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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Fifth American War |
| 2017-07-19 |
| h/t Instapundit 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. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |