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One of the more impactful books I read this decade was Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. The books argues that our media environment, primarily TV in the time that this book was written, encourages political infantilization, rhetorical deskilling, and an obsession with appearances rather than substance of policies and candidates. Parts of this argument are undoubtedly true: Postman gives the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 where people stood for 7 HOURS to listen to the two politicians duke it out over the nitty-gritty policies related to slavery as an institution at that time. I couldn't see very many people today, much less your average social-media addicted normie (probably the equivalent of a rural Illinois farmer in the 1850s), paying attention to anything for 7 hours, much less grasping complex policy arguments.
But at the same time, I wonder how rose-tinted Postman's perception of political culture in the antebellum period was. I'm doing my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom, and this time around it really struck me how much heavy-handed, or even blatantly-illegal shit that the pro-slavery faction of the nation in the 1850s got up to in the lead up to the Civil War. The Filibuster invasions of sovereign Central American countries were sanctioned by many politicians in the South, and the individuals responsible got away scot-free because of the bias of the jurors. The Fugitive Slave Act and related Dred Scott and other Supreme Court rulings were attempts to basically force the North to accept slavery throughout the whole country. Pro-slavery forces from Missouri tried to falsify elections in Kansas to force admission of that state as permitting slavery, despite a nearly 10:1 ratio of yeoman farmers:slaver holders in the territory. And this isn't even getting started on the morality of slavery itself. Of course the more extreme abolitionists also got up to some indefensible stuff (mainly thinking John Brown and his backers), but the majority of the insane policy prescriptions and rhetoric came from below the Mason-Dixon Line. All this is to say that basically, it seems to me that the undoubtedly superior attention spans and verbal reasoning skills in general didn't seem to do much to help policy-makers decide the slavery question. In the end force of arms had to do that.
I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States. Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln. In both cases, it doesn't seem that attention span, or verbal IQ helped either side convince their opponents or find a peaceful solution to the problem.
Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges? Or are these tools only really useful in justifying what one already believes in a slightly more pretty way, leaving the actual battles over fundamental differences to be fought on the battlefield.
Postscript: One difference that I do think is real between today and the 1860s is the willingness of young men to actually put their lives on the line for what they believed in. Say what you will for John Brown, or Stonewall Jackson, but they were willing to die to fight against (or for) slavery. There were quite a few university professors and students in the Union Army. I don't think you would see this kind of behavior today from either side of the political divide, but especially from the left.
William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution while calling it "an agreement with hell." In many ways I think the radical pro-slavery South Carolinian Fire-Eaters gave the other side a free win by splitting from the USA first, saving the radical abolitionists from the unpopular position of "destroy the Constitution and abolish slavery by any means."
While I understand where you're coming from (and wouldn't necessarily disagree in some respects) I actually think their position is closer to the North's in a specific aspect that is under-discussed.
A lot of the anger in the North towards the South wasn't due to the abstracted question of slavery, it was because slaves would escape from the South to the North, settle someplace like Massachusetts that would welcome escaped slaves, and build a new life for themselves...until federal officials showed up, tore them away from their family or friends, and returned them to the South, as was required by the Constitution. What caused the South to secede wasn't that the Constitution didn't favor their position, it was that they were getting locked out of conventional power by the more numerous free states (that's why South Carolina bailed when they did, after it became clear the federal government was going to be hostile to them due to a presidential election, even though the pro-slavey side had been racking up Wins like the Dred Scott decision just a few years earlier. (In this respect, I think your blue-states-as-South analogy is arguably very apt: the center of gravity in the electoral college is shifting redder and redder every census, and the Supreme Court's decisions haven't been cutting towards the blue states either.)
Interestingly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates saw the introduction by Douglas of the "Freeport Doctrine" which essentially said that even when slavery could not be legally prohibited, if the local government exercised its authority in such a way as to be inimical to slavery it would constitute a de facto ban.
It seems pretty clear to me that the blue states (or at least some of them) have been running their own version of the Freeport Doctrine as regards illegal immigrants and get upset about ICE for much the same reasons as Northerners were upset about slave catchers. And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free. Returning to your casting, it seems to me that the administration is quite content to dangle Fort Sumter in front of the other side, not necessarily in terms of secession but just in the reality that violent demonstration against the governmental authorities will radicalize reds and blues, but it seems plausible to have a net effect that favors the administration's position. Perhaps just as firing on Fort Sumter gave the abolitionists on a platter what they otherwise were arguably decades away from being able to seize by conventional political means, so too the protests against ICE in California (no matter how popular they are in California) will enable the Trump administration's previously radical push to aggressively deport illegal immigrants writ large.
Off the top of my head, the Revolutionary War might be the best example. Unlike other examples (such as World War Two) the Founding Fathers were having to make up a lot as they went along because they had to create the institutions they needed to be a nation as they went (yes I know the state Congresses were already a thing, so there was actually less of a jump there than one might think, but still!) and from what I can tell they did a lot of it on sheer "I have read history for 1000 hours and we're remaking the Roman Republic from scratch but better this time" energy. (Back to the Civil War: the South actually aspired to emulate the success of the American Revolution and saw their secession as an ideological successor but failed in part because George Washington could afford to retreat from the British in a way that a slaveholding agrarian state fighting for its independence against a neighboring country could not.)
There's no reason it couldn't. It really depends on what the anti-immigration people are upset about. Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California. If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.
Right, but this leads to a couple of things logically
the states that don't want the illegals will want to cut off any potential indirect federal subsidies to the illegals, because it makes no sense for them to help pay for aliens when they aren't even receiving any e.g. tax benefits. This means fights over things like "public school funding" and "welfare funding."
internal border checkpoints.
Maybe this is compatible with a United States, but I think in many ways it vibes as being less "united" than the European Union.
One of the things that's been proven dramatically twice over the past few weeks is that if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets. It's not really unreasonable for red states in a collateral security agreement with blue states to want to prevent this outcome.
They'll never tell you why.
Who's they and what's why in this context? I don't get it.
It's a reference to a supposed Russian proverb "the Jew will always tell you what happened to him, but he'll never tell you why."
Iran and Russia got hit because they engaged in acts of war against other countries. It doesn't occur to "they" that you can avoid having to worry about such things if you don't pick fights with foreign countries.
It's basically the mindset of the prison gang guy who's big and tough and strong and always thinking about how he will defend himself from attack, who sees of himself as a hard-headed realist, and is 10x more likely to die a violent death than the average schlubby insurance agent who never thinks about self-defense at all. MAGA is an entire political movement based around this mentality, which wants to drag the entire country down with it.
Ah I see, you've never actually lived in a failed state and have therefore no organic understanding of the necessity of a monopoly on force for what you consider a normal life to even exist.
That's easy to remedy, Hispaniola is really nice at this time of year. You can have a quick trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and convince yourself which society you'd prefer to live in based on their approach to border enforcement.
Be sure to ask any insurance providers what they think of either place, though you might have trouble finding any in Haiti at the moment.
I will say I don't even mind anarchists myself, so long as they can take a hard look at a lawless society and genuinely desire it for themselves. Me I'm more of a Leviathan guy, private property, courts and all that jazz you know.
Nice takedown of that strawman.
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