Whatever happens this week in the midterm elections, it won't be decisive. The stalemate will continue regardless whether the Red or Blue team gets the upper hand.
America has always had a split personality: One part Jeffersonian/Jacksonian, mostly premodern in its outlook, wanting to stay close to the land and keep to the old ways, hating progress and most anything industrialized. And the other part Hamiltonian and Whiggish--more about economic growth, change, development and as such celebrators of the creative destructive energies of capitalism.
In the first two centuries after the founding, the first dominated in the South and the second the North, but since the 1970s the split is more rural/urban whether in Texas or in Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania. The Republicans used to be the party of the urban Hamiltonian elites, but over the last thirty years has become the demotic party of rural Jacksonians. And the Dems have become the party of Hamilton, the party of urban, educated elites and Technocapitalists. No wonder an incongruous rap musical about him was so popular in New York.
I've been talking for years about how something has to give, how the basic compromises that held things together must break apart. The framework has always been fragile and the pressure has been building for years, at least since the Bush administration disasters in Iraq and the financial meltdown, but really since Reagan's fusion of Hamiltonian financial elitism with Jacksonian rural grievance that made the disasters of '01, '03, and '08 all but inevitable. And Reagan's Republican Neoliberalism was a reaction against the New Deal, which was a Democratic/Jacksonian reaction to the classical laissez-fair, Republican/Hamiltonian liberalism of the Robber Barons who emerged out of the Civil War, and the Civil War traces back to the North-South compromises made during the founding, which we're still fighting about today in this interminably irresolvable culture war between Hamiltonians and Jacksonians.
Things started breaking apart for the first time in the thirty year run up to the Civil War starting with the Missouri Compromise, and in a similar way they've been breaking apart again in the in the last thirty years starting with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine during the late Reagan administration, insofar as it provided a media soapbox for the repressed grievances of Middle America through Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And so here we are in the MAGA Age when it feels as if Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall and all the king's horses and all the king' s won't be able to put him together again.
History doesn't repeat itself exactly--the particularities matter--but certain historical themes do. We're not in the 1850s now, but we're in a situation where many of the same patterns are working very similarly. In the decade before the Civil War, the authoritarian, one-party South had advantages that enabled it to win most of the big fights in Congress and the Courts, and the pattern is repeating itself now. It remains to be seen how it will play out this time around.
The mistake the South made in the runup to the Civil War lay in its obsession for control that led to its overreaching. Most prominently The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision crossed a line that forced the North, which was mostly indifferent to slavery so long as it stayed in the South, to push back. The GOP is overreaching similarly now in its obsessive need for control and in that it has made it abundantly clear that it would be quite happy with one-party rule going forward.
Most everyday Americans aren't paying attention, or they see politics rather like sports and so without real-life implications other than the team they root for winning or losing. They can feel a passionate bond with their team, and they really, truly hate it when their team loses, and hate the other team for beating them. But the idea that one team doesn't believe in democracy anymore is for those rooting for the Red team too abstract, not enough for them to break with them, and so the real-world implications of the Red team winning are something they are going to have to feel before they understand them. Lots of Red Team fans won't care about one-party rule so long as their team wins, but most Americans will not be ok with it. They don't want the Red team running things, and they won't stand for it.
The 1850s culminated in a war that killed north of 600K people, and while it's hard to believe that kind of violence is a possibility for us, we're in for some level of increasing violence, especially if the Blue Team finds a way to keep winning. MAGA is not going away peacefully. We're not likely to see a territorial war, but I could see assassinations and terroristic acts that will make the 60s and the McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing seem like the good old days. And it's not inconceivable that a Red block of mostly rural states, for instance, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas declare a Democratic administration and Congress illegitimate, and assert their independence.
And what's a Blue President going to do? Send in the army? Not likely for fear of pushing the border states--the more urbanized Red States like Texas, Florida, Georgia--into the secessionist camp. But if he does nothing, then other rural states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. will go "independent". Then what? Corporations and Wall Street won't care so long as they're left alone. A lot will depend on where the how many MAGA heads are in the army--not the top brass, but MAGA brigadiers, colonels, and captains, the Michael Flynn types, who command the loyalty of the MAGA lower ranks.
It could get messy. There are a lot of unknown unknowns, so to say. Who knows what kind of plotting and collusion between military and local militias is going on even now? Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't.
On the other hand, If the Red team wins and institutionalizes a nation-wide, one-party system, and continues to stack the courts, it's not as clear to me what the Blue states would do. People will take to the streets, but Blue America has no infrastructure like Red America to support militarized resistance. If there will be any militarized violence it will come from the Red government moving in to suppress the rioting. I think it's likely that we'd become Hungary or Brazil for a while, but not China. It's unlikely that a regime that will be so fundamentally unpopular could last very long, but it could make things miserable for a while. The Hamiltonians won in the 1860s, and the smart money would be on their eventually winning again if a scenario like this unfolds, even if, as then, the early rounds go to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonians.
Ok, sure I'm letting my imagination get the better of me. But neither scenario is as inconceivable today as it was ten years ago. Who knows what things will look like ten years hence? Better to hope and work for the best and yet be prepared for the worst. But one way or the other, it's likely to get violent in some areas of the country, and if so, it's going to be profoundly destabilizing. How that actually plays out, nobody, I least of all, knows. But it's hard to believe that we're just going to muddle through without there being some catastrophe-generated major realignment.
I'd prefer a scenario in which we'd find a way to muddle through without catastrophe. I'd prefer a stalemate to chaos in the political sphere while we wait for a breakthrough in our cultural life along the lines of what I wrote toward the end of my previous post. But it seems that we humans only learn the hard way. But whatever happens in the short run, I don't really trust the Blues or the Reds to get us safely through the next fifty years without a restoration of the wisdom axis in our metaphysical imaginary. That might be a long shot, but in the meanwhile, better the Blues come out winners because pragmatic is always better than fanatic.
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Note 1: Jacksonians constitute the MAGA base of the GOP, but GOP elite leadershp--McConnell, McCarthy, Romney, Cheney, Stefanic, etc.--are Neoliberal Hamiltonians who often campaign as Jacksonians to remain in power. This is the coalition of Neoliberal Hamiltonian elites and Jacksonian Reagan Democrats that Reagan forged. Reagan was Barry Goldwater with FDR populist charisma. The Jacksonians (for cultural reasons) and Hamiltonians (for economic reasons) in this GOP fusion share common ground in their both wanting as little interference from the federal government as possible in the private sector. But the populist/elite tension between them is real, and it will be interesting to see if the Hamiltonians in the GOP establishment will retain leadership positions in the House and Senate in coming years. Establishment Republicans are the Party of the One Percent, and its interests simply do not align in the long run with the GOP populist base.
The Democrats, formerly the party of rural and ethnic urban Jacksonians, don't know who they are. Their establishment does not represent the interests of the Hamiltonian One Percent, but of the Hamiltonian top Twenty Percent plus rural and urban Blacks. They have have become resolutely anti-Jacksonian on cultural issues and have become instead a mishmash of Hamiltonian cosmopolitan urban and suburban coastal technocrats and technocapitalists, Blacks, feminists and LGBTQ+ identitarians. As such, the Dems have no real positive uniting vision for an American future. The only thing that unifies them now is in their being the party of anti-MAGA. But, as I've said elsewhere, they won't always have crazy to run against, and there's no future in No.
Since this is the week of the premier of the fifth season of Yellowstone, it's worth a few minutes to show how this Jacksonian/Hamiltonian tension is really the heart of the show. Jacksonians like John Dutton are in conflict with Neoliberal Hamiltonian developers. Dutton votes Republican, but it's a safe bet that his developer enemies vote Republican too. The few Blue team types that show up are usually portrayed as naive flakes from California.
Beth and Jamie Dutton are both comfortable in the Hamiltonian world in a way that the other Dutton Ranch characters are not. Beth is acceptable to her father in a way that Jamie isn't because Beth's loyalties are beyond question in a way that Jamie's are not. Loyalty is the supreme value in the Jacksonian world. Having no loyalties except to your self is beyond contemptible.
Beth, a true loyalist, submits her Hamiltonian skills to Jacksonian ends; Jamie is untrustworthy because his east-coast elite education has inured him to the Neoliberal Hamiltonian order. He's no longer truly a Jacksonian, and his pursuing a career in the Hamiltonian world is, when push comes to shove, more important to him than defending his family's Jacksonian heritage. He protests that he's loyal, but his loyalty is for hire and can be bought by the highest bidder. He went to Harvard, after all, a place where you learn to be a soulless, Neoliberal, meritocratic, careerist for whom the only value is what the market determines. Ask Larry Summers.