Tag Archives: civil war

The Morphing Of Civil War

Americans who know anything about the country’s Civil War tend to dismiss warnings of a similar eruption. After all, the War Between the States was a war between states, a conflict with antagonists defined largely by geography. Were there Union sympathizers in the South? Pro-slavery citizens in the North? Sure. But the war was largely between Americans who inhabited specific regions of the still-new country. As pundits like to point out, that’s no longer the case; deep Blue cities are located in even the Reddest states, and the nation’s suburbs have been turning purple for several election cycles. That absence of a geographical division means another civil war is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

A book titled “The Next Civil War” begs to differ.

Lincoln Square recently interviewed the author, Stephen Marche. Marche’s essential thesis was that our notion of what constitutes “war” is outdated.

What counts as civil war isn’t cannons at Gettysburg but something closer to “Ireland in the Troubles,”…. Low-level clashes, targeted killings, the steady presence of fear — these don’t come with banners or declarations, but they tear at civic trust all the same. That’s why the term “political violence” undersells what’s underway: It’s governance by threat, a society reshaped by intimidation. Once fear becomes the organizing principle, there’s no real boundary left between war and politics.

Stuart Stevens, who conducted the interview, noted that Marche had documented the steady “sorting” that has given us two diametrically opposed “armies.” He began with a telling statistic: the party that once competed for nearly 40 percent of the Black vote under Eisenhower, now hovers at eight percent under Trump. Over the years, the GOP purposely collapsed its coalition, abandoning a “big tent” and diversity in favor of loyalty. Partisan rewards now go to those most willing to comply, and as Stevens writes–and as we can now all see– the result is a hollowed-out political class.

In the Republican Party, competence has been traded for obedience.

Blue state governors resisting the authoritarianism of MAGA and the Trump administration are–at least in Marche’s telling–engaging in what has been dubbed a “soft secession.” The result is an emerging patchwork that signals national fragmentation.

Marche reminds readers that authoritarian regimes around the globe provide ample evidence that control doesn’t equal competence. Meanwhile, democracy is fading every day, despite the lack of a formal death notice. More troubling, politically motivated violence is rising.

Reviewers have described “The Next Civil War” as a “chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction.” Marche conducted nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists–in order to produce a book predicting a terrifying collapse of the America most of us have inhabited. Marche also interviewed soldiers and counterinsurgency experts, asking what it would take to control the population of the United States, and he tells us that “the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels.”

Thanks in large part to a fragmented, partisan information environment that facilitates misinformation and propaganda, promotes conspiracy theories, and deepens suspicions and bigotries, MAGA Republicans inhabit a vastly different reality than the one Democrats and Independents occupy. Our divisions go deeper than geography. Marche concludes that the United States as we’ve known it is coming to an end, with the only question being “how,” and in his book, he offers several scenarios to illustrate the possibilities.

I’m not convinced.

Granted, America has never been Camelot. Our elected officials have always included grifters and blowhards and outright criminals; our public policies even today fall far short of the lofty–“woke”– aspirations of the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This country has always been an experiment, and people like  Marche have evidently concluded that the experiment is failing.

Marche’s book is part of a burgeoning industry of doom and gloom. Although it’s important to understand where these predictions of disaster are coming from–important to recognize the severity of the threats to our always-fragile union– it would be a mistake to give in to those predictions, to give up in advance.

Remember, those “woke” abolitionists won the last Civil War–and although it won’t be easy, We the People significantly outnumber the Trumpers who want to turn America into a White Christian Nationalist autocracy. We can win this one too.

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Let’s Call It What It Is

I have a number of kind, well-meaning, “Never Trump” friends who tell me I’m painting with too broad a brush when I characterize the MAGA movement as racist to its core. These nice people (granted, lots nicer than me) are loathe to attribute Trumpism simply to hatred of those “Others”–Blacks, Jews, Muslims, immigrants (ok, Brown immigrants–not those from Norway or Canada), LGBTQ+ folks, and those detested “libruls.”

Sorry, but after coming across a recent news item from the Guardian, I rest my case. The headline really tells the story: “Anti-woke’ dog food and pro-America lipstick: US sees rise in rightwing stores.”

Mammoth Nation and Public Square are among the most prominent in the movement, both offering an Amazon-esque service, but stocking only goods which they claim are made by companies which have “conservative values”. Mammoth Nation makes its values clear on the homepage of its website: “Join Mammoth Nation to fight against Radical Left agendas,” booms a message, with the company claiming to stock only “brands who align with your beliefs”.

“When all of this wokeness started to happen and cancel culture, and then you start to see these companies stand up and say, ‘We’re not supporting this conservative or this Christian value any more,’ and just really lines in sand were starting to get drawn,” Drew Berquist, the national spokesperson for Mammoth Nation, told The Need to Know Morning Show, a North Dakota-based rightwing radio show, in December.

“And a lot of people were trying to figure out: OK, well, who are the good companies? Who are the companies that share our values, that support our constitution, support our troops or, you know, our Christian values as a country.”

Evidently, the Right’s “Christian values” are limited to “anti-woke” commitments. PublicSquare – which touts itself as Amazon for the right wing– claims to list products from more than 70,000 businesses. Unlike Amazon, however, PublicSquare’s merchants tout their allegiance to Republican causes, including opposition to abortion and an ahistorical version of the Constitution.

Evidently, efforts by companies to embrace diversity and inclusiveness–Target carrying Pride merchandise, Bud Light collaborating with Dylan Mulvaney (a trans media personality) – enraged rightwing consumers, creating a market for companies like Mammoth Nation and PublicSquare.

The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, launched a range of razors in 2022, after the company’s CEO deemed a rival razor brand to have “canceled” conservatives. The publication has since branched out into chocolate, soap, floor cleaner and, earlier this year, “manly green vitamin capsules”.

“Do you want to buy your men’s health products from a company that partners with drag queens and supports radical organizations that push gender procedures on children?” the Daily Wire asked readers in an article announcing the multivitamin – which at their launch cost 10 times more than Centrum-branded multivitamins.

According to the Guardian, most of these efforts have thus far failed to show a profit.

What they have shown, however, is the real motivation behind right-wing attacks on “woke culture.” Not that anyone paying attention will be shocked, or even surprised.

The word “woke” originally meant “awareness”–awareness of social injustices. The term has been co-opted by the Right, and become shorthand for a raft of cultural changes that enrage MAGA folks: efforts to be inclusive, efforts to combat racism, applications of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even mainstream Christian teachings about loving one’s neighbors and welcoming the stranger–in other words, for the America that a majority of citizens want to inhabit. “Woke” is thus the antithesis of White Christian male dominance and superiority, and a favorite epithet of a MAGA movement that is reactionary, racist and misogynistic.

My kinder and gentler friends insist that it is unfair to paint the entire MAGA movement as racist. I think the fairness of that accusation depends upon how one defines MAGA–whether it includes the small Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wing of the party. We are now seeing that it doesn’t (despite Musk’s own neo-Nazi sympathies), and I’m willing to concede that there is a faction of uber-wealthy “bros”–mostly Silicon Valley techies– whose motives for supporting a mentally-ill felon are purely financial and transactional. (The incompatibility of that faction with Trump’s GOP/MAGA base is currently playing out in real time.)

Non-bro MAGA Americans are replaying the Civil War, albeit thus far with less bloodshed. They are unwilling to share the civic table with those “Others” they insist cannot be “real Americans.” The war against “woke” is a contemporary battle for White “Christian” Supremacy.

It’s an ugly, embarrassing reality, but let’s call it what it is…..

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Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

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Banks Being Banks…

And you thought Micah Beckwith was the most “far out” candidate on Indiana’s statewide Republican ticket, just because he wants to ban books, criminalize abortion and put gay people back in. the closet?

Jim Banks says “Hold my beer.”

I had originally planned to post about reports that Banks approach is refusing to sign a bill funding Veterans programs if  unrelated culture war riders attached by the far Right are removed. Those provisions would eliminate diversity and inclusion programs and further restrict abortion nationwide. He has been quoted as saying that dropping them from a bill addressing practical matters important to veterans–a constituency Banks pretends to care about– will cause him to withhold his vote.

“If they go back to the Dem woke policies — if they fund those policies, I’ll vote against it,” Banks said. 

I wasn’t in any particular hurry to highlight this bit of “just normal for Banks” posturing. After all, with Jim Banks, threats like that just mean the sun rose in the East. He’s all culture war, all the time. Just the other day, he introduced a resolution to overturn a Biden administration rule requiring that foster parenting placements not be hostile to a child’s sexual orientation.

But then I saw this article from The New Republic.

Representative Jim Banks is running to represent Indiana in the Senate, but he categorically refuses to reject an armed rebellion against the federal government.

Banks was asked four times in person by a NOTUS reporter if he opposes a rebellion, and each time failed to give a clear answer. The fourth time, he even insulted the reporter.

I don’t take you seriously enough to answer your question,” Banks said on Tuesday, following three previous attempts on Monday when he instead chose to complain about Democrats. Why has a question with a clear easy answer become such an issue? It stems from a social media post from Banks on May 30, the same night Donald Trump was convicted in his hush-money trial.

Banks’s post on X (formerly Twitter) is pinned to the top of his profile, and has a picture of the Appeal to Heaven flag without any words. That flag today is attributed to Christian nationalism and the far right. It was also a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement created by Trump’s followers following the 2020 election, and carried by rioters at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has attracted criticism for flying the same flag outside his vacation home in New Jersey.

In one of his multiple evasive responses to the reporter’s questions, Banks referenced the upcoming election.

“We’re in unprecedented times, and November will be the result of regular people taking our country back,” Banks said to NOTUS. “And then we’ll have a reset, and then we’ll take back our government and our country from the elites and those who are trying to destroy it. So you can infer whatever you’d like from that post.”

I was previously unfamiliar with NOTUS, which bills itself as a “new Washington publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.” The original article, written by the NOTUS reporter who had conducted the interview, expanded on the conversation, noting that Banks had asked him whether he was a Christian, and whether he’d ever appealed to heaven. He followed that with a rant about the Democrats “weaponizing” the law against their political opponents. (I’m pretty sure that in GOP lingo, “weaponizing” means applying the rule of law to Republicans…)

Banks adamantly refused to answer the question “Do you oppose the concept of a second civil war?”

“That’s a crazy question,” Banks said, without answering it.

And when pressed again for his answer, he didn’t respond, disappearing into an elevator.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Banks did not respond to emails requesting the congressman’s opinion on armed rebellion against the U.S. government. On Wednesday, the spokesperson also did not respond to text messages from NOTUS, which were sent to his confirmed cell phone number, attempting again to see if Banks would like to offer clarity. The spokesperson did not answer phone calls from NOTUS ahead of this story’s publication, either.

It’s one thing to disagree with the “biblical perspectives” of people like Beckwith and Banks. It’s more important to recognize that they do not inhabit America’s current reality–or for that matter, any reality. They are thorough MAGA theocrats, convinced that they talk to God, and that God hates the same people they do.

I’m sure mental health professionals have a diagnosis for extreme theocratic zealotry. I don’t.

But I do know that they don’t belong in public office.

 
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A Speech Worth Revisiting

It’s probably a sign of just how suspicious I am these days of quotations on the Internet, but when I saw a post on Daily Kos that purported to be a lengthy portion of a speech by Ulysses Grant, I checked with two separate academic sites to confirm its accuracy.

It turned out it was accurate–and prescient.

Grant might have been commenting on our current national woes when he spoke in Des Moines in 1875.

I do not bring into this assemblage politics, certainly not partisan politics, but it is a fair subject for soldiers in their deliberations to consider what may be necessary to secure the prize for which they battled in a republic like ours. Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

Now in this centennial year of our national existence, I believe it a good time to begin the work of strengthening the foundation of the house commenced by our patriotic forefathers one hundred years ago, at Concord and Lexington. Let us all labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.

Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that the State or Nation, or both combined, shall furnish to every child growing up in the land, the means of acquiring a good common-school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistic tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards, I believe the battles which created the Army of the Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.

Grant eloquently addressed what I have called “civic literacy”–the need of a “sovereign people” to be both patriotic and informed. As is clear from the context of his words, Grant’s definition of “patriotic” is very different from the jingoism displayed by today’s MAGA Republicans. True patriotism requires an allegiance to the principles of America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, an allegiance based upon a proper understanding of those documents and the philosophy that animated them.

Grant was very clearly aware that such allegiance and understanding comes from instruction “unmixed with sectarian, pagan or atheistic tenets”–that such religious precepts must be left to the family, the church and private schools “supported entirely by private contributions.”

An eon ago–in 1980–I was a Republican candidate for Congress. I even won a Republican primary.  Despite the fact that I was pro-choice and pro-gay rights, among other things, I was considered–and considered myself– to be a conservative. Then and now, I believe the proper understanding of that label includes a commitment to conserve the values that Grant enumerated in that long-ago speech.

I continue to believe that labeling today’s GOP “conservative” is a travesty that works to normalize what is a truly frightening and very unconservative approach to politics and American governance.

True conservatism requires a commitment to uphold the individual liberties protected by the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech and press, Separation of Church and State, freedom of conscience and personal autonomy, among others.

I don’t know the proper label for the MAGA fanatics who have taken over what was once my political party. Culture warriors? White Christian Nationalists? Fascists? Today’s GOP is probably a blend of all those, together with a heavy sprinkling of people who are too civically-illiterate to understand how very unconservative–and dangerous– their party has become.

Grant eloquently defended the extension of “equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.” Today’s Republicans would call him “woke,” and angrily reject him (along with Lincoln) as “anti-American.”

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