This Does Not Mean Civil War

William T. Sherman
Atlanta, GA

I assume, when you say “civil war,” you don’t mean the Dinka vs. the Nuer in South Sudan. (Though being a betting man, I’m taking the Dinka, giving three points, since they’ve just drafted a really good utility machete-wielder out of Juba.) I’m guessing we mean the much-ballyhooed coming civil war between Red and Blue America. The one I hear foreshadowed nightly by combatants in the cable-news Octagon. The prophecy that has many of my upper middle-class news-junkie friends, who have soft hands from years of pushing around pixels for a living, sending apocalyptic emails about the need to stop squirrelling away nuts in my 401-K, and to instead buy more ammo and gold. Though when the End Times come and the grid collapses, they never quite spell out how my local Guns’R’Us dealer is going to give me change for a gold bar when I just need a couple boxes of shotgun shells. (Sorry, William Devane, but be more specific.)

Mind you, I’m not laughing at them, I’m laughing with them. Nervously. For I personally subscribed to one pundit’s notion, shortly before the election of 2016, when he wrote: “Newton had it right when he said that amped-up, morally-bereft political hacks who are in motion tend to stay in motion … It could be years, maybe decades, before they come to rest. By then, we’ll look like a Cormac McCarthy novel. Political life and civilization itself will have been worn down to a bloody nub. The only ‘trade deals’ we’ll have to worry about are whether you’ll trade me siphoned gas for a human flesh cutlet. The sun will go black. The rivers will run red with blood. Also, you can expect an uptick in registered independents.”

Full disclosure: I didn’t merely subscribe to that pundit, I was that pundit, writing that in this very space. And it’s not that I’ve surrendered my own negativity or dark outlook on human nature. I believe in pessimism. Shorting humanity is never a stupid wager—you rarely fail to collect. But after hearing my own rhetoric parroted back at me with alarming frequency over the last two years, I have a few hedges, after also hearing the echoes of my own childhood-era, bible-thumping mom whenever I went negative on her: “Confessions of the mouth,” she’d say, as rebuke.

During my formative years, I hailed from a tribe of strait-laced Southern Baptists. They’ve since loosened up: They now watch R-rated movies and even put red-wine vinegar in their salad dressing. But my parents took the bible seriously, a habit which rubs off on me to this day. Especially passages from the Book of James, chapter 3, which warneth us, if I may be so anachronistic to quote from the more musical King James Version: Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whithersoever the governor listeth … Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.

Back in the day, all that fiery tongue-talk was used out-of-context by our fundie Sunday School teachers, trying to discourage kids from French-kissing behind the sanctuary after church. It practically qualified as foreplay. But upon reaching full understanding of what the author really meant, it’s like James was reading our e-mail. Or maybe watching Hannity or Maddow on an average night. However you slice it, a case could be made that the governor (our tongue) is listeth-ing. Our ship is headed for dangerous shoals. Or, to switch metaphors, we habitually sow the seeds of division.

Several weeks ago, an old pal of mine forwarded a piece titled “The Civil War on America’s Horizon,” written by William S. Smith in The American Conservative. He thought it would be my speed. And it kind of was. I found it well-written and well-reasoned. I found myself in partial-agreement when Smith stipulated that “An uneasiness has overtaken the body politic. There is a sense that a terrible clash is about to occur.” And that “these battles are so worrisome because they are existential, not simply political. This will not end well, I fear. Goodwill and moderation exist on neither side. It may be that a civil war looms on the horizon. All that’s required now is a spark because every cultural accelerant is now in place.”

I joked with my old friend that I found it pretty difficult to believe Americans would grow so irate or radicalized that they’d change out of their pajama bottoms and take their finger off the Amazon-Prime order button long enough to head for the hills and eat hardtack (it’s not even gluten-free), in order to take up arms against their brothers. But what bothered me, even as I mocked it, is that the possibility was on the table. Which was something unthinkable even a decade ago, no matter how divided our country was politically. Civil war is something that happens in other places, places with low GDPs, secret police, and despotic kleptocrats. We gave up on that here about 150 years ago, aside from some lonely reenactors at Antietam playing dress-up, hearing a Ken Burns string-band soundtrack in their heads, then going out for barbecue and craft beer after waking from faux-fatal musket wounds.

But envisioning a new civil war isn’t just the cosplay of opinion-slingers trying to be provocative. Before the seemingly impossible happens, it must first be given voice. And if you look and listen, it’s being given plenty of voice. In fact, it’s a sentiment now enjoying wide enough currency that in a Rasmussen poll over the summer, 31 percent of respondents—nearly a third of the country, if you believe in polls—said a second civil war was likely within the next five years.

Maybe this comes from Trump’s revving everyone’s nerves ragged since the last election. Maybe it comes from watching too many viral Antifa videos, starring those fresh-from-mom’s-basement millennial ninjas who enforce tolerance by beating everyone they won’t tolerate down with sticks. But whatever the cause, Americans clearly have body-image issues. They are starting to believe the likenesses they constantly see reflected back at themselves in the media funhouse mirror. To assume that the Michelin-Man midsection and the billboard-sized forehead isn’t a deliberately distorted grotesquerie, but the new norm. The sad thing being that more and more of us are actually coming to look that way on the inside.

Or are we? Yes, the extremes on both sides tend to mutually reinforce each other’s worst habits. And they tend to be the loudest. Their echo chamber has a lot more carry than does the still small voice of someone quietly going about their business with balance and equanimity, raising their children, doing their jobs, serving in their church (as millions upon millions of Americans still are doing). As opposed to acting like a bunch of raging jackasses: This latter option being the surest way these days to get the mic passed to you in the public square, thus further distorting public opinion.

These, we keep getting told by the foot-soldiers/cultists of both sides, are revolutionary times. And moderates make for lousy revolutionaries. They tend not to become enslaved by too-easy narratives, to surrender to the over-excitability of the moment, which requires choosing a side, and sticking with it, even when that side is in the wrong. Resisting this impulse is itself fast becoming revolutionary behavior. For as Emerson framed it, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

And as that greatest of populists, J.C., said: “Calm the f@&# down.” Or it’s how He would have had to put it if trying to command attention in the current climate. Back during the much more civilized times in which He walked the earth—when you only had to worry about mass infanticide and public crucifixions, but at least there was no Twitter—He actually put it as such: “Ye have heard that it has been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

This might not cut much ice next to the Antifan beatitude of “Bear-mace and beat thy neighbor before they see it coming,” as I witnessed them actually do to profile subjects of mine last year in Berkeley. Nor is it in accord with the Trumpian edict, which I watched him proclaim one time at a Tony Robbins seminar: “When somebody screws you, screw ‘em back, but a lot harder.” Still, it carries the weight of millennia in the marketplace of ideas, and I have a hunch it’ll still have legs long after Trump’s stopped tweeting horseface insults and has taken up residence in a gold-plated mausoleum, or Antifa has traded in their black pajamas to become bourgeois Grievance Studies-scholars in associate-professor dorkwear.

These are divided times, to be sure. But when have times not been? During the ‘90s, when we impeached a president over lying about a blowjob? During the ‘60s, when segregation still ruled, and street-fighting men walked the earth, while assassinations were rampant (actual assassinations, not assassinating someone’s character on Twitter)? During the 1860s, when we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, killed 625,000 fellow Americans—two percent of our country’s entire population at the time?

We are awash in enmity and blood. And yet, when’s the last time you experienced anything like that while shopping at Safeway, or picking up sweet corn at the farmer’s market, or standing in line at the DMV (even if doing so plants the seeds of murder in your heart)? All in all, we have a high tolerance for each other, which most often goes unexpressed. Because tolerance is that encoded in our DNA.

I like that I live in a country that, as of now, doesn’t divide itself as “Bosnian and Serb” or “Hutu and Tutsi.” It does divide itself as conservative and liberal. But it’s often a vague, imaginary line. As someone who has lived in a red county in a blue state for nearly 25 years (Maryland: the Free State), a place seemingly ripe for divisiveness, I can honestly say I don’t even know the political leanings of any neighbors on my street. Which is perfectly fine by me. It’s not that important, nor should it be. I care more if they bring me plum tomatoes from their garden, or if they offer to help chainsaw up the white pine that fell on our fence-line. Or if they stand beside me, watching admiringly as our dogs run wild, leaping and bounding and sniffing each other’s asses. (Dogs, being much less judgmental than people.) My neighbors do these things, not necessarily because they’re stellar people. They could be running a basement meth lab for all I know. But because they generally want to get along and find commonality. They generally don’t want to take up arms against each other. They understand—and yours likely do, too—what cable news and the Internet often don’t: that it’s hard work, hating each other. Often, more trouble than it’s worth. Love isn’t merely some dopey antidote—it’s the path of least resistance.

It all reminds me of another divisive chapter in our time. Way back in 2005, right after the re-election of George W. Bush, when heartsick liberals were vowing to move to Canada, and many did, I went to Canada to interview apostates and expats. While doing so, I crossed the border, back into Bellingham, Washington, about 90 minutes south of Vancouver. There, I met Christopher Key, who was planning on packing it in, and moving to Canada. No small decision, as he was a direct descendant of Francis Scott Key, writer of our national anthem.

Key wasn’t some spacey hippie. He’d served in Vietnam, where he caught a stitch of shrapnel. He’d worked at a business magazine as a dutiful capitalist. But he believed, under Bush, that our country had gone into a tailspin—that it had become less tolerant, and more mean-spirited and judgmental. When I asked him, however, about how his life actually looked on the ground among the people he knew, he described a completely different reality. He lived in a mixed neighborhood of Republicans and Democrats. They got together for barbecues and came to watch him perform in community theater. He’d become a Universal Life Church minister, securing his ordination certificate off the Internet for 25 bucks, and so he’d officiated over his neighbors’ weddings and funerals. Agree with his politics or don’t, but he’d carried out J.C’s dictum: Love thy neighbor as thyself.

I was both impressed and depressed. Impressed that he treated people as discrete individuals, not as stand-ins for belief systems or as political punching bags. Depressed that he felt despondent enough to plan his escape from the country, this wondrous and beautiful experiment of ours that has never been rivaled in human history. I asked him, squarely and bluntly, if he wasn’t boxing Sean Hannity’s shadow—responding not to the America he actually lives in, but to the polarized version of America that lives in his cable box.

He responded: “I’m f—ing tired, and I don’t need to rebuild this country. There’s a perfectly good one 30 miles away.”

I finished my story. Despite my unification themes, it was a divisive one. The title ran: “Welcome to Canada: The Great White Waste of Time.” I endured sacks of hate-mail for weeks, from irate Canadians, who it turns out aren’t as polite as they’re billed to be. But I never did find out if Christopher Key forsook the country that Uncle Francis once cast into verse. I hope he didn’t. For despite our political differences, I recognized a kindred spirit. One who cared not just about his country, but his countrymen. Here’s hoping he stayed. We could use more of his kind around here.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected].