Hatred has begun to dominate American media and politics in this day and age. Today you can rarely find a political commentary by a blogger/opinion writer, a news story by a journalist, or a speech by a politician which is not laced with some form of hatred towards the people that person views as their opposition. In fact, people who do not have some form of hatred laced into their speech or writing are ignored or looked at with some form of incredulity by the others in politics or the media.
As a result of this hatred, it is also a natural human reaction (albeit not a moral one) when attacked with hatred, to respond with hatred while clinging ever more strongly to the principles that one believes in, whether they be right or wrong. This leads to polarization of two sides and the disappearance of the middle ground where compromises are made. When polarization occurs, conflict, in some form or fashion, is usually what follows between the two factions.
This attitude of hatred dominating the culture and the public sphere has only been seen once before in American History and it was at one of America’s great crossroads, namely the conflict between the Northern and Southern states in the mid-19th Century.
The underlying hatred between these two geographical sections of America had been slowly growing ever since the nullification crisis between the state of South Carolina and the federal government led by Andrew Jackson in 1832 and 1833. In the 1850s the hatred reached a boiling point with the implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which intensified the tensions between the North and the South by revoking a previous law intended to preserve the balance between the two sections.
The hatred dominated the American political scene until 1860 when the Southern states felt that the nation’s federal government was about to turn against them and so sought to withdraw from the union in order to preserve the ideas and culture which they held to be right. The Northern states, inspired by the resolution of the federal government in Washington D.C. to preserve the union, then sought to impose their culture and ideas on the Southern states by forcing them back into the union through an armed conflict, which they succeeded in winning.
The resemblances between these times and those of the years preceding the War Between the States are many. As mentioned before, the hatred between the two opposing views themselves is the most obvious parallel. Others include the following:
1. The common people from both factions today often complain that the people who represent them in the government generally do not listen to what their constituents really want and are only interested in their own profits and gains. That was a very common complaint of many Northern and Southern people in the 1850s as well. Many felt that they were betrayed by the power-makers in Washington whenever a bill was passed which contained provisions unfavorable to either faction.
2. The disgust and distrust with their government representatives by the Northern and Southern people led to the rise of extremist groups which were labeled as being on the ‘fringe’ of either section, namely the Abolitionists in the North and the Secessionists in the South. Today in America, there are groups labeled as ‘fringe’ on the Right and the Left who rose in response to the claim that those who claim to represent them in the government do not truly do so. On the right the ‘fringe’ group is commonly identified as the Tea Party movement, while on the left the group labeled as fringe is the Occupy Wall Street movement.
3. Much of the talk in political circles concerning the disgust among the common people with their government representatives today raises the prospect of the rising of a new major political party. They also believe that it will rise out of one of these so-called ‘fringe’ groups on the edge of the two main factions, with the prime candidate to host the movement for a new party being the Tea Party movement, which has been actively involved in political campaigns. In addition, one of the major government actions which helped spark the birth of the Tea Party movement was the passage of President Obama’s healthcare act, commonly called ‘Obamacare’. In the 1850s, in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened land originally slated for Northern settler expansion to Southern settler expansion as well, the Abolitionist movement was energized into helping form a new major political party in the Republican Party.
4. The Secessionists were the ones called for separation of their respective states from the union and later took the matter into their own hands, while respected Southern leaders such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who would eventually end up leading the Southern movement for independence, fought against secession until the movement could no longer be stopped. Today, the leaders of the Left, though radical, do not dare advocate violence in the public eye at this time, but the Occupy Wall Street movement has, in many instances, been calling for a violent change to the social order and has no problem resorting to violence in certain instances.
5. In the 1850s, as relations between America’s two sections deteriorated, the Presidents of the time, namely Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, were seen as very weak and unable to cope with the crisis and so became very unpopular with both North and South. In today’s world, President Barack Obama is seen as unable to handle America’s deteriorating situation and so is rising in unpopularity amongst both the Left and the Right.
There are many more similarities between these two eras in American History, but these six points are the most major similarities which paint a frightening picture of the future for America, especially if the nation’s economy begins to collapse.
In the political realm, the idol the political leaders and their followers worship is power. It was that way in the debates between the Northern and Southern sections of the nation in the 1850s, with both sections fighting for the upper hand on power in the federal government; Similarly today, the Left and the Right fight politically for the power to control the federal government so they can use its law-making abilities to advance their agendas.
When the South felt they had lost the electoral battle for good in the presidential election of 1860, they became willing to listen to the radical calls of the Secessionists and so sought to break away and form their own nation. If either faction in American politics today sees their faction threatened with annihilation by the results of some upcoming election, it would not be out of the realm of possibility for one of the so-called ‘fringe’ groups to call for their faction to resort to force as the only resort to save their side which would lead to an armed conflict for control of the nation’s government which would lead to heavy loss of life and could open the door for the rise of totalitarianism or the complete break-up of the United States as a nation.
Such a conflict between these two factions of American politics would embroil America in a true civil war for the first time in the nation’s history, with two sides fighting, not for the right of one section or faction to break away from the other, but for control of the nation’s federal government. This is a kind of conflict America has never had in its history. The conflict between the Northern and Southern states is remembered in American History under the title of ‘The American Civil War’, but this title is not very accurate and gives a misleading understanding of the conflict which tore through America in the mid-19th Century.
When one more closely examines the definition of ‘civil war’ as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition is as follows: “A war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country.” The conflict between the Northern and Southern states was not between opposing groups of citizens of the same country. As the Southern states implemented legal documents in the form of ordinances of secession which separated them from the federal government in Washington D.C., they were not technically members of the same country as the Northern states and so were not engaging in a civil war. This was also recognized, in a way, by the Federal Government and the North, which imposed a blockade of the Southern trading ports instead of declaring them closed, thereby de facto recognizing the Southern states as belligerents and also as an independent national entity.
Therefore, the more accurate title for the war between North and South is ‘The American War Between the States’ as the South simply fought for independence from the North, not for takeover of the federal government or the conquest of the Northern states. So, by these terms, America has never had a true civil war.
However, as the polarization of the factions in today’s America begins to resemble the polarization which took place between North and South in the mid-19th century, it is easy to see that America could be heading, in its not too distant future, for a ‘true’ civil war, where the factions do not fight for separation from each other, but for the power to control the nation as a whole through it’s federal government.
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