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There’s No Civil War
America is not on the verge of a civil war, no matter how much some media moguls may want us to be.
The silent majority of the American people don’t spend their time and energy on sick Twitter burns. Or howling at Trump Tower. Or putting on “pussy hats” and marching with Linda Sarsour. Or even writing brilliant, articulate posts like this on Ricochet.
Even we’re not like this most of the time. We mostly focus on family, friends, jobs, and how awesome the Mets are this year.
My most recent American experience was the day of the eclipse. I spent two hours with my daughter outside a mall (my wife was shopping, I was bored) offering people to look through our glasses. It was awesome. Each person had the same stunned, awed reaction when they saw the eclipse. I watched them. Different races, sexes, religions, and (I assume) income levels, professions, and political views.
Somebody who only knows America from Twitter, Fox, and CNN might expect that to cause trouble, but Americans know their offline world isn’t like that (mostly). In our normal day-to-day interactions, we relate to each other as fellow human beings living our lives together. Off Twitter and cable news, the American reality is not one of civil war.
There’s probably a sappy eclipse metaphor here but I’m distracted laughing at my memory of the picture of Trump looking at the eclipse. That was the Trumpiest thing ever. Carve that on Mount Rushmore.
So, engage in the cultural civil war (or not) but don’t let it dominate your time or destroy your perspective or your soul. Don’t follow the totalitarians into thinking everything is or should be about warring worldviews. What unites us is far greater than what divides us. And even our differences are mostly a good thing.
Spend most of your mental energies living, loving, and laughing.
And if you need tribal conflict, instead of fanning the flames of culture war, focus on those three magic words. Let’s go Mets.
Published in Culture
Amen.
Yes there is, and while you may not believe in it, it certainly believes in you and is not a fan.
Probably good advice but easier said than done. One must not read or listen to to the news, watch talk shows, comedians, TV series or shoot um up flicks on Netflix because it’s all presented in stark cultural war narratives from the other side.
Not a fan of me? Surely you jest.
True story: New York Mayor Ed Koch was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem with Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek when a very large rock is thrown at him, hitting him in the head and knocking him to the ground. Koch, bleeding from his head, looks up at the stunned Jerusalem mayor and says “That must have been meant for you. Everybody loves me.”
I wish I could agree with you. I really want to, but we disagree on core principles to such a degree that I fear it may escalate. One side stands for personal freedom, the other side is against it.
I have always been willing to die to protect freedom. Others have done so for me. I am beginning to believe they are willing to take lives in order to remove those freedoms.
Gil, you’re most certainly right that “we” aren’t at war with them (yet). But … they are most certainly at war with us.
The DNC, and its media collaborators, are a RICO enterprise.
Gil, thank you for making this point. I see a lot of people using the civil war metaphor here on Ricochet, and it has always struck me as being over the top. It’s an invitation to sloppy thinking and for the justification of things that are not justifiable short of an actual war. I prefer the metaphor of a bar fight. Nobody is going to get killed in a bar fight, and it is beyond the pale to draw a gun. You can attack your opponents, but there are still rules and still bounds of acceptable behavior.
One thing about a bar fight though – it is a bad idea to jump in if you don’t know which side you are on.
Diamond and Silk disagree ……..
I agree, Gil. Thank you for this post. The state of our country is important to me, but so are my friends, my work, my study, my practice. There is the great blue heron across the pond, the calling cardinal, the graceful palm trees. Our challenge in life is to find a way to fight for what’s right and also to find perspective and peace. No one else will or can do it for us.
I don’t believe in this “Civil War”, but I do have a question for those that do.
What does victory look like? What is the strategy to win?
The problem with the war metaphor as applied to politics is that it necessitates the utter anihilation of your “enemies”. Those on both sides who agitate for this civil war nonsense are dangerous extremists who would rather tear the country apart than countenance the idea that people might disagree with your vision for the country.
That America is still America. That the American ideal of self-government, limited government, personal responsibility, the defense of our national borders is retained and not “fundamentally transformed” into the European-style socialism enforced upon us from the Entrenched Leftist Government/Education/Media Political Complex. 0bama was most certainly fighting a war against this ideal.
It would be nice if the “Civil War” was just a matter of online chatter and dueling protests. Sadly, though, it is a part of everyday life for some people. A friend of mine, not from a priviliged background, and trying to make ends meet, moonlights as a wedding photographer. She can’t “just live her life.” She feels the need to be very circumspect in how she speaks to potential clients, lest she end up being another casualty. She has already given up her, and her daughter’s, involvement in the Girl Scouts, once she learned that one of the girls was a boy, and she was the only one with the good sense to object.
Personally, it is just online for me. Let’s see how long it stays that way.
Ok. What’s the strategy to win? Is it persuading those who disagree or are ambivalent about this march toward European socialism? Do you think this war will require violence?
TES, I think an excellent way to win argument is to pose a simple question which your interlocutor can’t answer. Good job. Of course, the people who insist on the civil war metaphor don’t mean it. If they did mean it, they would be grabbing their muskets, or AK’s, or whatever, and going out to kill the enemy. Almost nobody does that, and the few who do are universally condemned as deranged and evil. This civil war stuff is just tough talk; bluster that doesn’t scare or persuade anyone.
I said above that it is a bad idea to jump into a bar fight without picking a side. It is also a bad idea to pick a side, but instead of jumping in sit on the sidelines whining that your side isn’t fighting hard enough. As I was constantly reminded during 2016, elections are binary. My side is the GOP. Those who can’t support the GOP as a side (as opposed to some individual like Trump) really have no business being in the bar. You’re not going to win by wishing that there was some other group in the bar who was fighting for just what you want. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to a bar fight with the fighters you have; not with the fighters you wish you had.
Here’s an answer from the other side. This post was praised by the Twitter founders (and what prompted my post) https://medium.com/s/state-of-the-future/the-great-lesson-of-california-in-americas-new-civil-war-e52e2861f30
I agree normal, everyday life outside the media bubble isn’t as contentious as portrayed. But. Ideas are way more dangerous than guns. And the ideas animating Left and Right in this country have not been as irreconcilable since The Civil War. We will be a nation of free people with a government (of, by, and for), or America will be a Government with subjects. There’s no compromise possible.
I think it is naive (in the extreme) to believe you can live peaceably beside the Left with their will to power. Domination (for your own good) is their precioussss. What if your ideological opponent has the desire and the means to make your belief in man/woman marriage or gun ownership socially unacceptable? What if you can lose your job or your business for your political expression of such? What if you can be silenced for non-conformity with the prevailing fads (gender pronouns, “privilege” shaming…)? What if otherwise capable people are locked out of holding positions in the education establishment, the judicial system, the entertainment industry, the news media (those places where ideas are conveyed)… for their conservative/traditional political views?
Oh, wait…
Barack Obama prevailed in two elections touting the “fundamental” transformation of this country. He was simply capping off the long march of the Left through the institutions. If this is not a civil war, it’s because the Left has already won.
Why do all of the folks who deny, deny deny that a war exists … require violence?! #Warmongers
Still waiting to hear about your strategy? What does victory look like?
Wait … do you now agree that there is a cold civil war?
This country has never been more divided (thanks Barack!) and there are many outbreaks of violence due to that.
Try and be a conservative who speaks about the Constitution on a college campus today.
I read that article this weekend. To put it mildly, I wasn’t convinced. I don’t think California is a winning path forward for the left and “one side doesn’t have to win”.
The thing about liberal democracies, is that that both sides win elections. Change is incremental at best. You want the other side to be competent.
Friedman used to say that the way to get what you want was not to elect the right people, it was to make it politically beneficial for the wrong people to do the right thing. That means moving the Overton window to the right. That means persuasion. I don’t think fire breathers win many converts. We on the right, have the more persuasive arguments. They are just not easy arguments.
Because then its not a war…
This ‘civil war’ may be metaphoric (War on drugs? War on poverty?) Lack of overt hostility doesn’t mean nothing is being done. Problem is, the ones waging the ‘war’ are not those warning about ‘civil war’; it is those waging ‘war on civility’. Refusing to recognize/resist/counter the ‘attacks’ is one of the reasons the gradual takeover of institutions has been successful. When is it time to actively resist? Growing welfare dependence, focusing on trivial ‘unfairness’, undoing the rule of law (proper public behavior) in favor of ‘feelings’ … all these are assaults through infiltration. It may be that the general public, by acquiescing in this drift, deserves the outcome, as some will say, but the outcome will not be restricted to those who paddled with the current.
The drive toward central authority is older than civilization; acquiescence in protection rackets, trading freedom for security, delegating the hard jobs (education?) to those who may have mixed/other motives but will at least let me focus on other stuff, etc, will always favor the organized.
So, what is to be done? Probably nothing effective, when even those who recognize the danger in the direction of the drift advocate for not taking it seriously. Does an effective resistance strategy even exist? How can we preserve the Constitutional structure? Creating a geographical enclave (Utah?), perhaps?
Nah, too much trouble. Oh, I’ll vote against them, but anything else would be … uncivil.
The silent majority never does, never will. As long as civil society has not completely disintegrated, threats to it need not be taken seriously. As long as the fighting is on the front lines, far away, there is no reason to overreact, back here in the rear areas.
Posts like this bring out the pessimistic curmudgeon in me. I don’t know how to resist, either, but I dang well refuse to be complacent about it.
President’s Dole, McCain, Romney and Jeb! completely agree with you …
Guess what. In this uncivil environment, no one is listening to your persuasive argument.
Free Speech is under attack every day
You mean that you have never heard of the Cold War?
I personally have won over many to my way of thinking, or at least a lot closer to my way of thinking.
I would still love to hear how we win this civil war and how we should do it.
I keep hearing this, I’m not convinced.
I’m still waiting on your victory conditions and strategies to win this war, Field Marshall.
First you redefine the language (“marriage”, “privilege”, “common good”, …), then you make it socially unacceptable to use language as originally intended, and, eventually, people won’t be able to think any differently than you.
Oh, wait…
So if the attacked doesn’t know how to resist or triumph, there is no war? That may be technically accurate, if being overrun without effectively fighting back — being overrun — is not “war” but I don’t find it reassuring. Imagine a woman being reassured somehow that what she is undergoing isn’t technically rape (at least, not rape-rape) because she didn’t resist enough, or didn’t do the things necessary to avoid it, or …. Lack of resistance used to be used as a defense for the perpetrator back in the bad old days, you know.
Our civil structure has been disintegrating since 1918 or so. The rate of change accelerated in the 60s and has been accelerating more since the 90s. Call it ‘war’, call it ‘political evolution’; the issue is not what to call it, it is how to restore or at least resist it. We obviously don’t know how, because we quibble with each other instead.
As long as ‘no enemies to the left’ remains, the advantage is theirs because we are still fighting among ourselves.