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

[Eric the Green]

HISTORY REPEATING
The Civil War of 2017
Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign? The warning signs of a disastrous conflict are all around us.

John Batchelor
JOHN BATCHELOR
05.15.17 3:25 PM ET
Are we now engaged in a new great civil war?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-civil-war-of-2017



Are we already slipping into an existential battle to the finish between the legions of an inaugurated king who is denounced as illegitimate by foes, and the legions of the defeated pretender, who is decried as criminal by foes?

Two well-built new histories suggest that the tumult we witness in Washington and across the land, with mass protests and volcanic words—scorning the president as a “despot,” calling for a special prosecutor to rescue the Constitution—are in fact tableaus in a drama that has played out repeatedly across the last two thousand years of tragic civil wars.

David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, and Sidney Blumenthal’s Wrestling with His Angel, 1849-1856: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, both paint scenes of discord and despair that would work readily on the TV pundit panels and in the enflamed editorials of this day.

How can you know that you are in a civil war?

Language is a useful guide. Armitage points toward the English poet John Milton who discerned “the poetry of civil war …with its own characteristics and recurrent figures of speech, images, and themes.”

Importantly, signs of contemporary civil war around us are usually so difficult to fix and so dreadful to acknowledge that scholars have found it helpful to study historical civil wars for lessons learned.

A man wearing a mask depicting U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump protests during a demonstration against climate change outside of the U.S. Embassy in London, Britain, November 18, 2016.

Observers during the 17th Century English civil wars, or during the 18th and 19th century French and American civil wars, especially looked to the stories of the Roman civil wars in the 1st Century B.C.E in order to discover past narratives to describe present chaos.

The Roman poet Lucan of the 1st Century B.C.E.—a time ripped by civil wars from Dictator Sulla to Emperor Augustus – presented civil wars with a horror that sounds through twenty-one centuries: “…and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of/ a mighty people/ attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand/ of kin facing kin…”

The Roman historian Florus of the 2nd Century C.E. chose metaphors of disaster to portray the Roman civil wars: “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire…”

In the stormy prelude to the English civil wars, pitting the Puritan regicides against the crown, the English poet Samuel Daniel (d. 1619) echoed Lucan’s construction: “…Whilst Kin their Kin, brother the brother foyles/ Like Ensignes all against like Ensignes band:/ Bowes against bowes,/ the Crowne against the/ crowne,/ whil’st all pretending right, all throwen down.”

Notably there is a surprising recurring reluctance by combatants to admit that a conflict with their kin about the legitimacy of the sovereign is, in fact, a civil war.

After 1789, it became useful to invoke the political construction of a revolution in order to aggrandize a rebellion of rival claimants to sovereignty.

For example, fifty years after Yorktown, James Fenimore Cooper argued against the popular notion of an American Revolution: “The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war…”

In early 1863, Francis Lieber, Prussian-American professor of law, published a legal code of conduct for war-fighting, defining a civil war carefully, “Civil war is a war between two or more portions of a country or state, each contenting for the mastery of the whole, and each claiming to be the legitimate government…”

Later in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was bold in his Gettysburg Address to assert that what was routinely denounced by the North as a “war of rebellion” and argued by the South to be a “war of secession,” was, in fact, “a great civil war.”

It wasn’t until 1907 that the U.S. Congress agreed to call the war of 1861-1865, “the Civil War.”

What I learn from Armitage and Blumenthal is that the most telling condition that suggests strongly that you are engaged in a civil war is when you find yourself part of a “mighty people” who are faced with two claims of legitimacy, two crowns that are “pretending right” —two camps with “the rage of Caesar and Pompey.”

In 1850, the failing Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used his last days to promote his defiant vision to create two presidents of the United States, one for the North’s Abolitionists, one for the South’s slaveholder Ultras, in order to “restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government…”

Ten years later, Calhoun’s devious protégé, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, took up the two presidencies invention and led the South’s “slave power” into the catastrophe of the Confederacy.

A glance at today’s news from Washington suggests that there are a few of the same shadows of civil war in 2017 that the Roman Senate could sense when Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE, or when the English Rump Parliament declared itself “the supreme power in the nation” in 1649, or when South Carolina’s Ultras opened fire on Fort Sumter in 1861.

Was the election of 2016 stolen by a foreign power in league with a troublesome prince?

Is the legitimate chief executive the candidate who won the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots?

Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign?

In 1856, the troubled Lincoln sat awake pondering the lesson in the Gospel of Mark, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.”

Lucan offers us an even more unsettling lesson after two thousand years of divided houses, “What madness was this, O citizens?”

[radind]

Civil war would be a disaster. We need to try to be more civil.

[Eric the Green]

(07-19-2017, 05:04 PM)radind Wrote: Civil war would be a disaster. We need to try to be more civil.

As the article may suggest, the problem is not lack of civility between Americans. The problem is about who has power over other Americans, and what that power is used to do to those other Americans.

[Mikebert]

I think a civil war is very unlikely. A basic ingredient for war is a mass of aroused young males. Over the past number years I noted something I called "the male disease". I noticed working poor millennial men were not working, not on their own, but living with their mom/grandma or their baby mama and being supported by them, though sometimes they got disability. For example, my oldest grandchild (24), works, her husband doesn't, neither does the daddy of her firstborn. Number 2 is a 23, he  actually held a job for six months, once but otherwise was unemployed. Number 3 (22) works and has since he was 18. No. 4 (16) got a job, was fired in a week, not working since.  You get the picture. (All these folks are offspring of former foster children of ours, with whom we've had a grandparent relationship over the years.

Now these are just anecdotes, but data now backs this up, and you see stories about how millennials, particularly males, are not working as much as previous generations. One article I read a year or two ago suggested online porn was a factor.  But now the story seems to be around computer games, which are continually becoming more engaging. The idea is young men are choosing to spend more time playing and less time working.

Recently I read a story called Ready Player One, set in 2044, where economic depression had made half the population unemployed, and on the dole. The unemployed lived in "stacks" trailer parks where the trailers were stacked on top of each other to accommodate more people into a fixed space, and spend their days in this immersive computer generated world. The whole story takes place in this world, with brief excursions into "reality".

Recently I have seen stuff on universal basic income. If you combine a basic income with an addicting videogame I can see young males spending all their time online, expending all their aggression on virtual combat, and thus posing no threat of civil war ever again. To the extent we are heading in this direction civil war may well become a thing of the past.

[Mikebert]

(07-19-2017, 04:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: HISTORY REPEATING
The Civil War of 2017
Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign? The warning signs of a disastrous conflict are all around us.

John Batchelor
JOHN BATCHELOR
05.15.17 3:25 PM ET
Are we now engaged in a new great civil war?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-civil-war-of-2017



Are we already slipping into an existential battle to the finish between the legions of an inaugurated king who is denounced as illegitimate by foes, and the legions of the defeated pretender, who is decried as criminal by foes?

Two well-built new histories suggest that the tumult we witness in Washington and across the land, with mass protests and volcanic words—scorning the president as a “despot,” calling for a special prosecutor to rescue the Constitution—are in fact tableaus in a drama that has played out repeatedly across the last two thousand years of tragic civil wars.

David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, and Sidney Blumenthal’s Wrestling with His Angel, 1849-1856: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, both paint scenes of discord and despair that would work readily on the TV pundit panels and in the enflamed editorials of this day.

How can you know that you are in a civil war?

Language is a useful guide. Armitage points toward the English poet John Milton who discerned “the poetry of civil war …with its own characteristics and recurrent figures of speech, images, and themes.”

Importantly, signs of contemporary civil war around us are usually so difficult to fix and so dreadful to acknowledge that scholars have found it helpful to study historical civil wars for lessons learned.

A man wearing a mask depicting U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump protests during a demonstration against climate change outside of the U.S. Embassy in London, Britain, November 18, 2016.

Observers during the 17th Century English civil wars, or during the 18th and 19th century French and American civil wars, especially looked to the stories of the Roman civil wars in the 1st Century B.C.E in order to discover past narratives to describe present chaos.

The Roman poet Lucan of the 1st Century B.C.E.—a time ripped by civil wars from Dictator Sulla to Emperor Augustus – presented civil wars with a horror that sounds through twenty-one centuries: “…and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of/ a mighty people/ attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand/ of kin facing kin…”

The Roman historian Florus of the 2nd Century C.E. chose metaphors of disaster to portray the Roman civil wars: “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire…”

In the stormy prelude to the English civil wars, pitting the Puritan regicides against the crown, the English poet Samuel Daniel (d. 1619) echoed Lucan’s construction: “…Whilst Kin their Kin, brother the brother foyles/ Like Ensignes all against like Ensignes band:/ Bowes against bowes,/ the Crowne against the/ crowne,/ whil’st all pretending right, all throwen down.”

Notably there is a surprising recurring reluctance by combatants to admit that a conflict with their kin about the legitimacy of the sovereign is, in fact, a civil war.

After 1789, it became useful to invoke the political construction of a revolution in order to aggrandize a rebellion of rival claimants to sovereignty.

For example, fifty years after Yorktown, James Fenimore Cooper argued against the popular notion of an American Revolution: “The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war…”

In early 1863, Francis Lieber, Prussian-American professor of law, published a legal code of conduct for war-fighting, defining a civil war carefully, “Civil war is a war between two or more portions of a country or state, each contenting for the mastery of the whole, and each claiming to be the legitimate government…”

Later in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was bold in his Gettysburg Address to assert that what was routinely denounced by the North as a “war of rebellion” and argued by the South to be a “war of secession,” was, in fact, “a great civil war.”

It wasn’t until 1907 that the U.S. Congress agreed to call the war of 1861-1865, “the Civil War.”

What I learn from Armitage and Blumenthal is that the most telling condition that suggests strongly that you are engaged in a civil war is when you find yourself part of a “mighty people” who are faced with two claims of legitimacy, two crowns that are “pretending right” —two camps with “the rage of Caesar and Pompey.”

In 1850, the failing Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used his last days to promote his defiant vision to create two presidents of the United States, one for the North’s Abolitionists, one for the South’s slaveholder Ultras, in order to “restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government…”

Ten years later, Calhoun’s devious protégé, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, took up the two presidencies invention and led the South’s “slave power” into the catastrophe of the Confederacy.

A glance at today’s news from Washington suggests that there are a few of the same shadows of civil war in 2017 that the Roman Senate could sense when Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE, or when the English Rump Parliament declared itself “the supreme power in the nation” in 1649, or when South Carolina’s Ultras opened fire on Fort Sumter in 1861.

Was the election of 2016 stolen by a foreign power in league with a troublesome prince?

Is the legitimate chief executive the candidate who won the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots?

Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign?

In 1856, the troubled Lincoln sat awake pondering the lesson in the Gospel of Mark, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.”

Lucan offers us an even more unsettling lesson after two thousand years of divided houses, “What madness was this, O citizens?”

This seems overwrought. What we have today is polarization. Polarization is not the same thing as civil war. A common measure of polarization shows very high levels of polarization today and the first decade of the 20th century. What is does not show is high levels in 1860.  I would point out that the last time of high polarization was followed by a revolutionary situation in the late teens and early twenties, but no civil war. Instead the situation was resolved quickly by mass arrests and deportation, followed by immigration restriction.

Yet this did not prevent the fall of the capitalist elite regime in the early 1930's. Structural changes of the sort that often have required civil war or revolution happened, without their being a civil war.  It never ceases to amaze me that we here are aware of this, in fact S&H have given us a nomenclature (the period of interest was a 4T) and a way to actually forecast these eras, and yet do not see how the issues we face today could be resolved without a civil war, like last time.

[Warren Dew]

(07-22-2017, 07:13 AM)Mikebert Wrote: Now these are just anecdotes, but data now backs this up, and you see stories about how millennials, particularly males, are not working as much as previous generations. One article I read a year or two ago suggested online porn was a factor.  But now the story seems to be around computer games, which are continually becoming more engaging. The idea is young men are choosing to spend more time playing and less time working.

What makes you think this is out of choice?  The job market is terrible for young adults.

Quote:Recently I have seen stuff on universal basic income. If you combine a basic income with an addicting videogame I can see young males spending all their time online, expending all their aggression on virtual combat, and thus posing no threat of civil war ever again. To the extent we are heading in this direction civil war may well become a thing of the past.

Sure ... until it spills over into "offline PK", which has happened in Korea.

Quote:This seems overwrought. What we have today is polarization. Polarization is not the same thing as civil war. A common measure of polarization shows very high levels of polarization today and the first decade of the 20th century. What is does not show is high levels in 1860.  I would point out that the last time of high polarization was followed by a revolutionary situation in the late teens and early twenties, but no civil war. Instead the situation was resolved quickly by mass arrests and deportation, followed by immigration restriction.

Yet this did not prevent the fall of the capitalist elite regime in the early 1930's. Structural changes of the sort that often have required civil war or revolution happened, without their being a civil war.  It never ceases to amaze me that we here are aware of this, in fact S&H have given us a nomenclature (the period of interest was a 4T) and a way to actually forecast these eras, and yet do not see how the issues we face today could be resolved without a civil war, like last time.

Last time we had WWII to vent the stresses.

[Mikebert]

(07-22-2017, 01:17 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: MikebertWhat makes you think this is out of choice?  The job market is terrible for young adults.

Taylor says Taco Bell is desperate for people. They actually gave a job to Vicki, who held it for all of three days.  She hadn't held a job since 2005.

My wife told me Devin was working now. He has a 2nd shift job at Meijers.  He's 23 and has worked for six months in his lifetime so far. Maybe his girllfriend won't put out without him getting a job.

When employers will hire these folks, the ARE desperate.  This testifies to the tight market at the bottom (minimum wage jobs).

It has been many years since I have seen advertisements for jobs at the movies.  All the restaurants I go to have help wanted signs outside.  This testifies to a tight market at the notch just one up. 

For Chem E's, according to my professional organization annual survey job prospects for new engineers are good, just like they typically are late in the business cycle.

Statistically, unemployment rate is low, typically seen as an indicator of a tight job market.

When I noted the male disease, I was comparing non-working young men with their girlfriends/sisters (i.e. peers) who *were* working at low-wage jobs.  These are poor kids, who grew up working poor.  The absence of decent "middle class jobs" has no bearing on their reality.

[pbrower2a]

(07-22-2017, 08:17 AM)Mikebert Wrote:

(07-19-2017, 04:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: HISTORY REPEATING
The Civil War of 2017
Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign? The warning signs of a disastrous conflict are all around us.

John Batchelor
JOHN BATCHELOR
05.15.17 3:25 PM ET
Are we now engaged in a new great civil war?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-civil-war-of-2017



Are we already slipping into an existential battle to the finish between the legions of an inaugurated king who is denounced as illegitimate by foes, and the legions of the defeated pretender, who is decried as criminal by foes?

Two well-built new histories suggest that the tumult we witness in Washington and across the land, with mass protests and volcanic words—scorning the president as a “despot,” calling for a special prosecutor to rescue the Constitution—are in fact tableaus in a drama that has played out repeatedly across the last two thousand years of tragic civil wars.

David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, and Sidney Blumenthal’s Wrestling with His Angel, 1849-1856: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, both paint scenes of discord and despair that would work readily on the TV pundit panels and in the enflamed editorials of this day.

How can you know that you are in a civil war?

Language is a useful guide. Armitage points toward the English poet John Milton who discerned “the poetry of civil war …with its own characteristics and recurrent figures of speech, images, and themes.”

Importantly, signs of contemporary civil war around us are usually so difficult to fix and so dreadful to acknowledge that scholars have found it helpful to study historical civil wars for lessons learned.

A man wearing a mask depicting U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump protests during a demonstration against climate change outside of the U.S. Embassy in London, Britain, November 18, 2016.

Observers during the 17th Century English civil wars, or during the 18th and 19th century French and American civil wars, especially looked to the stories of the Roman civil wars in the 1st Century B.C.E in order to discover past narratives to describe present chaos.

The Roman poet Lucan of the 1st Century B.C.E.—a time ripped by civil wars from Dictator Sulla to Emperor Augustus – presented civil wars with a horror that sounds through twenty-one centuries: “…and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of/ a mighty people/ attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand/ of kin facing kin…”

The Roman historian Florus of the 2nd Century C.E. chose metaphors of disaster to portray the Roman civil wars: “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire…”

In the stormy prelude to the English civil wars, pitting the Puritan regicides against the crown, the English poet Samuel Daniel (d. 1619) echoed Lucan’s construction: “…Whilst Kin their Kin, brother the brother foyles/ Like Ensignes all against like Ensignes band:/ Bowes against bowes,/ the Crowne against the/ crowne,/ whil’st all pretending right, all throwen down.”

Notably there is a surprising recurring reluctance by combatants to admit that a conflict with their kin about the legitimacy of the sovereign is, in fact, a civil war.

After 1789, it became useful to invoke the political construction of a revolution in order to aggrandize a rebellion of rival claimants to sovereignty.

For example, fifty years after Yorktown, James Fenimore Cooper argued against the popular notion of an American Revolution: “The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war…”

In early 1863, Francis Lieber, Prussian-American professor of law, published a legal code of conduct for war-fighting, defining a civil war carefully, “Civil war is a war between two or more portions of a country or state, each contenting for the mastery of the whole, and each claiming to be the legitimate government…”

Later in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was bold in his Gettysburg Address to assert that what was routinely denounced by the North as a “war of rebellion” and argued by the South to be a “war of secession,” was, in fact, “a great civil war.”

It wasn’t until 1907 that the U.S. Congress agreed to call the war of 1861-1865, “the Civil War.”

What I learn from Armitage and Blumenthal is that the most telling condition that suggests strongly that you are engaged in a civil war is when you find yourself part of a “mighty people” who are faced with two claims of legitimacy, two crowns that are “pretending right” —two camps with “the rage of Caesar and Pompey.”

In 1850, the failing Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used his last days to promote his defiant vision to create two presidents of the United States, one for the North’s Abolitionists, one for the South’s slaveholder Ultras, in order to “restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government…”

Ten years later, Calhoun’s devious protégé, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, took up the two presidencies invention and led the South’s “slave power” into the catastrophe of the Confederacy.

A glance at today’s news from Washington suggests that there are a few of the same shadows of civil war in 2017 that the Roman Senate could sense when Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE, or when the English Rump Parliament declared itself “the supreme power in the nation” in 1649, or when South Carolina’s Ultras opened fire on Fort Sumter in 1861.

Was the election of 2016 stolen by a foreign power in league with a troublesome prince?

Is the legitimate chief executive the candidate who won the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots?

Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign?

In 1856, the troubled Lincoln sat awake pondering the lesson in the Gospel of Mark, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.”

Lucan offers us an even more unsettling lesson after two thousand years of divided houses, “What madness was this, O citizens?”

This seems overwrought. What we have today is polarization. Polarization is not the same thing as civil war. A common measure of polarization shows very high levels of polarization today and the first decade of the 20th century. What is does not show is high levels in 1860.  I would point out that the last time of high polarization was followed by a revolutionary situation in the late teens and early twenties, but no civil war. Instead the situation was resolved quickly by mass arrests and deportation, followed by immigration restriction.

Yet this did not prevent the fall of the capitalist elite regime in the early 1930's. Structural changes of the sort that often have required civil war or revolution happened, without their being a civil war.  It never ceases to amaze me that we here are aware of this, in fact S&H have given us a nomenclature (the period of interest was a 4T) and a way to actually forecast these eras, and yet do not see how the issues we face today could be resolved without a civil war, like last time.

Polarization can portent an unusually-destructive implosion of the overall society. Both sides have convinced themselves that the other side is evil beyond redemption and out of touch with some basic reality. Slave-owning planters had the conviction that they had that slavery was the most wonderful system that God Almighty had ordained upon 'Negroes' who could not survive without it while people not in their world saw it as an abomination incompatible with their concept of freedom. Think also of Russia on the brink of the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing Civil War in which the Reds and Whites were similarly intolerant, murderous, and contemptuous of democracy because they both claimed opposing conceptions of ideological truth. I get the impression that had the White reactionary cause prevailed in Russia, the nightmare of massacres could have been even worse in the 1920s.

The ominous parallel that I see for America is Republican Spain in the mid-1930s. Parts of Spain were as modern in attitudes and esthetics as any places at the time. Parts of Spain were still thinking in the Middle Ages except for technology. Like other fascists, Franco melded a medieval mindset with modern technology. Spain ended up with an early, protracted, and incredibly-stale, soulless High, one with little room for creativity or imagination. People with 'Believe it or Burn' fundamentalism would be delighted to save the souls of those who prefer the 'demonic' Darwinism to Young Earth Creationism. If you thought Franco's Spain stultifying in blandness... That's before I even discuss the idea that white supremacy can salve the resentments of under-educated losers.

[Eric the Green]

(07-22-2017, 08:17 AM)Mikebert Wrote:

(07-19-2017, 04:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: HISTORY REPEATING
The Civil War of 2017
Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign? The warning signs of a disastrous conflict are all around us.

John Batchelor
JOHN BATCHELOR
05.15.17 3:25 PM ET
Are we now engaged in a new great civil war?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-civil-war-of-2017



Are we already slipping into an existential battle to the finish between the legions of an inaugurated king who is denounced as illegitimate by foes, and the legions of the defeated pretender, who is decried as criminal by foes?

Two well-built new histories suggest that the tumult we witness in Washington and across the land, with mass protests and volcanic words—scorning the president as a “despot,” calling for a special prosecutor to rescue the Constitution—are in fact tableaus in a drama that has played out repeatedly across the last two thousand years of tragic civil wars.

David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, and Sidney Blumenthal’s Wrestling with His Angel, 1849-1856: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, both paint scenes of discord and despair that would work readily on the TV pundit panels and in the enflamed editorials of this day.

How can you know that you are in a civil war?

Language is a useful guide. Armitage points toward the English poet John Milton who discerned “the poetry of civil war …with its own characteristics and recurrent figures of speech, images, and themes.”

Importantly, signs of contemporary civil war around us are usually so difficult to fix and so dreadful to acknowledge that scholars have found it helpful to study historical civil wars for lessons learned.

A man wearing a mask depicting U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump protests during a demonstration against climate change outside of the U.S. Embassy in London, Britain, November 18, 2016.

Observers during the 17th Century English civil wars, or during the 18th and 19th century French and American civil wars, especially looked to the stories of the Roman civil wars in the 1st Century B.C.E in order to discover past narratives to describe present chaos.

The Roman poet Lucan of the 1st Century B.C.E.—a time ripped by civil wars from Dictator Sulla to Emperor Augustus – presented civil wars with a horror that sounds through twenty-one centuries: “…and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of/ a mighty people/ attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand/ of kin facing kin…”

The Roman historian Florus of the 2nd Century C.E. chose metaphors of disaster to portray the Roman civil wars: “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire…”

In the stormy prelude to the English civil wars, pitting the Puritan regicides against the crown, the English poet Samuel Daniel (d. 1619) echoed Lucan’s construction: “…Whilst Kin their Kin, brother the brother foyles/ Like Ensignes all against like Ensignes band:/ Bowes against bowes,/ the Crowne against the/ crowne,/ whil’st all pretending right, all throwen down.”

Notably there is a surprising recurring reluctance by combatants to admit that a conflict with their kin about the legitimacy of the sovereign is, in fact, a civil war.

After 1789, it became useful to invoke the political construction of a revolution in order to aggrandize a rebellion of rival claimants to sovereignty.

For example, fifty years after Yorktown, James Fenimore Cooper argued against the popular notion of an American Revolution: “The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war…”

In early 1863, Francis Lieber, Prussian-American professor of law, published a legal code of conduct for war-fighting, defining a civil war carefully, “Civil war is a war between two or more portions of a country or state, each contenting for the mastery of the whole, and each claiming to be the legitimate government…”

Later in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was bold in his Gettysburg Address to assert that what was routinely denounced by the North as a “war of rebellion” and argued by the South to be a “war of secession,” was, in fact, “a great civil war.”

It wasn’t until 1907 that the U.S. Congress agreed to call the war of 1861-1865, “the Civil War.”

What I learn from Armitage and Blumenthal is that the most telling condition that suggests strongly that you are engaged in a civil war is when you find yourself part of a “mighty people” who are faced with two claims of legitimacy, two crowns that are “pretending right” —two camps with “the rage of Caesar and Pompey.”

In 1850, the failing Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used his last days to promote his defiant vision to create two presidents of the United States, one for the North’s Abolitionists, one for the South’s slaveholder Ultras, in order to “restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government…”

Ten years later, Calhoun’s devious protégé, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, took up the two presidencies invention and led the South’s “slave power” into the catastrophe of the Confederacy.

A glance at today’s news from Washington suggests that there are a few of the same shadows of civil war in 2017 that the Roman Senate could sense when Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE, or when the English Rump Parliament declared itself “the supreme power in the nation” in 1649, or when South Carolina’s Ultras opened fire on Fort Sumter in 1861.

Was the election of 2016 stolen by a foreign power in league with a troublesome prince?

Is the legitimate chief executive the candidate who won the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots?

Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign?

In 1856, the troubled Lincoln sat awake pondering the lesson in the Gospel of Mark, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.”

Lucan offers us an even more unsettling lesson after two thousand years of divided houses, “What madness was this, O citizens?”

This seems overwrought. What we have today is polarization. Polarization is not the same thing as civil war. A common measure of polarization shows very high levels of polarization today and the first decade of the 20th century. What is does not show is high levels in 1860.  I would point out that the last time of high polarization was followed by a revolutionary situation in the late teens and early twenties, but no civil war. Instead the situation was resolved quickly by mass arrests and deportation, followed by immigration restriction.

The USA was certainly polarized in 1860, and polarization today is just as high. What may be different is that our society has been more successful than during the saeculum leading up to the 1861-65 civil war, and people today are too complacent or have too much at stake to waste in a big civil war, unlike when the USA was still a nation of pioneers still forming and still fighting over who would control the frontier.

Quote:Yet this did not prevent the fall of the capitalist elite regime in the early 1930's. Structural changes of the sort that often have required civil war or revolution happened, without their being a civil war.  It never ceases to amaze me that we here are aware of this, in fact S&H have given us a nomenclature (the period of interest was a 4T) and a way to actually forecast these eras, and yet do not see how the issues we face today could be resolved without a civil war, like last time.

It could be resolved without a civil war, like last time. But, there was some violence in the work place last time. Last time, the polarization was resolved principally by the activism of workers and unions. They made FDR make the reforms of the New Deal that made a middle class possible after the foreign emergency that climaxed the 4T.

But the alternating rhythm indicates that this current 4T is primarily domestic, although all 4Ts have some of both concerns. So, that is why I have forecast some kind of union break-up. And, the record of non-violence in 4Ts is not good. There has been much violence, either focused against enemies abroad, or enemies at home. So, I am predicting that there MAY be (I don't say will be, since predictions are not certain destiny) some violence, likely by whichever side loses, and which is dealt with fairly quickly. So, I don't see violence coming on the scale of the civil war. But in our current level of human evolution, major changes usually come with some violence attached.

The revolutionary situation happened in the 1930s, not the teens and twenties, if you go by the Strauss and Howe cycle. So yes, something similar has happened in this cycle as in the last one. The revolutionary situation like in the teens happened in the sixties and seventies, in the following Awakening to that previous one, and now we are in the Crisis phase where the capitalist elite is tottering again like in the 1930s, following the similar crash in 2008. But the elites were powerful enough to hang on this time, because this saeculum was created in the American High when these elites and their nation became all powerful. What has happened since the 1980s is that the elites have exaggerated their power and are ruining the middle class that was created in the last 4T, which itself (contrary to their liberation trickle-down ideology) made their wealth possible in the first place. So, in this 4T, we must resolve this imbalance-- and if it doesn't happen, then we have our first failed 4T, and the nation enters its death spiral, and other nations become supreme instead. IF it happens; [b]IF that is, the Republicans are defeated[/n], then we can move on into a new saeculum that takes us beyond the industrial age with its phony lifestyle and phony values that threatens not so much just the nation, but the world.

[Eric the Green]

(07-22-2017, 07:13 AM)Mikebert Wrote: I think a civil war is very unlikely. A basic ingredient for war is a mass of aroused young males. Over the past number years I noted something I called "the male disease". I noticed working poor millennial men were not working, not on their own, but living with their mom/grandma or their baby mama and being supported by them, though sometimes they got disability. For example, my oldest grandchild (24), works, her husband doesn't, neither does the daddy of her firstborn. Number 2 is a 23, he  actually held a job for six months, once but otherwise was unemployed. Number 3 (22) works and has since he was 18. No. 4 (16) got a job, was fired in a week, not working since.  You get the picture. (All these folks are offspring of former foster children of ours, with whom we've had a grandparent relationship over the years.

Now these are just anecdotes, but data now backs this up, and you see stories about how millennials, particularly males, are not working as much as previous generations. One article I read a year or two ago suggested online porn was a factor.  But now the story seems to be around computer games, which are continually becoming more engaging. The idea is young men are choosing to spend more time playing and less time working.

Recently I read a story called Ready Player One, set in 2044, where economic depression had made half the population unemployed, and on the dole. The unemployed lived in "stacks" trailer parks where the trailers were stacked on top of each other to accommodate more people into a fixed space, and spend their days in this immersive computer generated world. The whole story takes place in this world, with brief excursions into "reality".

Recently I have seen stuff on universal basic income. If you combine a basic income with an addicting videogame I can see young males spending all their time online, expending all their aggression on virtual combat, and thus posing no threat of civil war ever again. To the extent we are heading in this direction civil war may well become a thing of the past.

It could happen; on the other hand, our elites do not want to finance this dole/guaranteed income, especially since these millennials also tend to be ethnically diverse, and the elites have convinced many more-rural young people that diversity is itself the problem; and those issues are the nub of the polarization itself. So, what if the millennial males and their offspring have to FIGHT for this dole, so they can play their video games in peace and financial security?

[pbrower2a]

Source: http://rpubs.com/ianrmcdonald/293069

My comment in another political chat line:

In the 1960s the Democrats had some right-wing Dixiecrat pols I might not discuss the House for personalities, but the Senate has some memorable figures. The Republicans had Charles Percy and John Chaffee -- and the Democrats had John Stennis and Strom Thurmond. There were relatively-liberal Republicans, and they would show that they could accept the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They might have been pro-business, but they had no use for a cause associated with terrorism.

So there were "Rockefeller Republicans"... but by 2017 most of those (or those whose demographics suggest that they would have been such in the 1960s) are now Democrats. But at the same time, white Democrats in the South have given up on their old antipathy for Big Business, They consider the industrial jobs an improvement over tenant farming or other ill-paying activities of the old agrarian South. They may still be racists, but the Republican Party has a big-enough tent for those.

As late as the mid-1960s the Democrats had a bimodal distribution of Representatives with a peak around -.032  and another, smaller peak near zero. By 1995 the Democrats had a distribution with a single peak around  -.037 with a distribution resembling a bell curve. By 2013 the single peak for Democrats was around -.040, likely the result of the hammering of somewhat-conservative Democrats in the Tea Party election of 2010.

Meanwhile the Republican Party went from having a peak of about  0.22 in 1963 to about 0.45 around 1997 (but it was a bell curve). By 2013 the Republican Party had a three-humped curve resembling the profile of an atoll-lined sinking island with a large peak around 0.8 and lesser peaks at 0.55 and at 0.92. The scary point is what people might believe if they are at the range of 1,00 on either side. Marxists on the Left? Genocidal fascists on the Right?

Now here's a cause for much political distress: if one was in the range of -0.05 to about 0.30, the center-right, you had no representation like you. Democrats may be closer to the center, but they do not have the center. A President like Barack Obama might need to triangulate to the center after his Party gets clobbered in the 2010 Tea Party election. Donald Trump so far suggests that he can completely neglect people to the left of about 0.45 and must appeal to people close to 1.00. And who are around that level?

Donald Trump may act as if people to the left of about -.030 are now politically irrelevant, but there might be people on the far-right end of the Republican distribution who would like the Left eliminated from political life. Shut down the opposition, make it permanently irrelevant, or eliminate it? That could be the debate should the Republicans consolidate even more power in 2018 and 2020.  And that would be an ugly America.

[Eric the Green]

Many people deny that we are in a left-right split. There may be some validity to such opinions. I think most peoples' feelings and concerns can be categorized into today's left-right split, however, even if some people are a mixture. Both sides mostly consider themselves the "real Americans" who represent true American values. Personally, I think only one side (the left) is predominantly correct in that, because the core American value is that we can progress toward a greater life for all our people.

[David Horn]

(07-22-2017, 08:17 AM)Mikebert Wrote: This seems overwrought. What we have today is polarization. Polarization is not the same thing as civil war. A common measure of polarization shows very high levels of polarization today and the first decade of the 20th century. What is does not show is high levels in 1860.  I would point out that the last time of high polarization was followed by a revolutionary situation in the late teens and early twenties, but no civil war. Instead the situation was resolved quickly by mass arrests and deportation, followed by immigration restriction.

Yet this did not prevent the fall of the capitalist elite regime in the early 1930's. Structural changes of the sort that often have required civil war or revolution happened, without their being a civil war.  It never ceases to amaze me that we here are aware of this, in fact S&H have given us a nomenclature (the period of interest was a 4T) and a way to actually forecast these eras, and yet do not see how the issues we face today could be resolved without a civil war, like last time.

I agree.  Even if there was the stomach for a civil war, I don't see us fighting a war of any kind where the lines of demarcation are as poorly defined as the urban-rural split that seems evident today.  Perhaps some political settlement could be devised where a few extremely Red states are allowed to leave the union, if it comes to that.  I wouldn't bet on it though.

[pbrower2a]

(07-23-2017, 01:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

Source: http://rpubs.com/ianrmcdonald/293069

My comment in another political chat line:

In the 1960s the Democrats had some right-wing Dixiecrat pols I might not discuss the House for personalities, but the Senate has some memorable figures. The Republicans had Charles Percy and John Chaffee -- and the Democrats had John Stennis and Strom Thurmond. There were relatively-liberal Republicans, and they would show that they could accept the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They might have been pro-business, but they had no use for a cause associated with terrorism.

So there were "Rockefeller Republicans"... but by 2017 most of those (or those whose demographics suggest that they would have been such in the 1960s) are now Democrats. But at the same time, white Democrats in the South have given up on their old antipathy for Big Business, They consider the industrial jobs an improvement over tenant farming or other ill-paying activities of the old agrarian South. They may still be racists, but the Republican Party has a big-enough tent for those.

As late as the mid-1960s the Democrats had a bimodal distribution of Representatives with a peak around -.032  and another, smaller peak near zero. By 1995 the Democrats had a distribution with a single peak around  -.037 with a distribution resembling a bell curve. By 2013 the single peak for Democrats was around -.040, likely the result of the hammering of somewhat-conservative Democrats in the Tea Party election of 2010.

Meanwhile the Republican Party went from having a peak of about  0.22 in 1963 to about 0.45 around 1997 (but it was a bell curve). By 2013 the Republican Party had a three-humped curve resembling the profile of an atoll-lined sinking island with a large peak around 0.8 and lesser peaks at 0.55 and at 0.92. The scary point is what people might believe if they are at the range of 1,00 on either side. Marxists on the Left? Genocidal fascists on the Right?

Now here's a cause for much political distress: if one was in the range of -0.05 to about 0.30, the center-right, you had no representation like you. Democrats may be closer to the center, but they do not have the center. A President like Barack Obama might need to triangulate to the center after his Party gets clobbered in the 2010 Tea Party election. Donald Trump so far suggests that he can completely neglect people to the left of about 0.45 and must appeal to people close to 1.00. And who are around that level?

Donald Trump may act as if people to the left of about -.030 are now politically irrelevant, but there might be people on the far-right end of the Republican distribution who would like the Left eliminated from political life. Shut down the opposition, make it permanently irrelevant, or eliminate it? That could be the debate should the Republicans consolidate even more power in 2018 and 2020.  And that would be an ugly America.

I am surprised that this got no comment. So what happened to the politicians of the Center?

What were they? I am guessing that they were the sorts elected to do good for their districts. Get some federal funds for roads. Keep the farm subsidies flowing in rural areas.  Avoid saying things offensive to more than about 20% of the people in the district. Get along with other members of Congress so that you can get something done. Be able to explain any vote to constituents, and not only to lobbyists.

Gerrymandering ensures that most districts can support either a politician suitable to an R+30 district or a politician suitable to a D+20 district. So such are the politicians that we get, and with the majority-of-a-majority politics that Lee Atwater initiated and Karl Rogue refined, we can end up with a 51-49 split of power and, if the 51% is adequately ruthless, entrench itself and marginalize everyone else. One election that gives that side of the political spectrum that level of power is enough to entrench that unsustainable clique forever because it will then reshape the electoral practices to fit its agenda.  

How long can this last before we get torture chambers and labor camps? When one part of the electorate has the means and will to subjugate a minority  and no conscience, then that is what happens.

Maybe we can avoid a Hitler -- but we can easily get a Franco or a Milosevic.

[noway2]

(07-26-2017, 11:36 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Although I am promoting Militant (Apolitical) Nationalism, I am classic Center dweller. I'm nauseated by the Trump-loving, Duginist Neo Nazi Totalitarians. For the first time in my life, there exists a political group who incite me to potential violence. If a People's Army were to form up to combat them, who'd take a 54 year old (but still fit) old fart, I'd join.

Meanwhile, the Left? They don't nauseate me, but at times they do annoy me. Witness my keyboard mini debates with EtG.

Interesting way to put it, apolitical nationalism and the "left" doesn't nauseate you (I assume the "right" does) but they do annoy you.

In many ways I find myself agreeing with the apolitical nationalism, but both the "left" and the "right" nauseate me in different ways and for different reasons. There are some aspects of the platforms on both the "left" and the "right" that I support and some that I vehemently oppose.

In fact, I consider both the Pugs and the Dims to be two polar facets of one uni-party, neither of which represent a large portion of the people. It is almost comical that it came down to a Clinton versus Trump, the former epitomizing much of what I and many other people despise about the "left" and the latter I believe is the result of people's despise of the "right" and he rode more of the natural pendulum that would have made it very difficult for the D's to get a 3rd term.

One way to consider myself would be a "small government liberal", or to put it another way one who thinks we have too damned much government, getting too involved in our lives, passing too many damned "laws" that they have no business getting involved in. I am fiscally conservative and while I believe in the benefits of a safety net, I am tired of working to fund legions who sit on their backside with their handout; and no I do not believe they are entitled to anything - be it a basic income or health care at other people's expense. I am absolutely sick of being "taxed" (stolen from) to fund either the handouts both to the "poor" and the "corporate welfare" on the left and the "crony capitalism" on the "right". On the other side, I am socially liberal. I don't believe the "government" or the "church" should be telling me what I can put in my body or who I do what sex act with, or anything of the sort, as long as I am not putting the public in danger by my behavior or actions they need to butt out.

I have seen a growing number of people like me and more and more we find ourselves saying there is only one way to put a stop to the nonsense that is getting to be overwhelming - a violent revolt.

[Mikebert]

(07-25-2017, 06:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-23-2017, 01:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

Source: http://rpubs.com/ianrmcdonald/293069

My comment in another political chat line:

In the 1960s the Democrats had some right-wing Dixiecrat pols I might not discuss the House for personalities, but the Senate has some memorable figures. The Republicans had Charles Percy and John Chaffee -- and the Democrats had John Stennis and Strom Thurmond. There were relatively-liberal Republicans, and they would show that they could accept the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They might have been pro-business, but they had no use for a cause associated with terrorism.

So there were "Rockefeller Republicans"... but by 2017 most of those (or those whose demographics suggest that they would have been such in the 1960s) are now Democrats. But at the same time, white Democrats in the South have given up on their old antipathy for Big Business, They consider the industrial jobs an improvement over tenant farming or other ill-paying activities of the old agrarian South. They may still be racists, but the Republican Party has a big-enough tent for those.

As late as the mid-1960s the Democrats had a bimodal distribution of Representatives with a peak around -.032  and another, smaller peak near zero. By 1995 the Democrats had a distribution with a single peak around  -.037 with a distribution resembling a bell curve. By 2013 the single peak for Democrats was around -.040, likely the result of the hammering of somewhat-conservative Democrats in the Tea Party election of 2010.

Meanwhile the Republican Party went from having a peak of about  0.22 in 1963 to about 0.45 around 1997 (but it was a bell curve). By 2013 the Republican Party had a three-humped curve resembling the profile of an atoll-lined sinking island with a large peak around 0.8 and lesser peaks at 0.55 and at 0.92. The scary point is what people might believe if they are at the range of 1,00 on either side. Marxists on the Left? Genocidal fascists on the Right?

Now here's a cause for much political distress: if one was in the range of -0.05 to about 0.30, the center-right, you had no representation like you. Democrats may be closer to the center, but they do not have the center. A President like Barack Obama might need to triangulate to the center after his Party gets clobbered in the 2010 Tea Party election. Donald Trump so far suggests that he can completely neglect people to the left of about 0.45 and must appeal to people close to 1.00. And who are around that level?

Donald Trump may act as if people to the left of about -.030 are now politically irrelevant, but there might be people on the far-right end of the Republican distribution who would like the Left eliminated from political life. Shut down the opposition, make it permanently irrelevant, or eliminate it? That could be the debate should the Republicans consolidate even more power in 2018 and 2020.  And that would be an ugly America.

I am surprised that this got no comment. So what happened to the politicians of the Center?

What were they? I am guessing that they were the sorts elected to do good for their districts. Get some federal funds for roads. Keep the farm subsidies flowing in rural areas.  Avoid saying things offensive to more than about 20% of the people in the district. Get along with other members of Congress so that you can get something done. Be able to explain any vote to constituents, and not only to lobbyists.

Gerrymandering ensures that most districts can support either a politician suitable to an R+30 district or a politician suitable to a D+20 district. So such are the politicians that we get, and with the majority-of-a-majority politics that Lee Atwater initiated and Karl Rogue refined, we can end up with a 51-49 split of power and, if the 51% is adequately ruthless, entrench itself and marginalize everyone else. One election that gives that side of the political spectrum that level of power is enough to entrench that unsustainable clique forever because it will then reshape the electoral practices to fit its agenda.  

How long can this last before we get torture chambers and labor camps? When one part of the electorate has the means and will to subjugate a minority  and no conscience, then that is what happens.

Maybe we can avoid a Hitler -- but we can easily get a Franco or a Milosevic.

Polarization is a proxy for intra-elite competition/conflict. Such conflict is a normal occurrence during secular cycle crises eras.  Last secular cycle we went into crisis around 1907, this time it was 2006. Polarization peaked during the first decade of the 20th century and remained high afterward until the crisis was dealt with around 1940. Similarly polarization is high today and will remain so until the crisis is dealt with this time.

I would argue that intra-elite conflict was high in 1860 (even though it does not show up in the measure you cite) because Civil War broke out the next year.  I would suggest the elite-led insurgency developing in the 1760's and 1770's is strong evidence of polarization then too.  Similarly, developing insurgencies in the 1640's and around 1450 show the same.  Each of these periods saw the beginning of a secular cycle crisis that terminated in a 4T. 

Note: a secular cycle crisis is not the same thing as a 4T, they are related, but there are 4Ts (e.g. Armada) and many of the pre-1435 4Ts that are not in secular cycle crisis periods. 

Since inequality is historically high (this indicates a secular cycle crisis), and most of us believe it is a 4T now, isn't this sort of expected?

[Eric the Green]

(07-26-2017, 11:36 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(07-25-2017, 06:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-23-2017, 01:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

Source: http://rpubs.com/ianrmcdonald/293069

My comment in another political chat line:

In the 1960s the Democrats had some right-wing Dixiecrat pols I might not discuss the House for personalities, but the Senate has some memorable figures. The Republicans had Charles Percy and John Chaffee -- and the Democrats had John Stennis and Strom Thurmond. There were relatively-liberal Republicans, and they would show that they could accept the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They might have been pro-business, but they had no use for a cause associated with terrorism.

So there were "Rockefeller Republicans"... but by 2017 most of those (or those whose demographics suggest that they would have been such in the 1960s) are now Democrats. But at the same time, white Democrats in the South have given up on their old antipathy for Big Business, They consider the industrial jobs an improvement over tenant farming or other ill-paying activities of the old agrarian South. They may still be racists, but the Republican Party has a big-enough tent for those.

As late as the mid-1960s the Democrats had a bimodal distribution of Representatives with a peak around -.032  and another, smaller peak near zero. By 1995 the Democrats had a distribution with a single peak around  -.037 with a distribution resembling a bell curve. By 2013 the single peak for Democrats was around -.040, likely the result of the hammering of somewhat-conservative Democrats in the Tea Party election of 2010.

Meanwhile the Republican Party went from having a peak of about  0.22 in 1963 to about 0.45 around 1997 (but it was a bell curve). By 2013 the Republican Party had a three-humped curve resembling the profile of an atoll-lined sinking island with a large peak around 0.8 and lesser peaks at 0.55 and at 0.92. The scary point is what people might believe if they are at the range of 1,00 on either side. Marxists on the Left? Genocidal fascists on the Right?

Now here's a cause for much political distress: if one was in the range of -0.05 to about 0.30, the center-right, you had no representation like you. Democrats may be closer to the center, but they do not have the center. A President like Barack Obama might need to triangulate to the center after his Party gets clobbered in the 2010 Tea Party election. Donald Trump so far suggests that he can completely neglect people to the left of about 0.45 and must appeal to people close to 1.00. And who are around that level?

Donald Trump may act as if people to the left of about -.030 are now politically irrelevant, but there might be people on the far-right end of the Republican distribution who would like the Left eliminated from political life. Shut down the opposition, make it permanently irrelevant, or eliminate it? That could be the debate should the Republicans consolidate even more power in 2018 and 2020.  And that would be an ugly America.

I am surprised that this got no comment. So what happened to the politicians of the Center?

What were they? I am guessing that they were the sorts elected to do good for their districts. Get some federal funds for roads. Keep the farm subsidies flowing in rural areas.  Avoid saying things offensive to more than about 20% of the people in the district. Get along with other members of Congress so that you can get something done. Be able to explain any vote to constituents, and not only to lobbyists.

Gerrymandering ensures that most districts can support either a politician suitable to an R+30 district or a politician suitable to a D+20 district. So such are the politicians that we get, and with the majority-of-a-majority politics that Lee Atwater initiated and Karl Rogue refined, we can end up with a 51-49 split of power and, if the 51% is adequately ruthless, entrench itself and marginalize everyone else. One election that gives that side of the political spectrum that level of power is enough to entrench that unsustainable clique forever because it will then reshape the electoral practices to fit its agenda.  

How long can this last before we get torture chambers and labor camps? When one part of the electorate has the means and will to subjugate a minority  and no conscience, then that is what happens.

Maybe we can avoid a Hitler -- but we can easily get a Franco or a Milosevic.

Although I am promoting Militant (Apolitical) Nationalism, I am classic Center dweller. I'm nauseated by the Trump-loving, Duginist Neo Nazi Totalitarians. For the first time in my life, there exists a political group who incite me to potential violence. If a People's Army were to form up to combat them, who'd take a 54 year old (but still fit) old fart, I'd join.

Meanwhile, the Left? They don't nauseate me, but at times they do annoy me. Witness my keyboard mini debates with EtG.

It's always possible they could educate you, Mr. X

One reason for no comment, brower, may be the title "DW - nominate" What does that mean? If that's the title of the chart, what does the chart refer to?

"if the 51% is adequately ruthless, (it could) entrench itself and marginalize everyone else. One election that gives that side of the political spectrum that level of power is enough to entrench that unsustainable clique forever because it will then reshape the electoral practices to fit its agenda."
It seems only the right-wing is capable of this ruthless strategy so far. Perhaps that will change.

"we can easily get a Franco or a Milosevic"

We got a Mussolini.

[Eric the Green]

(07-28-2017, 02:59 PM)noway2 Wrote:

(07-26-2017, 11:36 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Although I am promoting Militant (Apolitical) Nationalism, I am classic Center dweller. I'm nauseated by the Trump-loving, Duginist Neo Nazi Totalitarians. For the first time in my life, there exists a political group who incite me to potential violence. If a People's Army were to form up to combat them, who'd take a 54 year old (but still fit) old fart, I'd join.

Meanwhile, the Left? They don't nauseate me, but at times they do annoy me. Witness my keyboard mini debates with EtG.

Interesting way to put it, apolitical nationalism and the "left" doesn't nauseate you (I assume the "right" does) but they do annoy you.

In many ways I find myself agreeing with the apolitical nationalism, but both the "left" and the "right" nauseate me in different ways and for different reasons. There are some aspects of the platforms on both the "left" and the "right" that I support and some that I vehemently oppose.

In fact, I consider both the Pugs and the Dims to be two polar facets of one uni-party, neither of which represent a large portion of the people. It is almost comical that it came down to a Clinton versus Trump, the former epitomizing much of what I and many other people despise about the "left" and the latter I believe is the result of people's despise of the "right" and he rode more of the natural pendulum that would have made it very difficult for the D's to get a 3rd term.

One way to consider myself would be a "small government liberal", or to put it another way one who thinks we have too damned much government, getting too involved in our lives, passing too many damned "laws" that they have no business getting involved in. I am fiscally conservative and while I believe in the benefits of a safety net, I am tired of working to fund legions who sit on their backside with their handout; and no I do not believe they are entitled to anything - be it a basic income or health care at other people's expense. I am absolutely sick of being "taxed" (stolen from) to fund either the handouts both to the "poor" and the "corporate welfare" on the left and the "crony capitalism" on the "right". On the other side, I am socially liberal. I don't believe the "government" or the "church" should be telling me what I can put in my body or who I do what sex act with, or anything of the sort, as long as I am not putting the public in danger by my behavior or actions they need to butt out.

I have seen a growing number of people like me and more and more we find ourselves saying there is only one way to put a stop to the nonsense that is getting to be overwhelming - a violent revolt.

You may have to choose which side to revolt against, and which to join. I don't know if the rebels in this 4T will be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The vast 30+ percent of Americans who are fundamentalist and racist will be the heart of any right-wing rebellion. See the article I posted about those very socially-conservative folks. On the left, there will be plenty of social-justice warriors and fiscal liberals who militantly disagree with your classic and typical conservative views about taxes as theft and legions of freeloaders. However, if somehow the revolt were to be sparked by another bailout of banks too big to fail, then at least temporarily it could come from people on both sides.

[pbrower2a]

(07-31-2017, 06:45 AM)Mikebert Wrote: Polarization is a good proxy for intra-elite competition/conflict. This is a normal occurrence during secular cycle crises eras.  Last secular cycle we went into crisis around 1907, this time it was 2006. Polarization peaked during the first decade of the 20th century and remained high afterward until the crisis was dealt with around 1940. Similarly polarization is high today and will remain so until the crisis is dealt with this time.

I would surmise that intra-elite conflict was high in the 1850's, even though it does not show up in the measure you cite, because Civil War broke out in 1861.  I would suggest the elite-led insurgency developing in the 1760's and 1770's is strong evidence of polarization then too.  Similarly, developing insurgencies in the 1640's and around 1450 show the same.  Each of these saw the being of a secular cycle crisis that terminated in a 4T.

Since most of us believe it is a 4T now, isn't this sort of expected?

...I wonder what sort of polarization existed in France before 1789, in Russia just before 1917, and in Germany in 1930. Do we have any parallels?

When Generations came out, I expected the Crisis to be mostly cultural and not economic. Dictatorship and racism were clearly outmoded throughout the industrial West, and expecting those to revive in America seemed impossible. Maybe there would be some sort of economic transition due to technological advances. Of course there was the possibility of a 1929-style Crash, and for a year and a half the economic meltdown beginning in late 2007 looked much like that beginning in late 1929. I could not see any Evil Empire rising that could make the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union seem a cause of nostalgia.

But we got out of the Panic of 2008 seemingly unscathed. There's a big difference in effect. The three horrid years beginning in late 1929 set America back about twenty years in economic progress and created a political climate in which people insisted upon institutional change.  Americans, including even what had been the ruling elite in the 1920s, abandoned the brash every-man-for-himself individualism  because such proved a failure. Americans had tolerated booms and busts, like pollution, as necessary characteristics of an economy in growth and an economy delivering technological advances that made life richer and fuller. People found out the hard way that such economic progress as America had had since the Civil War was so uneven that many people were still living as if it were still the 'Forties. The Eighteen-Forties, that is. 

But America in 2008 was no longer the America of 1929. America didn't react the same way to the economic meltdown. The political system rescued the shady actors of the Double-Zero Decade (the New Roaring Twenties) on the assumption that their capital and bureaucratic power had to be protected. But those people recovered the means in which to buy the political process -- which is exactly what those elites did. Our nation is the frog that took the scorpion for a ride through the floodwater.

Anyone who thinks that Trump's America is a democracy is a fool. But the election of Donald Trump is the last phase of salami slicing that has transformed America into a Republic in Name Only. It is entirely possible that the economic leadership will allow us to have an illusion of free elections that just fall short of giving people a government responsive to people other than big agrarian landowners, urban rent-grabbers, the shareholding elite, the executive nomenklatura (America's bureaucratic elites in Corporate America act much like the their counterparts in the Soviet Union -- they found ways in which to exploit the masses severely while not owning the means of production), sell-out intellectuals, and organized crime. These people prefer that politicians be either fanatics on their side or be pliable 'empty suits'. It's only a matter of time before America becomes the Evil Empire. Those elites are not at all in conflict

(OK -- so is the 'Russian' Mafia the American equivalent of the pre-WWII Black Dragon Society in Japan?)

Don't fool yourself. The economic elites like things as they are, except that they would like to privatize anything that can turn a profit, like the Interstate Highway System, to monopolistic gougers. But we will hear the gougers call themselves benefactors, the bringers of the best of all possible worlds. If you wonder whether the worst abusers and exploiters in American history, the slave-owning planters, had any feelings of guilt about what they did to slaves -- they thought themselves the best thing that ever happened to their chattels. That may be more marked in Idealist generations who can believe that their scummy behavior serves some great purpose (the enrichment and pampering of themselves). The pampering of the elites is so important that people may need to be worked to exhaustion on starvation rations for it -- to those elites such is a logical consequence of their narcissism.

The Great Depression had its positive effect in dashing the narcissism of people in Veblen's Leisure Class. In the 1930s America would have to grow its way out of the worst point of the Great Depression to the point that America was materially better than it was at the start. By the late 1930s people had more cars, telephones, radios, phonographs, ovens, refrigerators, and furniture than it had in the late 1920s. Those would be very useful when Americans had to endure the loss of the consumer society after the Pearl Harbor attack.

For the economic elites, times have never been better. The middle class is living on the past. The poor? They are scraping along. The system still offers welfare -- a way to ensure that there will be plenty of workers for munitions plants and in the fields for provisions for soldiers when the Master Class decides upon a war for profit in war machines and for resource-grabs in victims of American aggression.

America's economic elites are as rapacious, arrogant, and demanding as ever. They now have nearly total power. You are an optimist if you believe that they will allow any election to curtail their power. They need only get a 55-45 split in State legislatures and both Houses of Congress, and a pliant President to get what they want -- a society of extreme polarization in economic results.

...Just consider the antithesis of narcissism: humility. Nobody does humility for the fun of it. It is a survival tool, deference to others' power over one or about realities beyond one's control. In the 1930s, America's economic elites feared the masses who had lost so much between 1929 and 1932. Today's elites have nothing to offer us but fear -- and some stupefying entertainment to keep us from doing something so subversive as thinking.

[linus]

I read Neil Howe's WaPo op-ed from recent months, which didn't necessarily suggest he thought some kind of war was inevitable, but did say: well, hey, it happened repeatedly before.

I'm kind of still of the opinion that this Crisis is more like the Glorious Revolution (in a certain way) than any other, coming as it did after the Cycle that made England into Britain (much as I think the Depression/WWII made America a superpower). There was certainly violence abroad and in particular the colonies (King Phillips War and all that) but nothing like a total war in the UK.

I also think (having started but not yet completed Stephen Skowronek's "the Politics Presidents Make" - which should be of interest to any 4ters) that Donald Trump may be most like Andrew Johnson, a "wild card" president who succeeded a major, reconstructive liberal one and was unable to undo Lincoln's warrants for disruption and reordering. Trump is like the zombie Reaganite to Johnson's zombie Jacksonian (no wonder Bannon likes him). (The Trefousse bio of Johnson just dropped on my doorstep - am reading because precisely this; day off because f***ing hot out there.)

Re: violence: sadly, maybe more, I think, but of the kind we've seen and continue to: lone wolves, mass shootings, conspiracies involving small numbers of people acting out their crazy.