The 'cold civil war' in the U.S.: The common space required for civil debate...(MARK STEYN)

William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word "cyberspace," way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:

"When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?"

Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun's vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.

That's quite a concept: "A cold civil war." Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it's tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author's formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'd dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Someone else says, "America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government." Etc. But it's that one phrase that makes you pause: "A cold civil war."

Or so you'd think. In fact, it seems to have passed entirely without notice. Unlike "cyberspace" a quarter-century ago, the "cold civil war" is not some groovy paradigm for the day after tomorrow but a cheerless assessment of the here and now, too bleak for buzz. As far as I can tell, April Gavaza, at the Hyacinth Girl website, is pretty much the first American to ponder whether a "cold civil war" has any significance beyond the novel:

What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as "[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation." In that respect, is the current political climate one of "cold civil war"? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election ...

Indeed. 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 the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.

Obviously the vast majority of Americans are not foaming partisans. It would be foolish to adduce any general theories from, say, Mr. "Ed Funkhouser," who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, "who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?" An hour and a half later he realized he'd forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: "you are a f--kin' moron. and probably queer too!" No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse. Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the "regime change" and "inside job" types have set the pace.

But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies. In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop's Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn't exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things -- the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus -- but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained -- the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance -- but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.

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:

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.

It's curious to encounter the soft-left establishment's hostility to the state. Go back to that line of Gibson's: free peoples develop "Stockholm Syndrome" about government all over the world, not least in Stockholm. It seems a mite inconsistent to entrust government to manage your health care and education and to dictate what you can and can't toss in the trash, but then to fret over them waging war on your behalf. Perhaps the next president will be, as George W. Bush promised, "a uniter, not a divider." Perhaps some "centrist Democrat" or "maverick Republican" will win big, but right now it doesn't feel that way.

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."

The only thing that will bring the left over to sanity will be some sort of massive attack by an outside entity on things they hold dear.

9/11 united the country, or at least shut up the left, for about 2 days.

It will take a rash of muslims beheading the “hedonists”, especially the homos, in order for the left to see a problem.

Then they’ll demand that real men do something.

82 posted on 10/23/2007 6:51:21 AM PDT by MrB (You can't reason people out of a position that they didn't use reason to get into in the first place)

Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is instructive. He went and fought with the Spanish Leftists as a starry-eyed Liberal / trade unionist, and barely escaped with his life as the Communists began purging those on the Left who weren't in their clique, as they attempted to consolidate power.

83 posted on 10/23/2007 6:57:45 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Guns themselves are fairly robust; their chief enemies are rust and politicians) (NRA)

"..one way or the other"

Not me. If the dems win America as we know it is over. I really hate to paint such a bleak assessment however the left has learned alot in the last eight years will take decisive steps never to lose power again.

I know this is serious stuff, but you have to admit listening to CoastToCoast is kind of like watching a bad movie - It may be a bad script and badly acted, but it is still a guilty pleasure.

The real tin-foil-hatters are a hoot.

I like it.

How about weeble-wheat?

Weebles wobble but they won’t take a stand.

‘Mr. “Ed Funkhouser,” who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, “who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?” An hour and a half later he realized he’d forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: “you are a f—kin’ moron. and probably queer too!” ‘

Sounds like the average poster a Liberty Post dot org these days....(chuckle)

Thanks for posting this, its a good read, and food for thought.

By coincidence, I just read Hemingway’s “For WHom the Bell Tolls.” His hero is a lefty, but it’s still an interesting novel.

Some on both sides fantasize this with the eagerness born of ignorance.

While I fully recognize your qualifier, let us not forget there are also many who are inflamed by a genuine passion for the founding principles of this country, and a desperate longing to return to them.

How many pro-lifers have stayed their hands from the conviction a "just war" would not generate enough public support to be won?

"A cold civil war."

That's exactly what it is.

Not much would it take to turn hot. [I give you 7 Nov. 2000]

5.56mm

Another is the systematic disarmament of the enemies of the Left. Those who think "gun nuts" are the only ones to be concerned about this had better reconsider.

This started the American War of Independence; it will start our first truly civil war in this nation as well.

I really don't count 1860-1865 as a civil war because the southern states were not attempting to overthrow Washington D.C. They were just attempting to secede from the United States. There is a difference that not too many people think about.

Yes, it's happening on both sides. When, at the end of the carnage, someone asks "Why?", remind them that the answer was "because of largely trivial differences."

Is this comment not itself a subtle form of "demonization of ... opponents, and reasonable discussion ... rejected?"

Ignorance is no defense for the unjust application of force under the color of authority. Those who presume to invalidate natural law should suffer the consequences of what they inflict to enforce that presumption.

Not much would it take to turn hot. [I give you 7 Nov. 2000]

I'd caution the left not to get too unruly.

We've got the guns...

I'd caution the left not to get too unruly. We've got the guns...

Who would we have shot at if they had actually got away with stealing the election in 2000?

I submit things would have been different if the media had blacked out all the floridian outrage and allowed some democrat to declare Gore won the recount.

Public support for gun control has dropped a great deal in the same period.

Apologies for a late reply. You are entirely correct, of course. But that support is subject to manipulation in the media and tends to fall rapidly during hysteria campaigns, the pattern seen in Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. And an activist Democratic administration with a majority of both Houses will most certainly put gun control firmly back on the public agenda with strident support from sympathatic urban media.

It isn't a trend, it's a warning sign, something to watch for. McGee wrote a couple of novels around it.

Good take on Bilbo. That’s why he needed the Hildebeast to run interference for him and keep him in the reins of power. She is far more dangerous.

Thanks for sharing your insight.

I agree with your comment about how important it is to free people to care about moral issues.

And you described NJ to a “T”. How true.

Debt as a new form of slavery is an interesting thought. Two of my three adult children have freedom, but one, alas, is in its grip and will be longtime before he is free like his siblings.

Wrong choices have long consequences.

You know, it is hard to believe that the other side is capable of doing these things, but they are.

I always wondered how Germany, a highly technical and educated society, could descend into the barbarism of Nazism in the 1930s.

Now I don’t wonder so much.

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