April 14, 2019
Incivility was thrust upon us
Timothy Birdnow
Here is an essay about America's new civil war, one that I find myself quibbling with in no small part. Author Richard Fernandez is, in my humble estimation, trying too hard to be fair and balanced and seems to miss the crux of the issue, the divide that is tearing America apart.
He states:
What Fernandez fails to realize is people have always been that way. The problem now is that Progressive pacifism, the promotion of the last half century that says there is never justification for violence, no matter the provocation, has led to the exact opposite of what it was intended. People are now more rude, more aggressive, more vicious precisely because they no longer fear getting punched out by the offended party. There was a time when behavior was moderated lest you take a beating at the hands of a man who found his honor insulted. Nobody used to question the idea and, indeed, it was expected "you had it coming". The civil authorities generally ignored fisticuffs unless someone was hurt or there were weapons involved. But the Left - then well in the minority - moved to pacify the nation, so that they could insult and malign with impunity. The end result was a society where everyone is always in everyone's business and in their faces.
Don't doubt me on this. Just look at the Old West days. Frank Dalton, Wyatt Earp, James "Wild Bill" Hichok, none of these men put up with a whole lot. Everyone knew better than to pick a fight with them, too, after a while. Now, I'm not advocating for a return tot he Old West, but there are lessons to be learned; people in that era - indeed all former eras _ were much more polite to each-other than now, and that primarily because there was a real danger in rudeness. And crime was less than now because there was a real danger in robbing someone who might shoot you. In those days nobody was charged with a crime for shooting a burglar. That is a strictly modern idea, that property crimes "do not deserve the death penalty". It used to be believed that anyone engaging in a crime was taking a huge risk, and had it coming. No longer; that is a modern, Progressive idea. And it has done nothing but exascerbate crime. Imposed civility is what has given us so much incivility. That is especially true of the Left, which has made itself both the high judges of the modern morality and also now feels secure enough to openly advocate violence. They have the media on their side and can get away with it. The Courts, too. And lots of money to help pay for their defense. And so many of the people driving "the Resistance" are young post-adolescents, who have too little to do and a lot of angry hormones to suppress. Where once these kids would be doing hard labor to work off their aggressions, now they have nothing to do and are told how angry they should be by their teachers and professors and social media. So in their righteous indignation they lash out. The same is not true of Conservatives, and yet Fernandez intimates as much.
How many assaults by Conservatives have we witnessed over the last few years? Very few.
Which brings us to another point. We broke the covenant with the Left back in the eighties. See, we were supposed to keep our mouths shut, take our medicine, and accept our fate. That was the deal. The Progressives believed then as they do now that theirs is the moral high ground and that theirs is the inevitability of history. We are to be barely tolerated, archaic throwbacks to a past best forgotten. In politics this played out with a "mellerdrama", a riverboat stage play where Conservatives came out wearing a dark cape with a waxed mustache while everyone booed and hissed. That was our role. As long as we played it we were tolerated. But Reagan came along, then the Conservative movement, long moribund and calcified, cowering like a beaten puppy after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, was suddenly energized. We, the silent majority, had watched as the Left systematically dismantled everything we cared about in this country. Suddenly there was pushback. With the rise of a conservative counter-media and the ability to get information out, the Left saw it's control slipping. We had broken the pact, and they declared war on us.
By the way, the media has suppressed or twisted the facts for decades, far longer than the current era. I remember a photo in Life magazine of a man being hit in the head by a police officer during the '68 DNC Convention. They carefully cut the photo so it didn't show what was really happening; the man had a knife and was brandishing it at the police officer. But the media lied by omission, making it appear a cop was just pummeling an innocent protester, someone exercising his free speech rights. It was a lie then, and not an uncommon lie. The media has been doing this for decades. Shoot, they didn't even tell the American People that Franklyn D. Roosevelt was in a wheel chair! Walter Kronkite told America "the war is lost" after the Tet Offensive nearly wiped out the VietCong. They have always had their agenda, and it has been at odds with average Americans.
At any rate, this is not a push and pull scenario, but the result of a long-term strategy by the Left. They have been waging a revolution in slow motion against the normal people of America. They have assaulted America's churches, her social clubs, her institutions, her military. Then, after breaking everything, when there is nothing left to act to restrain people's passions, they complain about "incivility". Where was civility when Nixon was impeached? When the Democrats tried to impeach Reagan over Iran-Contra? When they called George W. Bush Hitler?
This did not start with Donald Trump.
Let us continue with Fernandez:
While one explanation for the fractiousness is a reversion to our primitive natural tendency to mistrust outsiders, the other possibility is that it is now the way modern warfare is waged.Alexa
End excerpt.
I would like to remind Mr. Fernandez that one of the triggers of the Civil War was the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks? Or the "incivility" of John Brown at Potowatomie Creek, where he murdered a half dozen southern settlers? For that matter, does he not remember accusations against political rivals from earlier, such as the back and forth between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, that led to their fighting a duel? James Madison was called a freak by his political opponent because of his diminutive size. Thomas Jefferson was accused of sexual dalliances with slaves, a huge thing back then.
The current acrimony over politics is nothing new. What is new is that it is driven by a twenty four hour news cycle thanks to cable news and the internet. And what is new is that there are people blessing violence against those who disagree.
Fernandez continues:
But since the resulting battlefields are waged inside the country, there is little reason why domestic political conflict should not resemble the international ones. Because victory is now attained by jailing opponents, silencing or financially sanctioning them, punitive prosecution, deplatforming, and universal surveillance are used alike in both cases and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart.
End excerpt.
It should be pointed out that Abraham Lincoln jailed political opponents, spied, and used these same dirty tricks on Americans with whom he disagreed. He suspended the writ of habeus corpus, for example, and kept "copperhead" news editors in the clink indefinitely without charge (until the Supreme Court overruled him.)
That's not to say this isn't wrong, but to say it's not unprecedented. What IS unprecedented is the use of the surveillance state, a machine built first to deal with Soviet spies and then to deal with terrorism, against political enemies. THAT could never have happened in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries; Americas government wasn't big enough, and people knew how they would handle it if someone tried to make it so. There was a reason why the Second Amendment was put in place.
But Americans have been cowed for the last hundred years, and now the wolves are trying to harvest the sheep. Fernandez, who is a good writer and solid conservative, seems to miss that fact. It's the problem with so much of the Conservative movement; an unwillingness to appear unreasonable, to be willing to call the emperor lewd and nude.
Fernandez contnues:
If a civil war were actually underway it would take the form of hybrid warfare and look much like what can already be observed today. It would explain why, in an era obsessed with safe spaces and tolerance, there is little of either left; why no one is safe from offense, nothing is private; why everything is increasingly criminalized. That context would explain why each new restriction, whether on the use of cash, private transportation, or gun ownership can be perceived as a veiled threat. "Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: 'I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.'"
It might shed light on why so many people already feel like psychological refugees with the strange sense they have been evicted from their homes and wondering: what happened to my country? To the church on the corner? To family gatherings? Trust networks? Why have they been turned into battlegrounds?
End excerpt.
Americans don't just feel this way - they ARE refugees in their own country. America has been stolen from her People. It really is that simple. The core values of America - that you are free to speak your mind, to worship your God, to love and defend your country, to work and enjoy the fruits of your labors, to protect and care for your family, etc. have all been taken away, replaced with a new vision, a collectivist vision that says the State and the ruling class of society can tell you what to say, indeed, what to think, how to act, where to go, etc. You no longer have the rights to own property, but merely to act as a caretaker; government can ultimately control property, real and otherwise. If you are a Christian you have to take a heaping helping of abuse. Your family is the ultimate responsibility of the State, and they will tell you how to raise your children. You should hate your country's history because ti is racist, ssexist, homosphobic, xemophobic etc. You have no right to horde your wealth...
You're damned right we are strangers in our own country!
Fernandez points to the Left feeling the same way. That is no surprise; the Left has always been guilty of projection, and they have recruited on the basis of our side doing what they have been working long and hard to do. I've always said that many of the people in Occupy Wall Street hold values similar to our own, in that, while they have been hoodwinked into believing in socialism and the like, they are uneasy about the rise of corporatism in the World. Well, we have the same worries. The "Establishment" are nothing but the same plutocrats the OWS people rail against. They aren't all wrong. But they will throw in with government as the solution, when government is bought and paid for by these same plutocrats. Why hate a business you don't have to support while supporting a much larger corporation that you are forced to deal with (the U.S. government)?
In the end, Fernandez seems to be calling for a certain return to civility. I would argue civility was the anesthesia that allowed the Left to gain so much ground, to fundamentally transform America in the first place. The current incivility was something long overdue. Even if a return to civility (read conservative surrender) were desirable, I don't think it is possible at this point; the Left is enraged at having been exposed and having open opposition, and they will not stop now until they have destroyed us. That has always been their plan, they just wanted to wait until they knew victory was certain.
We've got to stop fantasizing about a fifties-era bonhomie and face the terrible truth, that this thing is going to play out until one side is defeated. For decades we have been in an asymmetric war, with one side eternally on the offensive and our side following the trumpet that forever calls retreat. Now that is changing - and the Progressive Left doesn't like that at all.
Good.
Here is an essay about America's new civil war, one that I find myself quibbling with in no small part. Author Richard Fernandez is, in my humble estimation, trying too hard to be fair and balanced and seems to miss the crux of the issue, the divide that is tearing America apart.
He states:
There is less and less regret for incivility. Nobody says sorry anymore, they just retreat into a private reality where they are always right.
What Fernandez fails to realize is people have always been that way. The problem now is that Progressive pacifism, the promotion of the last half century that says there is never justification for violence, no matter the provocation, has led to the exact opposite of what it was intended. People are now more rude, more aggressive, more vicious precisely because they no longer fear getting punched out by the offended party. There was a time when behavior was moderated lest you take a beating at the hands of a man who found his honor insulted. Nobody used to question the idea and, indeed, it was expected "you had it coming". The civil authorities generally ignored fisticuffs unless someone was hurt or there were weapons involved. But the Left - then well in the minority - moved to pacify the nation, so that they could insult and malign with impunity. The end result was a society where everyone is always in everyone's business and in their faces.
Don't doubt me on this. Just look at the Old West days. Frank Dalton, Wyatt Earp, James "Wild Bill" Hichok, none of these men put up with a whole lot. Everyone knew better than to pick a fight with them, too, after a while. Now, I'm not advocating for a return tot he Old West, but there are lessons to be learned; people in that era - indeed all former eras _ were much more polite to each-other than now, and that primarily because there was a real danger in rudeness. And crime was less than now because there was a real danger in robbing someone who might shoot you. In those days nobody was charged with a crime for shooting a burglar. That is a strictly modern idea, that property crimes "do not deserve the death penalty". It used to be believed that anyone engaging in a crime was taking a huge risk, and had it coming. No longer; that is a modern, Progressive idea. And it has done nothing but exascerbate crime. Imposed civility is what has given us so much incivility. That is especially true of the Left, which has made itself both the high judges of the modern morality and also now feels secure enough to openly advocate violence. They have the media on their side and can get away with it. The Courts, too. And lots of money to help pay for their defense. And so many of the people driving "the Resistance" are young post-adolescents, who have too little to do and a lot of angry hormones to suppress. Where once these kids would be doing hard labor to work off their aggressions, now they have nothing to do and are told how angry they should be by their teachers and professors and social media. So in their righteous indignation they lash out. The same is not true of Conservatives, and yet Fernandez intimates as much.
How many assaults by Conservatives have we witnessed over the last few years? Very few.
Which brings us to another point. We broke the covenant with the Left back in the eighties. See, we were supposed to keep our mouths shut, take our medicine, and accept our fate. That was the deal. The Progressives believed then as they do now that theirs is the moral high ground and that theirs is the inevitability of history. We are to be barely tolerated, archaic throwbacks to a past best forgotten. In politics this played out with a "mellerdrama", a riverboat stage play where Conservatives came out wearing a dark cape with a waxed mustache while everyone booed and hissed. That was our role. As long as we played it we were tolerated. But Reagan came along, then the Conservative movement, long moribund and calcified, cowering like a beaten puppy after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, was suddenly energized. We, the silent majority, had watched as the Left systematically dismantled everything we cared about in this country. Suddenly there was pushback. With the rise of a conservative counter-media and the ability to get information out, the Left saw it's control slipping. We had broken the pact, and they declared war on us.
By the way, the media has suppressed or twisted the facts for decades, far longer than the current era. I remember a photo in Life magazine of a man being hit in the head by a police officer during the '68 DNC Convention. They carefully cut the photo so it didn't show what was really happening; the man had a knife and was brandishing it at the police officer. But the media lied by omission, making it appear a cop was just pummeling an innocent protester, someone exercising his free speech rights. It was a lie then, and not an uncommon lie. The media has been doing this for decades. Shoot, they didn't even tell the American People that Franklyn D. Roosevelt was in a wheel chair! Walter Kronkite told America "the war is lost" after the Tet Offensive nearly wiped out the VietCong. They have always had their agenda, and it has been at odds with average Americans.
At any rate, this is not a push and pull scenario, but the result of a long-term strategy by the Left. They have been waging a revolution in slow motion against the normal people of America. They have assaulted America's churches, her social clubs, her institutions, her military. Then, after breaking everything, when there is nothing left to act to restrain people's passions, they complain about "incivility". Where was civility when Nixon was impeached? When the Democrats tried to impeach Reagan over Iran-Contra? When they called George W. Bush Hitler?
This did not start with Donald Trump.
Let us continue with Fernandez:
While one explanation for the fractiousness is a reversion to our primitive natural tendency to mistrust outsiders, the other possibility is that it is now the way modern warfare is waged.Alexa
End excerpt.
I would like to remind Mr. Fernandez that one of the triggers of the Civil War was the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks? Or the "incivility" of John Brown at Potowatomie Creek, where he murdered a half dozen southern settlers? For that matter, does he not remember accusations against political rivals from earlier, such as the back and forth between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, that led to their fighting a duel? James Madison was called a freak by his political opponent because of his diminutive size. Thomas Jefferson was accused of sexual dalliances with slaves, a huge thing back then.
The current acrimony over politics is nothing new. What is new is that it is driven by a twenty four hour news cycle thanks to cable news and the internet. And what is new is that there are people blessing violence against those who disagree.
Fernandez continues:
But since the resulting battlefields are waged inside the country, there is little reason why domestic political conflict should not resemble the international ones. Because victory is now attained by jailing opponents, silencing or financially sanctioning them, punitive prosecution, deplatforming, and universal surveillance are used alike in both cases and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart.
End excerpt.
It should be pointed out that Abraham Lincoln jailed political opponents, spied, and used these same dirty tricks on Americans with whom he disagreed. He suspended the writ of habeus corpus, for example, and kept "copperhead" news editors in the clink indefinitely without charge (until the Supreme Court overruled him.)
That's not to say this isn't wrong, but to say it's not unprecedented. What IS unprecedented is the use of the surveillance state, a machine built first to deal with Soviet spies and then to deal with terrorism, against political enemies. THAT could never have happened in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries; Americas government wasn't big enough, and people knew how they would handle it if someone tried to make it so. There was a reason why the Second Amendment was put in place.
But Americans have been cowed for the last hundred years, and now the wolves are trying to harvest the sheep. Fernandez, who is a good writer and solid conservative, seems to miss that fact. It's the problem with so much of the Conservative movement; an unwillingness to appear unreasonable, to be willing to call the emperor lewd and nude.
Fernandez contnues:
If a civil war were actually underway it would take the form of hybrid warfare and look much like what can already be observed today. It would explain why, in an era obsessed with safe spaces and tolerance, there is little of either left; why no one is safe from offense, nothing is private; why everything is increasingly criminalized. That context would explain why each new restriction, whether on the use of cash, private transportation, or gun ownership can be perceived as a veiled threat. "Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: 'I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.'"
It might shed light on why so many people already feel like psychological refugees with the strange sense they have been evicted from their homes and wondering: what happened to my country? To the church on the corner? To family gatherings? Trust networks? Why have they been turned into battlegrounds?
End excerpt.
Americans don't just feel this way - they ARE refugees in their own country. America has been stolen from her People. It really is that simple. The core values of America - that you are free to speak your mind, to worship your God, to love and defend your country, to work and enjoy the fruits of your labors, to protect and care for your family, etc. have all been taken away, replaced with a new vision, a collectivist vision that says the State and the ruling class of society can tell you what to say, indeed, what to think, how to act, where to go, etc. You no longer have the rights to own property, but merely to act as a caretaker; government can ultimately control property, real and otherwise. If you are a Christian you have to take a heaping helping of abuse. Your family is the ultimate responsibility of the State, and they will tell you how to raise your children. You should hate your country's history because ti is racist, ssexist, homosphobic, xemophobic etc. You have no right to horde your wealth...
You're damned right we are strangers in our own country!
Fernandez points to the Left feeling the same way. That is no surprise; the Left has always been guilty of projection, and they have recruited on the basis of our side doing what they have been working long and hard to do. I've always said that many of the people in Occupy Wall Street hold values similar to our own, in that, while they have been hoodwinked into believing in socialism and the like, they are uneasy about the rise of corporatism in the World. Well, we have the same worries. The "Establishment" are nothing but the same plutocrats the OWS people rail against. They aren't all wrong. But they will throw in with government as the solution, when government is bought and paid for by these same plutocrats. Why hate a business you don't have to support while supporting a much larger corporation that you are forced to deal with (the U.S. government)?
In the end, Fernandez seems to be calling for a certain return to civility. I would argue civility was the anesthesia that allowed the Left to gain so much ground, to fundamentally transform America in the first place. The current incivility was something long overdue. Even if a return to civility (read conservative surrender) were desirable, I don't think it is possible at this point; the Left is enraged at having been exposed and having open opposition, and they will not stop now until they have destroyed us. That has always been their plan, they just wanted to wait until they knew victory was certain.
We've got to stop fantasizing about a fifties-era bonhomie and face the terrible truth, that this thing is going to play out until one side is defeated. For decades we have been in an asymmetric war, with one side eternally on the offensive and our side following the trumpet that forever calls retreat. Now that is changing - and the Progressive Left doesn't like that at all.
Good.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
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