George Rebane
This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’. The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’. I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country. And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine. I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.
The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen. Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border. Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”
Next, Larry Schweikart, in his ‘The Collape of the US Constitutional System’, makes the case that “the Founders’ vision has been thoroughly corrupted from within.” In this discourse he presents the history of how, under Martin Van Buren, our governments developed a methodology to avoid focusing on matters most germane to the nation – at that time, slavery. The method was the now well-ensconced system of federal pork. The ante-bellum national attention was successfully diverted, allowing pressures among the states to build, until one morning the entire country found itself rendered and at war.
“Van Buren initiated a spoils system, known then as the Albany Regency, in which government would grow larger with every election. To get elected, a candidate had to promise jobs. The newly formed Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson, operated a similar system. Once a competitor party, the Whigs, appeared, they had no choice but to climb on the patronage bandwagon.”
That made it very difficult to defeat incumbents. The system went from providing loyal individuals with government jobs, to providing “interest groups” with jobs. Everyone joined in – “farmers, teachers, autoworkers, and retirees all started to lobby for government goodies in the form of subsidies, government-permitted price controls, minimum-wage laws, …” The result of it all was that “short of radical change, there can never be a concentrated effort to ‘reduce the debt’ or ‘control the budget’ because the very nature of American legislative politics demands just the opposite.”
Finally, we have arrived at a national state of affairs in which our ascendant Left, that has always needed a political bogeyman in which to wrap its narrative, had to dredge up a post-Trump raison d’etre for their public policy notions, potions, and lotions. The one at hand had already been introduced as the irredeemable deplorables who had voted for Trump, and who were still very much in evidence on America’s political scene. As Christopher Roach describes in his ‘Diagnosing the Right as Pathological’, it was time to up the ante. “The Left’s internal need for a common enemy, more than the facts, explains their campaign to categorize Trump voters, and the Right in general, as extreme. Countering extremism is the new unifying principle of the Left.”
Roach goes on to cite chapter and verse of today’s ongoings in/by Democrat-controlled government, academe, media, and corporatists to marshal the country on the well-trod path to authoritarianism. “The ruling party displays an unusual concern regarding private beliefs. It’s not enough for citizens to obey the government out of fear, prudence, or habit. One must publicly affirm the legitimacy of Biden’s election in 2020.” Else the expression of such unapproved beliefs become prima facie evidence of ‘radicalization’.
“Right-leaning views generally do not arise from exclusive contact with official news, much of which consists of ‘fake news.’ Those on the right tend to seek out alternative sources, not least because the official stories contradict what their own eyes and ears show them to be true. Thus, the Right has a higher proportion of autodidacts and skeptics. Such people are more confident, curious, and independent and, therefore, prone to ‘radicalization’.”
And how will the Left handle these radicalized and proto-domestic terrorists? Again, that path is well defined for socialist cum communist governments. It begins with public denigration and shunning, what we now call cancelling, and soon proceeds to the psychoanalysis and pathologizing political opponents. Institutionalizing the more serious cases will not be far behind. “In the Soviet Union, the use of psychological diagnoses and treatment avoided publicity and the minimal requirements of Soviet law. The same advantages prevail today. Doctors are in better graces with the public than politicians or law enforcement. Labeling someone as sick gives the patina of medical science and charity to coercion.”
To make it all possible, the state needs millions of compliant and loyal eyes and ears. “One can expect that every psychologist, family doctor, school counselor, and neighbor will soon be on the lookout for signs of ‘radicalization.’ A wayward comment, a bumper sticker, reading the wrong kinds of books, or making the wrong kinds of jokes may unleash the full panoply of tools in the arsenals of the state and its corporate and health system allies. One thing we have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that there is a large cohort of eager snitches with a deformed moral sense walking among us.” (For early examples-in-training, take a look at Rightwing Watch and its commenting acolytes already keeping an eye on these pages.)
[20jul21 update] The Great Divide dialogue/debate has witnessed a sea change. Its approach, long-sensed by conservative thinkers and even distinctly left of center intellectuals, is today hard to ignore save by the most sheltered and/or mentally deprived in our land. Our commenters and my correspondents have brought two significant essays on the Great Divide to my attention. I deem them important enough to make them available as an update to this post.
The first is by Victor Davis Hanson, the nationally prominent, indominable conservative Stanford historian and observer of all things in today’s America. In his ‘The American Descent Into Madness’ VDH cuts to the chase and spells out the details of our country that has crossed the line of insanity, and now stands on the threshold of a dysfunctional state. We are truly a ‘house divided’ and at the crossroads where we will soon (hopefully) be asked to decide which way we are to resolve what has become an irredeemable ideological standoff between two sides convinced the other is both ignorant and evil.
The second essay, ‘Americans Hate Each Other’ is a major contribution by political scientist B. Duncan Moench who currently lectures at Arizona State University. Dr Moench is a man of the Left – he hails FDR’s New Deal as a pinnacle of America’s cohesion – yet, nevertheless, he has a clear vision that “it’s time to embrace what (hating each other) means for the country’s future.”
Moench opens with “In the late 1990s, Michael Lind wrote about different “republican” epochs in American history: the Anglo-American republic (from the Founding to the 1920s), the Euro-American republic (1920-1965), and the multicultural American republic (1965 to the present). Lind hoped the fourth American republic would be a transracial one based on the idea of what he called “liberal nationhood”—classically liberal in respect to human rights, individual property, free speech and markets, but also liberal in the more statist, New Deal-like economic sense. … If the United States is to survive as a unified state under its present configuration, something like Lind’s idea of liberal nationhood will have to coalesce. But there’s one big problem with constructing a new concept of American-ness centered around liberal ideals, no matter how one defines them: Americans hate each other.”
To the extent that you consider the Great Divide a likely event in America’s future, these essays outline important milestones that we are passing on our way to one of several possible futures. As we have said for some years, we are beyond the tipping point and there is no turning back.
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