Neil Howe: 'Civil War Is More Likely Than People Think'

[Marypoza]

(02-03-2017, 12:01 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: James Howard Kunstler is now posting his blog twice a week--on Mondays and Fridays.  An aging Boomer and author, he reminds me of "the Crazy Uncle" who holds forth at the Thanksgiving table every year with his political rants. You want to lock him up in the attic, but he makes just enough sense (sometimes) that you keep on inviting him back.  He's entertaining, if nothing else.

His blog post today ties in with a thread that I began on the old 4T forum.  (I've since deleted it from my own files, but it basically asked the question "What Happens If the Center Does Not Hold?"  The inspiration for this thread was a book by Jonathan Alter published in the wake of Obama's re-election titled "The Center Holds," whose premise I had little faith in at the time.

Midway through, a New York Times book review summed up Alter's thesis thusly--
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/books/...alter.html

...Mr. Alter’s thesis is that the 2012 election was possibly “the most consequential” in recent times and “a hinge of history” — “a titanic ideological struggle” that put the “social contract established during the New Deal era” on the line. He readily acknowledges that he thinks the United States “dodged a bullet in 2012,” and that in re-electing Barack Obama and rejecting the Republicans’ “extremist” views, America reaffirmed its identity as an essentially “centrist nation.”

Toward the end of this volume, Mr. Alter quotes Mr. Obama telling an aide that if he lost, his presidency would be “a footnote” and that “all of the progress we made in the first four years would be reversed”; if he won, his first-term achievements would be cemented for a generation and he could move ahead on promises sidetracked by the recession...

My oh my, how quickly the pendulum swings...Not only is the political center not holding here in America, but it's melting away abroad as well.

Anyway, Kunstler writes today with an insight that's on the mark, in my opinion:

The Purpose of Decadence and the Pleasures of Coercion

I guess you’ve noticed by now that the center didn’t hold. Instead of a secure platform for political premises like tradition, precedent, rationality, and cultural norms, you see a fiery maw of sheer emotion between the camps of the so-called Left and the so-called Right.

I say so-called because the campus Left and the Trump Right have escaped the categorical corrals they formerly occupied. And they may have left their customary official parties stranded and dying too. It may be fatuous to say whether that is a good or bad thing; it just is, for the moment. They are two halves of a polity so broken and so far apart that it is also hard to see how they might ever come back together into a consensus about how a society might operate successfully...

...Both the Left and the right show not a little sadism in their methods. In the background of these histrionics, the great groaning machine of Modernity lurches toward collapse — not the end-of-the-world as many foolishly imagine, but the end of a phase of history when things that used to work, don’t. At a certain point, we’ll have to try other ways of being with each other on this planet, and then for a while things will come together again.

I ponder the events of the past week, most especially the virtual riot at UC-Berkeley, and I can't help but wonder if a cold civil war is playing out in our country--a civil war in which one side now enjoys a decided advantage...

--you read clusterf*ck nation too, huh?