“Cold Civil War” isn’t a euphonious phrase, but it’s the best available in English to describe what Thucydides called stasis: the clash of factions that are more zealous for their own advantage than for the safety of their country. It is also a not unreasonable description of the state of mind of a large portion of the contemporary Left. I worried about the phenomenon years ago. Yesterday, Mark Steyn said much the same thing (more incisively and wittily, of course):
A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can’t thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he’s playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he’s playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can’t do that if the guy you’re talking to doesn’t believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up theconstitution. . . .
Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain’s Harold Macmillan famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Yet in the end even “events” require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. “The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review’s Rich Lowry this week, “in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact.” As Lowry remarked, “This is the lonely war” – its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front. In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined “cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.” The “cold civil war” may be another “consensual hallucination,” but for many it’s more real than “the lonely war.”
Some people imagine that American politics “has usually been this way”. They remember a more turbulent past than we’ve actually had. Even during the Vietnam War, a Congressman who declared that the President of the United States gained “amusement” from seeing our soldiers die would have been drummed into infamy. Today the most that happens is that he eventually offers a pseudo-apology – “I shouldn’t have distracted the House” rather than “I am ashamed of myself and beg forgiveness” – after his Democratic colleagues rally to defeat a censure motion. (Only five Democrats voted to condemn the slander; eight were lamely “present”.) Less politique leftists were livid that Rep. Stark backed down, however slightly, from “speaking the truth”.
The worst feature of stasis is that it is self-aggravating. For the time being, as Mr. Steyn also observes, the conflict is largely unilateral, like the Terror War before 9/11:
Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system – they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers’ books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:
Hollywood’s latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?
A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper – “Taser this: F--k Bush” – and the Denver Post hails him as “the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious.” Anyone audacious enough to write “F--k Hillary” or “F--k Obama” at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?
Speaking of which, Columbia University won’t allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because “Don’t ask, don’t tell” discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you’re bebottoming.
But how long will it be before hatred and paranoia on one side draw forth a reaction from the other? It’s not so easy to think civilly about people who accuse you of plotting murder and mayhem – especially not when they also advocate silencing conservative spokesmen via a revived “fairness doctrine” (actually deployed for that purpose within living memory).
There are few evils worse than civil war. I much fear that our hopes of avoiding them are fading steadily.
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