Posted by
Patrick Henry on Saturday, June 13, 2009 1:27:39 PM
Long before civil war broke out between the north and south, a climate
of dislike and suspicion prevailed. Northeners routinely regarded their
southern counterparts as cruel, ruthless and morally bankrupt. Southerners
listened to the abolitionist moralizing harboring suspicion that the demanded
immediate release of all slaves was based not as much on moral grounds
as on a desire by northern bankers and working class people to level the
economic playing field between themselves and southern plantation owners.
Southerners resented what they perceived as creeping federalism, and
saw the rights hard won in the Revolutionary War slipping away from
the states to a congress and president in Washington. Northerners, on
the other hand, welcomed that trend as a way of reigning in what they
regarded as recalcitrant southern aristocracies. Abolitionists found the
human bondage of slavery morally abhorrent, but southerners worried
that releasing the slaves would cause such a great economic and social
upheaval and drain on meager states' resources that it was impractical
without a careful plan. While Abraham Lincoln cut a giant and historic
swath he was, at the time, perceived as a highly polarizing leader, with
the north exalting him as the "great emancipator" and the south loathing
him as a tyrant with an agenda. So the fight was formally about slavery,
but historians then and now have divined far more complex agendas. In the
excellent civil war film Gettysburg, a Confederate general expressing his
feelings about the conflict is depicted saying, "We should have freed the
slaves and THEN fired on Fort Sumter." Many civil war era southerners
felt exactly that way.
Fast forward to 2009 and the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the
highest office in the land. Charismatic and silver-tongued, he has been
hailed by the masses as a social savior, and exclusively embraced by the
media and a congress that is predominantly of his party. But not all worship
at his feet. Many perceive him as a reckless spendthrift whose social agenda
is nothing more than an irresponsible and dangerous shift toward socialism.
His rash takeovers of troubled business organizations, repeated promises
to "spread the wealth around," embrace of ten-year multi-trillion dollar
government budget deficits and cavalier public criticisms of the people he
was elected to represent have disillusioned many, and are making him new
enemies and detractors daily.
States are beginning to openly rebel at federal interference, with some
rejecting outright federal bailout funds that carry heavy strings, and
passing laws designed to override Draconian gun control regulations
contemplated by the feds. The federal agency charged with protecting
the homeland openly worries about the radicalization of those disagreeing
with federal abortion policies that they consider every bit as immoral as
slavery, with unbridled illegal immigration and the prospect of avaricious
government taxation. People see their individual rights slipping away, a
belief aided when Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State says publicly that
"we have to stop looking at the individual" so that the collective good,
solely adjudged by government, may be served.
America has survived deep polarizations before. Prohibition, Civil Rights
and forced integration and the wars in Viet Nam and Iraq have sent our
citizens to the street in mass protest amd resulted in violent clashes
between competing interests and between protestors and authorities. The
strategic difference between those polarizations and the present one is
that they were all single-issue disputes, while this one, as in 1860, covers
a far broader range of closely related issues.
From the Revolutionary War of the 1770s forward, it has never been
the nature of Americans to suffer perceived oppression in silence. It is
virtually inevitable that disillusioned voters will eventually take to the
streets to protest government takeovers of private business, government
recklessness, interference in the healthcare system. amnesty for those
having entered the country illegally, and the cronyist system of favoritism
being practiced in Washington today. It is equally inevitable that
government will respond in an effort to suppress that dissent.
So are we on a collision course with another Kent State, where National
Guard troops fired on protestors, or with an American redux of Tiananmen
Square? And if so, will such incidents be the precursor to wider civil
conflict? More importantly, is there a rational way of backing away from
the abyss BEFORE the veil of peace is rent? The third and final part of
this essay will speculate on whether Civil War is a thinkable possibility,
if so what it might look like and what can be done by all parties to
pre-empt it.