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there is a certain amount of reenactment of the Civil War in the present. And people respond to it, in ways that I find regrettable but I suppose it's really mostly symbolism.
There has been a North-South cultural divide in the continent around the significant snowfall line for a long time. The Iroquois tribes and the Catawbas seem also to have waged centuries of war across that line (depopulating the Virginia Piedmont and letting other tribes settle there) for centuries and the cultural differences that rooted in were probably sort of what white folks ultimately fought about too (as they adapted to the land and became more like the native peoples they had displaced). In serious snowfall country there is more collectivity and more flexibility about individuality provided it is consistent with forming a functional collective, iow disciplined enough to behave according to moral standard upon demand. In lands of little snowfall (and more hurricanes and tornados) clannishness trumps the collective and individuality is more antisocial, perhaps more focussed on the gloriousness of the individual and given to social hierarchy and individual pursuit of power. Real estate is more destiny than accidents of weather. Hence arguments about the conditions of 'Union', about federation vs confederation, about tolerability of slavery, about the tying of property and status, about who gets the privilege of inflicting violence and how much, about the degree of anti-collective and anti-equality behavior the individual is afforded. Then as today, and tomorrow.
We have also been fighting a Culture War since the days of Pearl Harbor, with roughly the same divisions as the Civil War. The Midwest has joined the South, the Far West has joined the North. The fight has been kept as political status- psychological and economic- violence rather than physical violence, but it has been brutal. The past few Presidential terms coincide, event- and power dynamic-wise, with years of the Civil War in my opinion. 1988-90, in the aftermath of the Bork nomination, the rise of Gingrichism was more or less the Secession and its choice of violence over negotiation of 1860-61. 1998 was the spring and summer of 1863 for them, the Impeachment became their Gettysburg.
2003 for Democrats corresponds to the mid-late summer of 1864 for the North: after the low morale of winter (post-9/11) and tactical setbacks of the spring (the 2002 election season) our strategic strength is starting to show but hasn't yielded the telling victory we need (and have almost despaired of ever happening) yet. The North was in frustrated despair in the summer of 1864- we all know the war turned to its favor in that time, on every front between mid-August and October, but Northerners had great skepticism and hopelessness to work through. Ulysses Grant and Abraham Lincoln seems to have been the only serious optimists and determined Northerners, almost, during that time. (There was an incredible disparity between Northern public perception and the military facts in mid-1864 until the fall of Atlanta: after that the North as a whole never looked back and turned coldly determined to end the thing rapidly and with minimal attention to style.)
The dynamic is thus like the Civil War, if one follows it closely, as a contest of strength along carefully coordinated fronts. The sides and issues have pitted unregenerates against each other: at stake is whether the country is, and should privilege what is, Eurocentric (e.g. white people, European versions of Christianity, the colonial socioeconomic system of the British settlers and its resultant distribution of wealth and power, its claimed role in world history). On one side are the conservatives, defending the indefensible, and on the other are the liberals, not well able to imagine (or guarantee anyone a good place in) the not yet existing society they battle for. (The nonpartisan people see mostly a choice between Scylla and Charybdis.) One side insists on stasis and degeneration into evil, the other for similarly unbearable transformation and chaos (how ever well-intentioned). The central argument is again about 'equality', which is a code word for breaking class barriers predicated on racial segregation. In 1860 it was about participation in the greater society for black slaves, in 2003 it is about the last barriers to integration for non-whites and women and gay folk.
So we are in for more suffering and recriminations for some time. The North/South split will not go away anytime soon, though as the society and economy of the South and Midwest becomes less agricultural and mining/drilling centered the socioeconomic hierarchy pyramid should become a good bit less sharp and pain-inducing, and more resemble that of the Northern and Far West states. Unfortunately our present fight was, via Nixon's choice of the Southern Strategy, mapped politically right onto that of the Civil War. But what that war did not settle, this one ultimately will: by marrying people of Latino or Caribbean descent, the black/white racial and cultural division in the South (and elsewhere) will close within two or three generations. The Right is partly correct: we are looking at a Last Generation of a society with racial segregation, and the Left is not well prepared- intellectually or emotionally- for the decline of White America, for that future whose way it has helped open, either. We distract ourselves from the uncertainties and unimaginables by bickering internally about who is to blame, daring not to address the things that really bother and perhaps scare us about the situation we can foresee.
So don't worry too much about the supposed divisions. It's not each other, it's the way the future refuses perfection in our lifetimes that causes the anxiety and the search for someone to blame. And we'll let it go when there are better things to do. I hope.
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