Civil War talk

It’s easy to dismiss what’s going on — violence in the cities as “stop-the-steal” Trumpers clash with people who haven’t lost quite as much of their sanity, Alex Jones gaining currency by shouting Biden “will be removed one way or an other” — as the sort of mob lunacy a powerful personality like Trump’s can have on the easily influenced that will in turn fade away and leave a lot of people feeling embarrassed. Not so fast.

In the run-up to the Civil War (the real one), some pundits observed how influential Southerners agreed with Thomas Jefferson’s observation that slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears: “We can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” But they went with secession and war anyhow.

By allowing a powerful and deranged personality such as Trump’s into the White House, and not shooting down the stolen-election narrative before it accelerated into a violent distrust of the entire electoral system, Republicans now also hold a wolf by the ears and don’t know what to do.

Except they do. They follow the lead of their 1860s forebears: Either let go and put themselves at risk — many Southerners who opposed secession fled the South to save their lives — or continue to encourage the mob and ride it out.

What’s behind all this that was also behind the Civil War?

History is going to regard these events and whatever horrors arise from them as outcomes of how the internet gave literally everyone a megaphone. The most effective shouters wound up with followers, and in order to keep turning profits, they kept feeding their followers ever more controversial information. People love controversy and it’s very profitable. But eventually it leads to action. We don’t know yet what that action will be.

An interesting fact of the Civil War is that while it was about slavery, the vast majority of men who fought and died for the South had no chance of ever owning slaves, or in many cases the ability even to rent them. What then were they fighting for? As citizens of their states, they answered the call to duty to hold off an invading army intent on destroying their way of life. Never mind that the North did not set out to end slavery. Never mind that for most Southern men, their way of life didn’t include owning slaves. The important thing was they believed their world was under attack. How did they get this way?

People in the know understood that for ten years a fragile peace had stood thanks to the Missouri Compromise. In other words, so long as the Senate was evenly split between the pro- and anti-slavery factions, the country could carry on, concerned about other things.

But there was change afoot, and it was becoming violently controversial for new territories to come in as slave or free without another territory set the other way to maintain balance. Those people in the know knew that this couldn’t go on forever, and that the anti-slavery sentiments in the country were eventually going to prevail. The Senate would then be majority abolitionist, and the country would start to draw down the peculiar institution.

So what, you ask? There’s no slavery here. Even white nationalists aren’t as racist as they used to be. Are there similarities or not?

Southerners were used to slavery. It was their “way of life.” But I don’t believe most of them were really all that invested. A more or less peaceful evolution over the next few decades, while Congress slowly but surely pulled the wolf’s teeth, would I believe have been acceptable to most of them. It wasn’t necessarily that big a deal.

Except it was. Why? Same as with every other movement: Propaganda. Those wealthy Southerners who saw in Lincoln an immediate threat to their enormously profitable slave-based economy also owned newspapers. And newspapers were increasingly unified in their editorial stances by the miracle of the telegraph. A few talented voices proclaiming the natural right of the superior race to keep the inferior races in bondage could go a long way with the telegraph-driven growth of the news business. Abolitionists became anarchic threats to the world order. Lincoln became the sharp-fanged leader of that devil mob. Rank and file Northerners became dupes in the service of New England banks. There was talk of secession, and it was not a novel idea. And then the talk got louder and the politicians, facing angry mobs ginned up by a radicalized media, gathered in their legislative chambers to discuss and vote on articles of secession. We all know how powerful the mob mentality is within legislative chambers. Even now a majority of Republican assemblymen claim that Joe Biden stole the election despite a complete lack of evidence.

So my rambling point is what? We’ve seen all this before and it did not end well. We’ve seen it before because modern internet-enabled misinformation is the very echo of 1860s newspapers that shared misinformation speedily disseminated over the telegraph. Both phenomena are driven by the very same motive: An excitable population buys a lot of news. The Civil War was and whatever we have coming up next is ultimately driven by the profit-seeking of those who have no real sense of responsibility or especially of patriotism.