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Wednesday, January 25, 2017

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.

19 comments:

  1. I am surrounded by uniformly conservative (Pro-Trump) friends, relatives, and coworkers.

    Racist language is the accepted daily norm.

    ..... but let any of them find out you are agnostic ..... you will be subliminally shunned from that point forward.

    ..... moral of the story, Texas or SCal .... neither are safe zones for free thinkers.

    We're perhaps just a little more conditioned for politeness due to the higher probability of ideological arguments escalating into instant gunplay.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pasto, I will put you up after it becomes Calexico. You need some culture shock. I just want a picture of you and the fam walking on the ice in front of the house like some bewildered Saudis in a twilight zone episode.

    The REAL good news is that if CA actually seceded (and it was allowed (hello, 1861, anyone?) there will never be a D president again.

    Of course the new wall would be a real pain in the ass

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pasto,
    Damn. It's that bad?

    If you flee here, I will put you up. I do have a "spare" house. And I think that you can find a job here -- possibly in the specific field wherein you're working now. But I can't offer you the culture shock that Epa has offered.

    Here in the D.C. area, most are anti-Trump. In fact, I've been shocked by some of the postings of some of my FB friends, who previously would not have said such ugly things about any GOP POTUS -- or any POTUS, for that matter.

    But there are also many here in the D.C. area who are Trumpers and, for various reasons, secret Trumpers. I'm one of the not-so-secret Trumpers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It is that bad.

    I have been the proverbial frog boiling in water.

    It has gotten so bad that yesterday, I went to a Hispanic friend of mine who is a Trump supporter and asked him if it is difficult for him in his all-Hispanic family.

    His answer: "No, most of the men and some of the women in my family are Trump supporters".

    IMAGINE THAT.

    It's worse in my family.

    Then I began to ask him, "Do they call you racist?" And I looked at him and realized, no, they would never do that, BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL HISPANIC.

    But they do it to me.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Epa, you are absolutely right. It would be such a culture shock for my family, ESPECIALLY FOR MY KIDS.

    But I probably won't leave until my kids are no longer under my support. In other words, I have a few years to go.

    My wife wants to leave too. She feels some of the same alienation, but not to the same degree as me. And she loves the weather here much more than I do.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Pasto,
    Wow.

    You are young enough to get out.

    Please contact me privately if you want to make some plans for this area. As a lifelong resident here, I have quite a few contacts in various fields of employment.

    What upsets me the most about what you've shared in this blog post is the way your family is treating you. That's so hurtful!

    ReplyDelete
  7. RT,
    You have a really interesting point. I hadn't really thought about the fact that agnostics or non-Christians would be treated that way, but it makes sense from everything I have noticed about Texas the six or seven times I was there.

    As I did mention in my post, I am neither fish nor fowl, and I don't honestly think I would be a model Texan if I did move there.

    I guess if I moved to Austin I would be fine, and I do like Austin, but it might be too similar to California for my taste.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AOW,

    It is upsetting to me to be treated this way, but to be fair, it is the younger people and the people who married my brothers and sisters-in-law who shun me or call me racist. It's not those who are closest to me.

    But I realized I am not among friends many times, even within my own family.

    In a way, it's my own fault. As you guys know, I can be a LITTLE blunt.

    LOL

    ReplyDelete
  9. Being blunt isn't a crime in my book. The real tragedy will unfold in the days which reality will repeatedly and mercilessly smack these #NeverTrump'ers/deniers in the face.

    At those points, one could choose to remain steadfast and blunt by coldly reminding them at each opportunity . . ."I told you so" or spare them some humility by simply walking away. Karma, it's whats for breakfast.

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  10. 'In a way, it's my own fault. As you guys know, I can be a LITTLE blunt.'


    Makes you perfect curmudgeon for ME02.
    We are all curmudgeons.

    After all, what we do every day here is benevolent anarchy.

    Ex hippies - 60's, you know V-1.0, who woke up realized we had to work, cut our hair, never forgot, sold our first homes, moved here, got rifles, fishing poles, heat with wood, and DO THAT FOR REAL, and if we help the neighbors it's because we WANT TO, or moral and religious imperative which is internal. and finally LIVE ON THE ROAD WE BUILT.

    A place where the jews (us) are continually and good naturedly invited to the born again church to SING

    And when I say NORMAN ROCKWELL LAND, it's an exaggeration, but not a huge one.

    Our town - 61% Trump

    BY the way, the summers ...May - Sept are paradise, and there is nothing like the autumn, I promise you, and as odd as it sounds, the day after an 18" snowstorm, when you get out there in the morning with the cold front coming in and not a cloud around, and the sun sparkling like diamonds off the powder as the snowblower gets going, with the music blasting in the headphones ... you will discover something

    Spring SUCKS, btw.

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  11. Pasto,
    My bluntness has cost me a few friends and some clientele.

    But no family members. So far. They are used to me. LOL. And most feel the same way about politics as I do.

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  12. Pasto,

    What you are experiencing merely shows that Americans exist who do not fully understand freedom of expression. What an individual desires regarding their own expression must be the courtesy they extend toward the other. I have actually learned the art of listening without rebuttal or argument. I can also choose to be silent. At times the silent pauses allow me to more fully understand (and not necessarily appreciate or support) the view of my counterpart. And more and more, my silence does not denote lack of understanding, but it merely means that my neural pathways are fully activated and in combat mode. Silent, deadly. But activated.

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  13. Epa,
    Questions:

    1) why does Spring suck?

    2) don't you have humidity in the summer?

    ReplyDelete
  14. AOW,
    I think the difference is

    DC is a place where both Republicans and Democrats congregate, while California is a place that has, because of it's proximity to the border, entertainment, and technology, has become absolutely totalitarian Leftist.

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  15. TLEP,
    That's why you're a good journalist.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Curmudgeonly benevolent anarchy.

    I like that.

    Maybe needs to go on the masthead somewhere :-)

    ReplyDelete
  17. :)

    BTW, when you do decide to run you can always come "home". Less snow than Epa's neck of the woods, less politics than AoW's & we can put a big cabin tent up in the back yard until you can get resituated.

    ReplyDelete