J.J. Sefton has, over the last two days expounded on something that has been percolating in my consciousness for a few months. Today he eviscerated (but gently!) Karol Markowicz for the admittedly pie-in-the-sky idea that we can’t have a national divorce, but We Can Work It Out! But, apologies to The Beatles…No We Can’t!
Whether we have a violent separation into two radically different countries, or the freedom-loving portion of America is subsumed into the socialist miasma that we all know is coming remains to be seen. The question is: are there different paths to a better America besides the bloody ones? Sure, I can conjure up a rosy road full of conservative unicorns and unfettered 2nd Amendment rights and true free speech and a comprehensive diminution of the regulatory state, but I prefer not to be laughed at this early in the morning.
What I have been thinking about is what comes after? And the only template we have is the American Civil War. Yes, these things have happened in other parts of the world, most recently in Yugoslavia, where it was unimaginably bloody and cruel and destructive, culminating in the creation of six different countries and another couple “autonomous” zones.
[Please don your rose-colored glasses]
The template closest to our national psyche is different than the vicious religious and cultural divisions of Yugoslavia, and it is there where there is a faint glimmer of hope. Not for reconciliation ante bellum, but for a post-schism accommodation. Our civil war was also brutal and bloody and cruel, yet with time and admittedly some fits and starts we were able to create a country unified in its goals and aspirations, without the festering hatreds of central Europe or Rwanda or Peru or any of dozens of countries whose internal strife rivaled the worst of human history.
That is broken. Who will come out on top is anyone’s guess, and for every pathway to sanity, I see several that end in dystopian nightmares. And at the end it is entirely possible that the American Exceptionalism of our first 200+ years of history will have been drowned in a sea of compliant and passive drones from Central America and the Far East.
Who knows….
