right who would like to see an Article V Convention. One side fears what the Federal government might do and the other side has had enough of what the Federal government has done. The one thing all sides of the political class may accept in the end is a restoration of the natural regionalism that has always existed in America.