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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24706 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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It's easy to explain really. Lincoln, the GOP and the civil war are the birth of Empire in these United States.

It's the moment that marks the Unitarian nature of power in that State, the dominion of one ruling class and the primacy of the global industrial agenda thereof.

Lincoln was the US's Stalin. A hard managerial ruler for what was to become an empire backed by it's administration rather than a federation of nation-states. One that fought his own great patriotic war to settle the authority of his administration.

What is there in that that would be sympathetic to a paleocon or paleolib, besides abolishing slavery?

I meant specifically the interventionism part. Evidently US was quite capable and willing regarding fighting foreign wars before the Civil War, as evinced by the Mexican-American War, or the War of 1812.

Are these really foreign wars? I don't want to gerrymander the category but we're talking about stuff happening at the US's own borders that involves Americans pretty directly.

The break I'm talking about pretty clearly demarcates the Manifest Destiny era from the New Imperialism era. Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, now these are foreign wars.

Maybe you could find some paleos to agree that the whole Texas thing was interventionism, but I don't think you'll find as many as would condemn getting treaty ports with extraterritorial jurisdiction from China.

I'm at loss as to what really separates the Spanish-American War from the Mexican-American War, beyond one being a naval war and one being a ground war. Both lead to acquisition of new territories, though less was annexed directly in case of the first one than the latter one.

It's also worth noting that it was 33 years from the end of the Civil War to the Spanish-American War - over three decades of the supposed imperial state just chilling (and killing Indians) before it got the whole imperialism business going.

I simply can't consider the Philippines as obviously an American affair as Texas because of sheer distance.

Maybe it is just that, that you're properly an empire once you have a navy powerful enough the whole world is your business.

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