How Liberals and Conservatives Fight
Or don't.
Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to give you Part Four of why we’re not going to have another Civil War.
Look, here’s the nightmare scenario that’s been floating around in the Zeitgeist:
That in the next few years, sometime this decade, liberals and conservatives are somehow going to be shooting each other in the streets, in our government buildings, in our shopping malls, and in our churches.
Following closely on that is a belief (held moreso by conservatives) that if you scratch liberals they’ll somehow go full antifa-jihad, buy guns, and start attacking conservatives… and that conservatives will outshoot the liberals, pause to righteously gloat at how right they were about everything, wave a flag, and then go on the offensive and take back the country via guns and gumption and make the world safe for church and Cracker Barrel.
None of that is gonna happen, not without a couple of impossible things happening first – and I’ll get to them in a minute.
There’s two main reasons I don’t think it’s going to happen.
First, if gunfights-in-the-streets between Left and Right haven’t happened by now I don’t think they’re going to. And I think the reason why they haven’t happened is because that “fight” has been underway now for fifty years already and we already long ago decided how we’re going to have this fight and that how has been staring us in the face all along.
[GIANT CAVEAT: The distinction I’m about to offer is not mine. A friend of mine mentioned it to me 15 years ago and now neither he nor I remember who said it first and I can’t find its origin. If you know, please tell me in the comments so I can give credit later where credit is due.]
Second, there’s a truism I heard a long time ago that I’ve had in the back of my mind ever since and it seems to bear out. So let’s stress-test it a bit…
Liberals believe in systems; conservatives believe in individuals.
This is why liberals believe in governance, government, and infrastructure and why conservatives believe in rugged individualism.
When something goes wrong, liberals blame a bad system; conservatives blame bad individuals.
This is why liberals love civil rights movies and conservatives love every cop show on Earth. Almost all of liberals’ recent-past heroes were peaceful; almost all of conservatives’ recent-past heroes were armed – or commanded those who were. Liberals believe that changing a system will make the world better; conservatives believe that if you get rid of (or lock up) the bad people the world will then self-correct. Liberals long for The Great Breakthrough. Conservatives long for The Great Showdown.
When they conclude that nonviolent solutions have failed, liberals attack systems; conservatives attack individuals.
This is why liberals protest but don’t shoot and why conservatives shoot and don’t protest. Liberals try to create societal pressure to make change; conservatives try to intimidate individuals to make change. This is why, according to New America Foundation’s running tally, far right wing attackers have killed 134 Americans since 9/11 while far left wing attackers have killed only one.
This is also why conservatives isolate first, fall back into red states or wherever, and pull up the interstates behind them — to (physically and/or legislatively) retreat from the ‘bad individuals’ for as long as they can. This is part of why “white flight” to the suburbs happened and part of the reason for conservative evangelicals’ worship of End Times theology in recent decades (the Rapture is a cosmic escape chute). And when conservatives can no longer retreat or isolate themselves from liberals they sometimes lash out to ‘defend themselves’ from liberal cultural and electoral onslaught. This is why they legislate against Drag Queen Story Hours for kids at local libraries. It’s also why so many of the Capitol Rioters were from trending-blue suburbs around blue cities – those were folks who believed (or were simply told) they faced an existential threat from liberals who they could no longer escape or defeat electorally and they decided they had to fight back — to “stop the steal” of their own lives.)
But what about radical leftists and the violent New Left of the 1960s and 1970s — didn’t they attack a lot of individuals? Actually, no. Depending on whose tally you use in the entirety of that era the violent New Left killed only either eight or twelve Americans total – including two Weathermen who accidentally blew themselves up while building their own damn dumb bomb. The violent New Left primarily attacked places and things they believed were levers or nodes in a corrupt system in order to (they believed) bring pressure against the Johnson and later Nixon Administrations to end the draft and end the war in Vietnam.
Unless I’m forgetting something (and I probably am), the last actual, real gunfight-in-the-street between any part of the Left and the Right was the Greensboro Massacre all the way back in 1979. And the last real street fight between any part of the Left and the Right was in Charlottesville in 2017.
What about the 1990s? The (nominally liberal) Earth Liberation Front was the most prolific domestic terrorism movement during that time and they killed all of zero people and actively eschewed violence against living beings. Their method was economic sabotage designed to make ecological degradation caused by companies’ profit motive so expensive as to no longer be cost-effective and thus spur companies and federal policies to change. (And they were often real eco-jerks. I mean, who attacks the U.S. Forestry Service? Seriously, dude. Seriously.) By sorta-not-really contrast, Timothy (avowedly conservative) McVeigh targeted and killed 168 federal agents, federal employees — and their babies and toddlers in the daycare on the first floor of the federal building — in Oklahoma City with an enormous homemade truck bomb that blasted a giant kinetic force-sphere into the heart of a Heart-of-America city.
What about 9/11? OK, al-Qaeda is a special case to everything – and they’re a story for another day – but they’re not what you’d call, you know, system people. They’re more killing-people people. Nonetheless, according to the same tabulation by New America, jihadists have killed 107 additional Americans in the United States since 9/11 (when they killed 3,000). Oh, also, Muy Importante: If you are one of those folks who believe jihadists are radical leftists, here’s a tip: Do not ever say that to a jihadist. They see themselves as ultra-righteously-violent, ultra-right Sunni fundamentalists. They will hand you your ass if you call them liberals. Then they will hand you your head. And you will not be able to hold your ass or your head because you will be dead. So don’t say stupid things to jihadists.
But what about the Capitol Rioters? The Capitol Rioters quit when (a) they couldn’t find any individuals to hang and (b) thought they’d “stopped the steal” when they’d chased all 435 Members of Congress out of the House and Senate chambers and thwarted the count of the Electoral College vote. Once that happened, the rioters thought they’d won. So they left. They didn’t try to keep and occupy the Capitol and start a new system of American governance. They left.
And the Women’s March the day after Trump was inaugurated? Ohhhh, we’re gonna talk about that in a later newsletter.
Oh — and those college campus protests these past few weeks? The greatest tactical successes those protesters had were successfully (a) camping, (b) conquering an empty building, and (c ) being jerks to a system about foreign policy. They weren’t an armed Antifa-Ninja-Force militia.
All of this is to say a few things:
Liberals aren’t trying to kill people. They do not believe in it.
I am not saying that liberals are morally superior to conservatives. I’m saying that liberals and conservatives fight very differently. And when liberals and conservatives fight each other they do not actually “aim” at each other. Liberals target systems; conservatives target people. A civil war would thus moreso a continuation of the one-sided mass shooting hootenanny we’ve had for decade-plus now. Which we as a society are already accustomed to even though we haven’t (all) quite accepted the amount of killing yet.
Just… a side note on non-political, non-civil-war-y mass shootings in schools: A few years ago my wife posted a barrage of news stories about dead, shot-up kids such that a guy from back home pinged her to say If you keep posting like this, people will start thinking there’s a problem. And once she’d put out the flames in her hair, my wife responded Yes, the repeated-making-dead-and-en-dead-ening-of-many-children-into-piles-of-bodies is a problem we should tackle as a society, Cleetus. So get your responsible-gun-owner-ass-off-the-sofa and go get-be responsible, you know, for. the. children. (So… in case you were wondering, this-here Dale household doesn’t have a Live. Laugh. Love. sign up on the wall: we have more of a Love. Laugh. Unleash Sass for Jesus. wall-stencil thing going.)
So. Another civil war — really?
In order for liberals to fight conservatives in the streets with guns in a civil war type of scenario liberals would have to first overthrow everything within themselves – their moral codes and those of their heroes – and give up on voting, on protests, on education, persuasion, and subversion, on peace, policy, and the law, and on Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and Jesus in order for them to deign to attack a person rather than a system in order to try to make change. And to pick up a gun to do so.
In order for conservatives to fight liberals in the streets with guns in a civil war type of scenario, liberals would first have to overthrow everything about themselves, gun up, care enough to try to find the small remote town where conservatives have isolated themselves to, find the right street at high noon and arrange for an appropriate number of tumbleweeds to blow across the avenue in, you know, a dramatic fashion. And then the conservatives would also still have to ignore the local diner owner shouting from the sidewalk Please do not shoot the tourist money. And the mayor seething Do not shoot. the taxpayers. on a road. we maintain. with federal money. Please. And the Founding Fathers shouting Prithee, what the Revolutionary fuck is wrong with you? And the pastor shouting Hey, dumbass, murder is wrong and if you do this God will be mad at you and you will disappoint Jesus and your mama and the Founding Fathers who will ask you in the name of Jesus what the Revolutionary fuck is revolutionarily wrong with you? If you do this you will not go to Christian heaven or ‘Murican heaven when you die. At which point that pastor is going to step out into the middle of the street and shout The Magic Words that will make any violent liberal extremist set down his peashooter: Hold up a minute. I’m going to talk to this dumbass and straighten his ass out in the name of Jesus so he will sin no more. I got this. At which that liberal is going to look up avocado toast recipes and Christian peace on his phone while that pastor yanks that dumbass off the street and says What-the-Ezekiel, Daryl, ain’t nobody but you can run that pellet grill and we’ve got a potluck on Sunday.
And thus the republic will endure.
We are not going to have another civil war.
So.
Over the next few weeks:
I’ll do a roundup/shoveling-together of alllllllllll of this plus One Giant Last Thing.
And I’ll explain why America will not become the world of The Handmaid’s Tale.
And Oh - I think I’ve figured out the Biden campaign strategy. Almost the whole thing. I read it in a kung fu comic book from about 15 years ago. And I think it’s totally-probably gonna work.
See you next week.
“Folks who believe jihadists are radical leftists” do so because jihadists aren’t white. In the US, the left-right divide is as much about white supremacy as it is about male supremacy, whereas jihadism is fundamentally the latter.
The civil war comes when some Blue State notices that we are funding the fundies. And decides to withhold federal taxes.
Until then, the Red State elite knows that they rely on Blue State money for their Fundie Preacher lifestyle.
Speaking of which , fundie preachers are completely about the civil war and killing the sinners and all that. Quiverful is first and foremost about the coming war between us and them.