Tag Archives: Red States

Thoughts on America’s Protracted Cold Civil War

02 Friday Oct 2020

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TeenVogue is not the most intellectually sophisticated of publications but the fact that the prospect of secession, stemming from growing concern over this nation’s protracted cold civil war, is now being openly discussed by the mainstream left speaks volumes about the increasingly intractable divisions in this country.

My only problem is with their argument that a blue-state republic – or, as the case may be, peoples republic – somehow will be inherently more democratic, economically successful, humane, and progressive, not only culturally but also in terms of its commitment to scientific and technological advancement.

How can they be certain of that in light of the turmoil that has transpired almost exclusively within blue regions of the country within the past few years?

In what is turning out to be the one of the most significant demographic shifts in U.S. history, Americans, apparently fed up with the dysfunction of blue-state social and economic policies, are fleeing the most prominent blue states in droves and relocating to solid red states such as Texas and Montana, which are associated with lower taxes, lower costs of living and traditional notions of law enforcement

For that matter, can blue states even bank on the certainty they will remain paragons of scientific and technological achievement? How can they be so certain of this when far-left ideology of wokism is making what appear to be steep inroads into blue-state political and social institutions?

A crisis that transpired at a relatively obscure public liberal arts college in Oregon, The Evergreen State College, portended much of the social upheaval in the Pacific Northwest that would follow in 2020. What transpired there hardly represents an affirmation of Enlightenment principles of open inquiry and free speech. In fact the cultural struggle on this campus arguably played a significant role in the strengthening of the Intellectual Dark Web, a loose league largely comprised of center-left scholars who, while embracing many of the values of the progressive left, still affirm the Enlightenment legacy.

Much of this ideology of wokism by its own admission espouses a turning away if not a outright rejection of many of the ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment.

For years, eminent secularist scientists, notably Christopher Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have heaped scorn on the fundamental/evangelical red heartland. Yet, the culture of this region is steeped in a religious faith, a uniquely Ametican brand of frontier evangelical Protestantism, which is based on Enlightenment principles. And while the culture of much of the vast red heartland has tended to reject some aspects of 19th and 20th century rationalism, notably evolution, the region by no means is unequivocally opposed to the values and the legacy of the Enlightenment.

Yet, red state America increasingly is being drawn into what seems like a protracted struggle with its blue-state counterpart, one that has been characterized as a cold civil war and that sooner or later could morph into something resembling a full-fledged hot civil war. And much of this animosity is being stoked by elites in the blue regions of the country who regard their counterparts in the vast red heartland as intellectual obscurantists.

Yet, when one considers the issues in deep context can we really bank on the guarantee that a blue-state republic (or republics) will emerge from this protracted struggle as the most viable governing model?

Given the growing affinity of the mainstream left for the woke left, how can we be certain that a blue-state nation will prove a successful nation, one that maintains a fidelity to the Enlightenment legacy, which vaulted America and the rest of the West into the front ranks of successful nation-states?

Zero-Sum Federalism

03 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by in Devolution, Federalism, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics

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state-flagsOur federal bonds are fraying.

We Americans increasingly are conditioned to view federalism and, along with it, national unity, in zero-sum terms. And why shouldn’t we?  The century-old cookie-cutter-style federalism imposed on this country via Wilsonian progressivism has been stretched far beyond the limits of its design function. It’s grown increasingly threadbare.  It’s no longer equipped to accommodate the world’s largest and most diverse economy, much less a culture that is growing increasingly diverse and divided.

The latest evidence attesting to this fact:  The uproar among several blue states – California, New York, Connecticut and Oregon, to name a few – over the House Republican tax cut plan.

The House bill would eliminate the most widely-used deduction – income tax – and would cap property tax deductions, the second most-used, at $10,000.  Here’s the rub:  Many high tax blue states rely heavily on these state and local deductions.  Consequently, many middle-class families in these states will end up paying more under the plan.

This is a lesson in history repeating itself – and possibly with dire consequences.  This growing dissension among states over tax policy bears remarkable parallels to the vexatious debates over tariff policy in the years leading up to the Civil War.  This dissension contributed mightily to the already toxic relations between the manufacturing Northeastern states, which favored high, protective tariffs, and the agrarian, slave-holding, export-oriented Southern states, which insisted on low tariffs levied only to raise essential federal revenue.

And, honestly, why should blue states be expected to foot tax relief for the rest of the country?

Some here in the red hinterland would argue that states that operate expansive and expensive safety nets have backed themselves into tight fiscal corners and no grounds for complaint.  But isn’t this their prerogative as sovereign states within a federal union?

This brings me to a social media exchange I had with some friends this morning regarding the future of the country and strategies for restoring some semblance of a social policy, one that accommodates all regions and classes throughout country.

I related to them that for the past generation or so, I’ve striven to become an amateur scholar of post-war politics and economics of post-war West Germany.   As a Tory conservative, I believe that there is much that Americans in the highly secularized, post-Christian 21st century can learn from this morally ravaged society.

I especially admire the old West German Christian Democratic party, which strove to restore a measure sanity to a morally and ethically gutted out post-Nazi society. Moreover, I admire deeply the social market economy that emerged after the war. As this term, social market, implies, it was an attempt by the Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his fledgling party not only to stave off socialism but also to build a vibrant post-war free-market economy, albeit one that would provide a reasonably generous safety net and collective bargaining for the working class.

Frankly I would like to replicate some version of the social market to American conditions, but the more I reflect on this, the more it occurs to me that this country is simply to big and diverse – not to mention, badly divided – to implement any such system over a vast scale. What worked – and, to a degree, still works – in a relatively organic society like Germany, simply isn’t tenable in this United States. I could marshal a number of historical arguments for his, but in the interests of brevity, I wont.

Suffice it to say that part of the challenge stems zero-sum views on federalism into which so many of us have fallen.  Blue-state Americans seem to regard any concession to red-state America as tantamount to moral and political betrayal and vice versa.


Under the circumstances, we seem to have drifted far past the point where any kind of humane social order can be established in a nation as large and diverse as the present-day United States.  Indeed, the more I think about all of this, the more inclined I am to adhere to the vision a new constitutional order outlined by the late American diplomat and statesman George F. Kennan.   Maybe the only viable option for American federalism is to heed his call to devolve power to 10 to 12 smaller entities – constituent republics in which citizens share strong historical and cultural affinities.

We could still share a common market and a common defense, but responsibilities for implementing social policies such as healthcare, social security, etc., would be left more or less exclusively to these constituent republics.

Yes, this amounts to a systemic, radical change, but is there really any other choice?  Aren’t many states evolving what amounts to different social and economic systems?  California, which possesses the fifth largest economy in the world, has evolved social policies and even a legal system that diverges significantly from much of the rest of the country.

 Under the circumstances, should we really be surprised that an increasing number of states are coming to regard federalism as a zero-sum game?

Pushed into a Corner

26 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by in Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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tucker-carlson“You get a volatile society when you change it overnight, and you don’t give people a chance to weigh-in on whether they like it or not.”

This was Tucker Carlson’s response last night to Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a journalist who contends that white nationalists David Duke and Richard Spencer constitute a bigger threat to democracy than Islamic Jihadism.

I’m no more of a Duke or Spencer fan or white supremacist (whatever the hell that means) than anyone else who values simple human fairness and decency.

Even so, within the last decade elites in America and Europe, often using extralegal means, have undertaken a rapid and virtually wholesale demographic transformation of the West. And this has been accompanied with a strategy of using official or quasi-official media sources to call out any dissent as rank expressions of racism and white supremacy.  Recall the widely reported account of Angela Merkel asking Mark Zuckerberg near an open microphone about what could be done to repress Facebook criticism of her immigration policies.

These elites have placed all of us firmly on terra incognita. To my knowledge, no demographic change in history has taken place this rapidly and on such a vast scale. We can scarcely predict the social and cultural upheaval that will follow this change, though it sure strikes me as excellent cover for the imposition of more soft authoritarianism on the part of our elites.

Equally disturbing, most of this has taken place with comparatively little public input or debate. And on the few occasions when dialogue has occurred, dissidents haven even been told to emigrate themselves if they do not find this demographic upheaval to their liking. (Read Douglas Murray’s “The Strange Death of Europe” for more details).

When people, especially free people in societies that purport to be democracies, are pushed into a corner, their natural response is to express anger and outrage. Yet, virtually all protest is countered by elites with allegations of racism and white supremacy.

Small wonder why the little people in Deplorablia are growing so restive.

Alexander Stephens, Red State Progenitor?

10 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in American Federalism, American History, U.S. Politics

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Alexander Stephens’ America.  That’s one way of looking at Red State America.

It’s remarkable how Stephens, a Georgia Whig U.S. congressman who would later serve as vice president of the Confederate States, really wasn’t a Confederate sympathizer to any significant degree.  He came to Montgomery very reluctantly as a delegate from Georgia to the Confederate Constitutional Convention, entrusted with helping draft both the Provisional and Permanent Constitutions of the the embryonic Southern confederation.

He was not only a Whig but also an FOL (friend of Abraham Lincoln, actually a very close friend of Lincoln). And to add an extra layer of irony to his legacy, Stephens at heart was also a deep-dyed unionist who had opposed secession.  Like Robert E. Lee, he cast his lot with the Southern cause only because he considered his first allegiance to lie with his beloved Georgia, which, much to Stephens’ regret, had withdrawn from the American Union and chosen to confederate with the other Southern Gulf states.

How did he intend to re-engineer this American reunification? By insisting that the Confederate Constitution include a provision to allow the admission of free states. Because of the Mississippi River, which still provided the most efficacious means for transporting agricultural and manufactured goods, Stephens was confident that hard economic realities ultimately would force the Old Northwest (the present-day Midwest)  to leave the American Union and confederate with the Southern Gulf States.

In essence, Stephen hoped that most of the Union, sans the Northeast, eventually would coalesce around the new Confederate Constitution.  This new charter would function not as the charter for a Southern Confederacy but as the basis for a reconstituted American Union.

It is amazing how this map, currently circulating on Twitter, reflected Stephens’ vision of a reconstituted American Union.

In a sense, he anticipated Red State America a full 150 years in advance.

John C. Calhoun: Blue State Icon?

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by in U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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John C. Calhoun, architect of Southern exceptionalism.

It’s often said that politics produces strange bedfellows.  And it appears that two weeks after the election of Donald Trump, a growing number of left-leaning blue-staters are embracing, however unwittingly, the political legacy of one of one of red state America’s most incendiary firebrands.

For 180 or so years, elites in the blue states – or what became blue states – have been wagging their fingers at Southerners and other red state Americans, decrying our appalling lack of patriotism and commitment to national unity and, even worse, our recalcitrance in the face of federal power and all that is deemed good, noble and decent in nation and the world. And, rest assured, if, after a year or so following a Hillary victory these fissiparous tendencies had surfaced once again in the South or any of the red states, the outcry would have been unremittingly harsh, with the left screaming about the dangerous rise of secessionist sentiment and the ugly racist, reactionary, conspiratorial and paramilitary-related impulses driving all of it.

Now that the proverbial shoe is on the other foot – now that red state rather than blue state America is in a position to tighten the federal screws – a growing number of Californians and other coastal blue states almost seem disposed toward the ideology of one of the greatest red state recalcitrants of them all: John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina firebrand who helped refine the nullification doctrine and even drew his native state and much of the rest of the South to the precipice of secession in the 1830’s.  And this embrace is occurring with hardly the batting of an eye.

And make no mistake: The people calling for secession or, at the very least, genuine devolution, are not simply ordinary people but also businessmen with real influence. One prominent Silicon Valley investor, Shervin Pishevar, walked back his earlier assertions of California secession, though affirming “a new Federalism where state and local governments are empowered to determine their destinies while bonded together in a United States of America.”

Think about this for a moment. A red state billionaire or political leader wouldn’t have conceived of raising such views following a Hillary victory without the inevitable verbal upbraiding by elites and the mainstream media. Yet, in the weeks following Trump’s unexpected victory, these sentiments are being espoused by the very people who otherwise would have regarded such opinions as dangerous, divisive, if not traitorous, talk only a short time ago.

But there is a silver lining to all of this rising fissiparous blue-state sentiment: It will likely pave the way for some genuine attempts at returning power to states and localities. States were envisioned by the Founding Fathers as entities with the attributes of nationhood but that were compelled, out of necessity, to pool a share of their sovereignty, namely, defense, foreign policy and economic policy,  to a general government – an approach considered far more efficient than each of these states exercising this sovereignty separately.

Honestly, despite all the hypocrisy that newfound blue state affinity for states rights and localism conveys, I wish California lots of luck.  I’ve got no problem with the idea of blue state America preempting Calhoun.  California and the other blue coastal states have every right to reacquire the accoutrements of nationhood that once characterized all of the states of the American Union.

I just hope that these states understand that red states are as much entitled to these attributes of nationhood as they are.