The Fifth American War
July 18, 2017
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning.
The wars between Trump, the media, the deep state, and the
progressive party — replete with charges and counter-charges of scandal,
collusion, and corruption — are merely symptoms of a much larger
fundamental and growing divide between Americans that is reaching a
dangerous climax.
On four prior occasions in American history the country nearly split
apart, as seemingly irreconcilable cultural, economic, political,
social, geographical, and demographic fault lines opened a path to
hatred and violence.
During the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1830s, factions nearly ripped
the country apart over whether the East Coast Founders’ establishment
of a half-century would relinquish its monopoly of political power to
reflect the new demographic realties of an expanding frontier — and its
populist champions often deemed unfit for self-governance. For the most
part, the Jacksonians won.
Three decades later the nation divided over slavery, prompting the
most lethal war in American history to end it and force the defeated
Confederate southern states back into the Union.
The Great Depression, and the establishment’s inept responses to it,
left a quarter of the country unemployed for nearly a decade — hungry
and desperate to expand government even if it entailed curtailing
liberty in a way never envisioned by the Founders. The result was
eventually the redefinition of freedom as the right of the individual to
have his daily needs guaranteed by the state.
In the 1960s, the hippie movement — fueled by furor over the Vietnam
War, civil-rights protests, and environmental activism — turned holistic
in a fashion rarely seen before. A quarter of the country went “hip,”
grooming, dressing, talking, and acting in a way that reflected their
disdain for the silent majority of “straight” or “irrelevant”
traditional America. The hipsters lost the battle (most eventually cut
their hair and outgrew their paisley tops to join the rat race) but won
the war — as the universities, media, foundations, Hollywood, arts, and
entertainment now echo the values of 1969 rather than those that
preceded it.
Now we are engaged in yet a fifth revolutionary divide, similar to,
but often unlike, prior upheavals. The consequences of globalization,
the growth of the deep state, changing demographics, open borders, the
rise of a geographic apartheid between blue and red states, and the
institutionalization of a permanent coastal political and culture elite —
and the reaction to all that — are tearing apart the country.
Despite its 21st-century veneer, the nature of the divide is often over ancient questions of politics and society.
The Deep State
Technological advances, the entrance of a billion Chinese into the
global work force, and the huge growth in the administrative entitlement
state have redefined material want. The poor today have access to
appurtenances undreamed of just five decades ago by the upper middle
classes: one or two dependable cars, big-screen televisions, designer
sneakers and jeans, and an array of appliances from air conditioning to
microwave ovens. The rub is not that a Kia has no stereo system but that
it does not have the same model that’s in the rich man’s Lexus.
Inequality does not mean starvation: Obesity is now a national epidemic
among the nation’s poor; one in four Californians admitted for any
reason to a hospital is found to suffer from diabetes or similar
high-blood-sugar maladies due largely to an unhealthy diet and lifestyle
choices.
In political terms, the conflict hinges on whether the powers of
entrenched government will be used to ensure a rough equality of result —
at the expense of personal liberty and free will. The old argument that
a wealthy entrepreneurial class, if left free of burdensome and
unnecessary government restrictions to create wealth, will enrich all
Americans, is now largely discredited. Or rather it is stranger than
that. The hyper wealthy — a Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Warren
Buffett — by brilliant marketing and opportunistic politics are mostly
immune from government audit, and from robber-baron and antitrust
backlash. Instead, redistributive ire is aimed at the upper middle
class, which lacks the influence and romance of the extremely wealthy
and is shrinking because of higher taxes, ever-increasing regulations,
and globalized trade.
It does not matter that the ossified European social model does not
work and leads to collective decline in the standard of living. The
world knows that from seeing the implosion of Venezuela and Cuba, or the
gradual decline of the EU and the wreckage of its Mediterranean
members, or the plight of blue states such as Illinois and California.
Instead, it is the near-religious idea of egalitarianism that counts; on
the global stage, it has all but won the war against liberty. We are
all creatures of the Animal Farm barnyard now.
Indeed, if today’s student actually read Orwell’s short allegorical
novel (perhaps unlikely because it was written by a white male
heterosexual), he would miss the message and instead probably approve of
the various machinations of the zealot pig Napoleon to do whatever he
deemed necessary to end the old regime, even if it meant re-creating it
under a new correct veneer.
The conservative effort to roll back the entitlement, bureaucratic,
and redistributionist state has so far mostly failed. That today, coming
off sequestration, we are on target to run up a $700 billion annual
deficit, on top of a $20 trillion national debt, goes largely unnoticed.
Eighteen trillion dollars in national debt later, Ronald Reagan’s idea
of cutting taxes to “starve the beast’ of federal spending has been
superseded by “gorge the beast” to ensure that taxes rise on the upper
classes. To the degree that there is a residual war over entitlements,
it is not over cutting back such unsustainable programs, but instead
about modestly pruning the level of annual increases.
The government necessary to ensure such continued state borrowing and
spending is now nearly autonomous and transcends politics — and is
eager to use its formidable powers against any who threaten it.
Identity Politics
On a second front, there is a veritable civil war over race,
ethnicity, gender, and identity. Massive immigration, the rise of
opportunistic identity politics, and a new tribalism have replaced the
old melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage with
salad-bowl separatism. The only obstacle to the tribal state is that
there may soon be too many victims with too many claims on too few
oppressors.
There are too many incentives — from political spoils and university
admissions, to government employment and popular cultural acceptance —
to identify with one’s tribe rather than simply as an American.
The problems with such tribal fissuring are threefold. One, the
rhetorical disdain for traditional majority culture and values operates
in a landscape in which the critic adopts the tropes and lifestyles of
all that he demonizes. From what traditions do the Claremont or Berkeley
students believe their rights of protest derive? Where do they get
their expectations of clean campus water or capital to drop out of the
economy for four years of college? Was the technology behind the iPhone a
result of a patriarchal, nativist, male culture — and does that
therefore make the device tainted and unsuitable for use?
Second, if red-state, traditional America is constantly assaulted
with various charges of –isms and —ologies, why would any foreigner wish
to enter the United States, or upon entering live in such wretched
places as red-state Arizona, Texas, Florida, or Utah? Is schizophrenia
thus required: Concretely use and enjoy the legacies of a demonized
culture while abstractly damning them?
Third, when tribalism supersedes the individual, then all criteria of
merit, character, and ethics recede into identity: Race, gender, and
ethnicity replace merit and we begin to have black NASA engineers, white
nuclear-plant operators, or brown jet pilots rather than missiles,
power, and flights that are overseen and operated by the most skilled
among us. When a society operates on a tribal basis — we see it often in
Africa and the Middle East — everything from tap water to IVs are a
luxury.
In short, will America remain a multiracial nation united in one
culture in which superficial physical appearance becomes largely
irrelevant (and indeed one’s racial DNA pedigree soon becomes almost
undefinable), or will it go the tribal route that ultimately leads to
something like the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq — or Evergreen State, Ferguson,
and Middlebury?
Finally, there is a growing rejection of the founding principles of
the United States, its traditional Christian-based values, and the old
idea of American exceptionalism. Federalism and the idea of a republic,
after all, do not necessarily lead to radical egalitarianism or a
society of absolute equals. Yet the modern progressive mind is wedded to
two principles: that 51 percent of the population at any given moment
should have the final say in governance only if it reflects correct
progressive principles; and if the population is “fooled” and votes
incorrectly, then an elite in government, the courts, and the media will
intervene to set in place what hoi polloi should have done to properly
advance the correct agendas.
In practical terms, will universities still teach the inductive
method and fact-based knowledge, or deductive social activism? Will our
past be seen as noble and at times tragic, or melodramatically as
exploitive? And will progressives abide by occasional political setbacks
in elections, the courts, and popular referenda, or seek to subvert
those institutions as unacceptable impediments to their radically
egalitarian agendas?
So who is winning this fifth American conflict, and why?
Progressivism
It has an insidious appeal to human nature, offering contexts and
arguments for dependency — which is defined as the consequence of some
sort of prior unethical exploitation (rather than chance, bad luck, or
personal pathology, perhaps in addition to exploitation) and therefore
deserving of proper recompense. Progressivism promises a transcendence
over nature’s limitations through superior education, proper training,
and correct reasoning, as if poverty, illness, and inequality were not
innate to human nature but results of selfishness and ignorance and so
rather easily remedied. It confuses technological progress with a credo
that human nature itself evolves in predictably progressive ways,
thereby supposedly making obsolete institutions and protocols (from the
Constitution itself to ancient ideas such as deterrence) that were once
time-honored.
Virtue-signaling among elites who are critical of the very protocols
that led to their own success serves as a psychological mechanism to
alleviate guilt about privilege. And when an elite deprecates its own
culture, the ripple effects widen upon reaching the masses. The
combination of market capitalism and personal freedom can enervate a
population, misleading people into thinking that their bounty is
unending and natural, and giving them the latitude for cynicism,
skepticism, and nihilism about the sources of their privilege. In the
West, a narcissism follows that oddly manifests itself in thinking that
human sins are almost exclusively Westerners’ own.
These age-old observations often led to depressions among Western
philosophers who grasped the Western paradox that the success of market
capitalism and constitutional government might undermine the ancient
virtues essential to their continuance.
In this latest arena of civil dissent, Donald Trump, the renegade
liberal and most unlikely traditionalist, squares off against the elite
that despises his very being not only for reasons of class and culture,
but mostly for attempting to restore a traditional regime of
citizenship, individualism, assimilation, territorial sovereignty,
recognized borders, strong defense, deterrence abroad, and free-market
capitalism.
In sum, behind the daily hysterias over collusions, recusals,
obstructions, and nullifications, there is an ongoing, often vicious war
over the very nature and future of Western culture in general and
America in particular.
posted by Henry Mark Holzer at 12:35 PM on Jul 20, 2017
"Going, going.....gone? Our beloved America at a crossroads"
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