This essay is not about the "coming civil war." We're not reliving 1860 and seeing the eagerness by both sides to fight a war.
The American Civil War was a long time coming. You could say that the fuse was lit during debates over the Declaration of Independence and the question of slavery. While hotheads on both sides of the issue wanted a definitive statement on the evils/benefits of slavery, cooler heads prevailed, and a strong statement Jefferson had included against slavery was stricken rather than risk South Carolina and other southern states walking out.
The Civil War became inevitable when John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1856 and his hope to start a slave uprising that would have killed thousands of southerners was cheered on in the North and hysterically condemned in the South. At that point, both sides knew that war was the only way. North and South had become two countries. People on both sides saw each other as separate political and cultural entities. And the thought of killing the other side so their position prevailed became thinkable.
We are not anywhere near that point yet. Passionate partisans on both sides of the aisle might see the country that way, but America has more than 340 million people, and the partisans represent less than 10% of that number.
The nation is coming apart. That doesn't mean war. It means chaos, spasmodic violence, and a continued dissolution of the bonds of brotherhood and comity that have seen the United States through wars, economic chaos, and natural disasters.
Civil War historian James McPherson points to Lincoln's 1860 election as the last straw. Southern states saw the election outcome one way, and Northerners saw it another. Southerners saw Lincoln's election as a declaration of war, a hysterical overstatement of the true nature of Lincoln's ascension. From that point on, everyone waited for the shooting war to begin.
Matthew Continetti writes eloquently of the current status of the American experiment.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last weekend, author Cynthia Ozick said, “This is a good country. It’s a great country. And now, it’s disintegrating.” That is why Kirk’s death feels like a watershed. It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations, divided not only by politics but by culture, lifestyle, psychology, and epistemology. Weak institutions, corrupted data, rampant distrust, political enmity, and an apparent inability to control criminality and the dangerously mentally ill tear us apart like a centrifugal force.
America's colleges and universities are fueling this disintegration. Campuses have become "petri dishes of the new nihilism," Continetti writes.
Speech codes, bullying, and the heckler’s veto foreclose debate. Students marinate in postmodern relativism, racial essentialism, gender ideology, atheism, and antisemitism. They’ve been instructed in the sins of their civilization and urged to take “direct action” against white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and the Zionist entity.
If you've been following the uninformed reaction to Kirk's death on the left, you know exactly what Continetti is talking about.
To the ghouls celebrating online, Kirk and his supporters represented something else entirely: fascism, Nazism, Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. How does one succumb to such delusion? Whatever the mix of ideology, grievance, envy, contempt, or pure nihilism, the hatred is spreading. Every year brings forth downwardly mobile graduates with debt, no prospects, a sense of entitlement, and mounds of resentment. Combine radical individualism with a culture without restraint, and you have the social equivalent of a Molotov cocktail.
No "civil war," just the slow disintegration of the country with outbursts of violence by both sides. That violence will inevitably lead to a bigger effort to maintain order, which means more policing, more restrictions on our freedom, and more violence in response.
My belief is that America needs a leader who can heal, someone who can reach both sides, change hearts and minds, and inspire us to be better citizens.
I know it's a pipe dream, but that's what I think is needed.
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