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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
Go Astros!
I’ve been listening to David Rubin and I’m all about your deal. The GOP should be for gays and vegans and everybody as long as they accept liberty and won’t force Christians to bake them a cake or a BBQ restaurant to serve kale. Gays or vegans who love freedom ought to be welcome.
Dave Rubin was pushed to become kind of odd libertarian because he likes people freely choosing how to live their lives and hated that the left was always telling everybody what to do.
Last year’s? Why, did you move to Los Angeles?
That one is still this year’s since ‘this year’s’ hasn’t happened yet. It’s a New York thing I have picked up from my wife.
Or else I am going senile-ish. Nah.
I submit the Republican Party has been doing that already, but they’re not as much in control of their own PR as they might like to be. If I remember it correctly, the War on Women narrative of the 2012 election was kicked off by some news-monkey just randomly asking Mitt Romney if he wanted to outlaw birth control. More recently, there’s the widespread myth that Donald Trump, despite being the first president to have endorsed same-sex marriage before incumbency, is some kind of enemy of homosexuals.
But then, I’m also curious just what you find oppresive.
We know that these attacks are going to be made, and that they are a product of our legacy of tone-deafness on these issues. Republican candidates need to be prepared for questions like that with evidence of proactivity and not mere passivity, which does them no favors in the current political environment.
If Rick Parry had been aware of and had changed the troublesome name of that place on his ranch, he would’ve looked more like a reformer than someone floating in a bubble of generational racism. We shouldn’t have any prominent conservatives standing up for sodomy laws, or vociferously defending all confederate statues, or saying that there “good people” in white power marches. Or fretting over gay marriage.
Regardless of the merits of any of these issues, we have to be aware of the optics and find a way to address sensitive subjects with subtlety and new ideas that aren’t so easy to depict as “hate.” There are other ways to deal with societal changes than loud cultural warfare. Let that be the other side’s abrasive and off-putting approach while we find small government and freedom-oriented ways to deal with new challenges.
This is the sort of thing that bears explanation. Are you saying that Republican politicians shouldn’t talk about something like same-sex marriage now, after the court has ruled? Or are you saying we should have just capitulated on it to begin with? And does that go for other “social issues,” like abortion?
I ask, because I’ve been hearing for some years now that the Republican path to majority lies in throwing social conservatives under the bus, in hopes of attracting small-government social liberals. It’s always seemed to me like a sure path to defeat.
In any case, I still say you’re being too optimistic about the GOP’s control over its own brand; given the Left’s institutional power, and willingness to make things up.
Yes, I think the path to the future for conservatism is focusing on small government and freedom and not on controlling people’s behaviors. The contingent of the party that wants some kind of religious tradition-backed social code is shrinking. If that party wants to begin attracting new & young supporters, it needs to settle some conflicts within its coalition, and in that settlement I strongly favor liberty as the more emotionally appealing and viable principle capable of competing with the increasing authoritarianism of progressivism.
Ah, but the two issues I mentioned don’t fall into the category of social conservatives enforcing a “social code,” or controlling people. Well, not any more than laws against murder already control people. And the social conservative view on same-sex unions is essentially that government should ignore it. Now that government recognizes those relationships, they’re more controlled than before, and our government is somewhat larger. (Especially when governments are involved in catering and wedding cake disputes.)
So, yeah, let’s have more liberty. But let’s figure out what it is, first.
If we could’ve cut straight to the “government should ignore all marriage” argument without at least a decade of “gay marriage is wrong” rhetoric coming from the right, we might’ve avoided mischief from activist judges and a whole new generation having evidence that the GOP is “the party of hate,” and while advancing the cause of limited government. Instead, we jumped 10 steps back and didn’t gain anything.
I doubt there’s a case to be made that government ignoring marriage (actual, ya know, boy-girl marriage) would really do anything to advance liberty or limited government. The problem we have, really, is that our culture ignores marriage. Hard to reduce the social spending when so many children need help from Daddy Government.
Not to mention lots of “liberated” women wanting help from Sugardaddy Government. Because they’re empowered or something.