OK At This Point Is It Reasonable to Describe What’s Happening in the US As a Cold Civil War?

[moon_custafer]

Because it sounds like Trump is deliberately blocking medical supplies from states that won’t suck up to him, and Massachusetts basically had to put together a conspiracy to smuggle the stuff they need in from China with the assistance of Alaska and the New England Patriots football team. Which will no doubt make a thrilling movie in a decade or so, but it’s one hell of a way to run a railroad.

Comments

[sabotabby]

I can't believe this is happening oh wait I can.

[kore]

Maddow was highlighting the death tolls in African-American communities last night and it was sickening. The NYT is sorta covering that. And if there was one superspreader among the HUNDREDS of people who had to wait in lines for hours and hours yesterday....

[dewline]

David Brin still calls it "Phase Eight of the American Civil War". I think he even argues that it never really ended when the US broke away from the British Empire. Nor when 1865 came and went, either.

[dewline]

Let's see if I can find specific blog entries where he makes the case...ah! Here we go. It's from 2014, but he still held to the argument as recently as 2017.

https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/09/phases-of-american-civil-war.html

[kore]

I am really reminded right now of a seminar I had on Thoreau -- we did Walden, yeah, but it was mostly a deep dive into his Civil War writings and that history, and the teacher remarked that in his readings, in a lot of pre-CW writing people said "The United States are...." but afterwards it was "The United States is...."

[sovay]

Trump is deliberately blocking medical supplies from states that won’t suck up to him, and Massachusetts basically had to put together a conspiracy to smuggle the stuff they need in from China

When I said yesterday that the federal government was straight-up trying to kill us? Yes. And we still don't have enough of the stuff we need. Hence the development of priority scores, to decide who gets the life-saving efforts and who will have to be left to die. Artificial scarcity and zero-sum games at their finest.

The Civil War underlies most of American political life in ways that have become even more ragingly apparent in the last four years, but I don't know that I would describe the present circumstances as a cold civil war. Certainly the number of casualties may already have reached the definition, but I feel there should be more organization of factions in order to qualify. But I am also a little tired of being asked why I'm not in armed revolt against the government and have never found the Second Civil War memes funny.

[kore]

I am also a little tired of being asked why I'm not in armed revolt against the government

Yeah, all I can do is mutter "it's easier to destroy than to create" and "revolutions don't usually go the way people want" and a whooole lot of people are in armed revolt against the government already anyway. Arguably Trump is the end of a long anti-Federal effort by the Republicans (and some Democrats, looking at you, Clinton) to end the Republic, who always thought it was the problem. (And isn't the idea of having a big overarching Federal gov't a huge point of contention in the Federalist papers anyway, funny, wasn't there just a musical about that....)

[marahmarie]

Do you mean this Clinton? That confused me so much. I gave it a straight-up read so thought you meant Bill Clinton.

[kore]

No, Bill Clinton -- I was thinking of policies like welfare "reform," banking deregulation and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act, the unregulation of derivatives (which led to the crash in 2008) and other New Democrat type legislation. I remember "Reinventing Government" and the idea that the public sector should be full of entrepreneurial spirit and run like a business. Al Gore smashing that ashtray on Letterman turned into a joke, but Gore's big thing then was how wasteful and ridiculous most government regulations supposedly were. (Flashforward to Paul Ryan's stunt for reporters by picking on line items in the tax code.) He was of course nowhere near as bad as Gingrich or Trumpty, but he initiated policies that were developed to cause a lot of harm later.

//dislikes Bill Clinton for many reasons

[marahmarie]

I remember "Reinventing Government" and the idea that the public sector should be full of entrepreneurial spirit and run like a business.

Yeah, at that point he'd gone full Blue Dog; kinda recall that myself.

It's weird about him; while I disagreed with some of what he did, and while he was a hair too Blue for me, I thought he was a great president (though very, very divisive. I thought that was a feature, not a bug back then, but then I was very young and still wet around the ears. Now I see him as a Trump pre-cursor for all the stark division he caused). Like him as a person, though? Maybe not so much.

[kore]

Well, I think the divisiveness was way more Gingrich's fault than anyone else, and he did a lot more to pave the way for Cheetolini. I have sadly lost a lot of respect for Clinton both as a politician and a man, tho, which feels weird because he was the first President I ever voted for who won, and I was really happy at the time about it.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, me too, that made my year/possibly the entire 90s for me up until the Monica scandal. Though I had my differences of opinion with him especially re: his Blue Dog politics and various political decisions he made he seemed pretty good, overall.

And I mean, you're right, now that I think back - it was Gingrich who stirred the pot initially, but you can't stir a pot with nothing in it. Every R seemed to just fall into line.

At the time I thought it was pure unfairness. Now I see that to them, Clinton truly was *that* radical a figure - ie, Rs reacted to him the way Ds react to Trump now. I can't say how many times I've felt like saying, "Yeah, OK, with Trump you finally got us back for Clinton, thanks guys" because in a way it's the truth.

If you might recall Clinton never did poll with great popularity until the Monica scandal, and never won election by big (or any) majorities, either. So I see some similarities in terms of polarization of politicians themselves and of the populace to follow.

Back then it was like...rooting for your favorite teams (and kind of why I liked the idea of Ross Perot running, as it finally gave us a bit of a break from that). Funny how it all comes back around now.

[kore]

(Like, I was exclaiming about this to people all over the internet today, but AMMON BUNDY IS IN ID talking about guns! WTF, why didn't he slink off to die of shame somewhere? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/coronavirus-idaho-bundy-patriot.html)

[sovay]

WTF, why didn't he slink off to die of shame somewhere?

I have given up on any of these people dying of shame; I just want them to die. I just want as few other people as possible to die in the process, which is why this pandemic is annoying me so much.

[kore]

Civil War, yeah, Cold War, no. I remember a lot of the people screaming about guns and their God-given right to infect other people now, who were screaming about guns and their God-given right to call Obama horrible slurs and send death threats, before Trumpty. In a sense the Civil War has never really gone away (William Faulkner's "The past isn't dead -- it's not even past").

[marahmarie]

I think of it as actual genocide (thought I was being oh-so original, too, but a quick look around shows I'm not, it's almost consensus opinion at this point, at least in *ahem* SOME quarters).

I don't like to think of it in such terms but for all the laughing done into sleeves right now because "Oh, it's killing them" (us), their number's up next, according to everything I've read and heard on the topic. I hope not, but still - karma can always work out kinda funny like that, now can't it.

Because it sounds like Trump is deliberately blocking medical supplies from states that won’t suck up to him, and Massachusetts basically had to put together a conspiracy to smuggle the stuff they need in from China with the assistance of Alaska and the New England Patriots football team

Sounds like the plot of a direct-to-video tape - except possibly even less believable. JFC.

[kore]

Re genocide....yeah, the numbers coming out of places like Wisconsin and Michigan about the death rate of African-Americans are horrific. The Rachel Maddow show had footage of elderly voters who had been waiting in line for hours to vote Democratic and it was just heartbreaking. I am really really dreading what might happen in New Orleans.

But the real point for me is even if it's carrying off old white conservative voters in Florida or younger black Democratic voters in Detroit, the virus isn't politicized, even if Trumpty tries his hardest to do so. It's coming for everybody. What scares me about the heroic patchwork attempts of the states is all the indicators are, if there's no overarching Federal response that's consistent everywhere, this plague is going to be really bad. And there's just absolutely no foundation for that anymore. The states have to deal with each other, we're all on our own.