Civil War II?

Above: Protesters occupy the Senate Hart building during a rally against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington. Credit: radionz.co.nz

The Culture War, Brett Kavanaugh and “owning the libs”

Of course, a real civil war is not going to happen anytime soon, and it will most likely not happen anytime in the far future. What amazes me though is how the idea of another civil war has so quickly and easily slipped into the common vernacular in Trump’s America. Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column, The American Civil War-Part II, compared our present anger to the protests of the 1960s, writing:

“This moment feels worse — much less violent, blessedly, but much more broadly divisive. There is a deep breakdown happening between us, between us and our institutions and between us and our president. We can’t find common ground on which to respectfully disagree; the other side is “the enemy.” We shout at each other on television, unfollow each other on Facebook and fire verbal mortars at each other on Twitter — and now everyone is on the digital battlefield, not just politicians.” 

I completely agree, and this sentiment, as Friedman goes on to write, perfectly encapsulates the brutal viciousness surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s recent confirmation to the Supreme Court.

To preface, I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh should have been confirmed. I do not know whether he sexually assaulted Dr. Christine Blasey Ford while the two were at a highschool party together in the early 1980s. I think the doubt surrounding Mr. Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence is substantial enough that he should not have been confirmed. To attain an appointment on the highest court, one which he will not leave until I am in my early 50s, requires a near pristine moral character in making decisions that will impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Mr. Kavanaugh’s rampant drinking habits in high school and college suggest he could have blacked out, meaning he could likely not recollect assaulting Dr. Ford, explaining his adamant denials in the face of her conflicting testimony according to experts. Of course, we will likely never know for sure whether or not that is the case. Still, in a rather inflammatory article for the far-left site, Splinter (I try to read outside my ideological bubble), Paul Blest points out that the last judge to withdraw his name for a supreme court nomination was Douglas Ginsburg over admitted use of marijuana.

Think about how much the world has changed since 1987. A judge would voluntarily withdraw his name over something infinitesimally less serious than the allegations facing Mr. Kavanaugh today. Moreover, I do not think that the doctrine of presumption of innocence holds firm in this instance given that, again, the issue at stake is giving an individual significant influence over the long-term future of the United States. It is not deciding whether he should be criminally punished for his previous acts. Since these questions over credible allegations, along with Mr. Kavanaugh’s heavy drinking habits, are not indicative of the highest moral character required, he should not be confirmed.

All of that said, I understand how emotionally contentious this issue can be. What we witnessed over these last few weeks was a judicial confirmation becoming some sort of culture war on extreme steroids.

Donald Trump thrives under such conditions. He reportedly loved Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony during his confirmation hearing Tax cuts bore him, and his supporters, to death. A new internal GOP memo admits;

“A challenge for GOP candidates is that most voters believe that the GOP wants to cut back on these programs in order to provide tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.”

Now Republican candidates no longer talk about taxes. I have a personal theory on why Trump loves the concept of the scorched earth culture war politics. Trump has always thrived on battle, clashes of personality, winning explicitly at someone else’s expense. As a high-powered real estate developer, he loves the concept of crushing his competition. He sees trade with China, Mexico and Japan as a zero sum game. As a reality TV star, he loves humiliating his underling contestants by firing them, all the while the attention remains on him.

Consequentially, he loved what was in effect a gladiator match that did not tear apart the nation, but rather showed how divided we already are to begin with. Such is the culture war and it will undoubtedly continue to define American politics.

With that said, I was talking with a friend who told me how fascinating it was for two groups of people to view the exact same footage of Mr. Kavanaugh’s testimony and come to such radically opposite conclusions. One side saw a belligerent misogynist drunk oozing white male prep school entitlement screaming at his questioners while the other saw an honorable judge valiantly defending his honor and that of his family. There really are two Americas. I really cannot conceive how they can become one again.

People on the right criticize the left’s reaction to this affair as mob-mentality political thuggery. Yelling at Susan Collins in the senate office building elevators, accosting Ted Cruz at dinner, screaming profanity in unison. Yes, there is a vulgar edge to these snapshots of American political life, but most of it is nothing more than the exercise of the first amendment. Indeed, people on this publication vociferously defend the first amendment when it comes to what they see as leftist campus authoritarians suppressing free speech.

I completely understand that sentiment. It must be applied evenly, even to people conservatives viciously disagree with who come across as crass, crude and vulgar.

More importantly, these protests against Brett Kavanaugh are coming from a genuine feeling on what moral ground American political institutions should operate upon. These protesters are convinced that Brett Kavanaugh committed sexual assault. Therefore, they are understandably horrified that such a transgression is ignored so that he can be given enormous power over them as American citizens.

This might be stating the obvious but I think it bears repeating over and over again. I think that sentiment is lost on conservatives who reduce this whole affair to “hysterical mob rule” and “owning the libs.”  

Conservatives often feel resentful toward concepts they brand as “political correctness” or “identity politics” so they see “owning the libs” as merely snapping back against a hostile, overreaching authoritarian left that victimizes wealthy white straight males like Brett Kavanaugh merely for being wealthy straight white males.

So, they go on to “own the libs,” only generating more fury from Americans on the left, further alienating them from the right. They protest what they view as injustice more angrily, the right responds more harshly in what becomes a self-perpetuating cycle wherein any center ground ceases to exist, the echo chambers grow, the insulation intensifies and understanding becomes impossible.

Such resentment lingers rotten in the air of societies like Lebanon-whose Civil War Mr. Friedman covered-Syria and the former Yugoslavia. This summer, I travelled to a region of the world not recognized as a country, the Armenian Republic of Artsakh. Formally a part of Azerbaijan, this small self-governing region of Armenians in the Caucuses see themselves as an extension of the Armenian nation. They broke off from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s during what is internationally known as the Ngorno Karabakh war, from the ruins of the Soviet Union. In the bombed out buildings of Stepanakert and Shushi, I saw what happened to a space where people found out they could no longer live together.

Identity politics have undoubtedly proven significantly divisive, even toxic, in recent American political memory. Jonathan Chait, a center-left commentator, sees the need to inject identity politics into every issue as repressive of the inquisitive, free-thinking liberal mind. I believe there is significant merit to this argument, but at the same time does not identity politics need to figure at least to some extent in questions of whether a potential supreme court justice committed sexual assault? In fact, should it not be accepted as inevitable to some extent that identity politics will naturally arise from this type of affair?

I think so. I think many conservatives also at least agree somewhat on a subconscious level. Like their leftist counterparts however, they are mad as hell. We are at a point where both sides see each other as morally deficient, not simply well-intentioned but wrong on policy issues. When both sides see each other as morally deficient, they believe the only possible outcome is wiping out the opposing side from American political life.

This sense of morality is not new to American politics. In trying to understand where we are today, I keep going back in my writing and thinking to Carlos Lozada’s “Samuel Huntington, a Prophet for the Trump Era.” Mr. Lozada evokes “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony” of Samuel Huntington, famed political scientist known for his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, as indicative of where we are today. The inability of American governance to provide a society defined by liberty, equality, individualism and democracy inevitably leads to chaos as “At times, this dissonance is latent; at other times, when creedal passion runs high, it is brutally manifest, and at such times, the promise of American politics becomes its central agony.”

“Creedal passion” undoubtedly defined what we saw unfold with Brett Kavanaugh, as millions of Americans, especially liberal women, believed that they saw a corrupt, elite institution supposedly endowing virtue effectively spit in their faces.  

Such “creedal passion” as Huntington goes on to note defined the Jacksonian era, the progressive era, and the turbulent, divisive 1960s. They also ran high in the run up to and during America’s (first?) Civil War.

He goes on, “If the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century.”

I wrote that Mr. Kavanaugh will likely be a supreme court justice into my early 50s. The question is what America will look like in those 30 years. Given what we have seen, I honestly have no idea, but I doubt it will be pretty.