GIVE US THAT OLD TIME RELIGION.

It has long been a topic of inquiry, among academicians and practitioners of politics alike, why people vote or align with political movements or coalitions that don't really serve their best interests, at least as the academicians and practitioners see them.  That dates back in my memory to the Vietnam War and civil rights era: it was the hard-hats and bowling-shirt ethnics who were getting drafted and doing the dying, and yet they did not make common cause with the war protesters.  Most horribly, they gave Richard Nixon a landslide win in 1972.  (It probably didn't occur to most of the people I encountered who held such views that the kind of Marxian intellectual analysis they were engaging in came bundled with the socialist freak show so ably sent up by George Orwell.)

Now comes Counterpunch contributor Richard Rubenstein, who will offer a contemporary variation on that theme, after first suggesting that the national divorce, civil war talk is overwrought.

We need to talk sensibly about the potential of a nation like the U.S. for serious political violence, but this isn’t easy to do so. “It can’t happen here” is obviously too glib and complacent, while “It will happen here” is alarmist and demoralizing. The questions that most need thoughtful discussion are these: What are the most important causes of serious political violence in wealthy nations like the United States? Can these conditions be altered so as to make civil war less likely? If so, how do we go about preventing the violence?

Why even in relatively wealthy societies do people sometimes cross the line from nonviolent to violent politics? The list of underlying causes and conditions is a long one, including socioeconomic inequalities, ethnic and racial tensions, cultural differences, and more. I will get back to these underlying structural causes at the end of this discussion. Three more subjective causes, however, seem particularly important in conditioning civil groups to fight: the growth of “all or nothing” consciousness, the loss of trust in mediating institutions, and a conviction that the war has already begun.

The short form of his "subjective causes" might be "politics divides," perhaps aggravated by a denial of coherent beliefs and the creation of bundles too big for any sort of single-peaked preference to emerge.

One reason that political conflicts usually remain peaceful even for those on the losing side is the perception that you can compromise with an opponent or even suffer defeat in particular battles and still avoid permanent harm or damage. The idea that a movement can live to fight another day rests on two assumptions. First, the fight is about negotiable interests, not core values or urgent needs that must be satisfied right now if they are not to be sacrificed permanently. Second, the struggle takes place within a system that can be expected to survive more or less intact, whatever the outcome of the current struggle.

On the contrary, if the conflict is all about core values, and if losing it would entail a permanent change in the political system, this tends to produce a win-or-lose-everything mentality that increases the likelihood of serious civil violence.

Here's what the too-big-bundle gets you.

How close are we to experiencing serious civil violence? The clock that some imagine ticking toward a new American civil war is not yet at one minute or even fifteen minutes before midnight. What pushes the minute hand further back is the fact that each side still considers certain political instrumentalities usable and is investing time, energy, and resources in hopes of using them successfully. On the right, these instrumentalities include the U.S. Supreme Court, many inferior courts, the U.S. Senate, and roughly half of the state legislatures, while on the left they include the remaining state legislatures, the U.S. House of Representatives, and (although with a good deal of handwringing) the Presidency. The problem is that each side fears that its hold on these power bases could easily slip, permitting the other side to institutionalize its own interests and values permanently. The political game somewhat mitigates each side’s “all or nothing” consciousness; thus, the intense interest in both camps in the November 2022 midterm elections. But the clock keeps ticking.

Now stir in the denial of coherent beliefs, or the deconstruction, willy-nilly, of the mediating institutions with no agreement on what replaces them.

A related factor promoting potential civil violence is the tendency for a general movement toward polarization to weaken or render obsolescent the institutions designed to mediate and soften partisan political conflicts. No doubt, the notion that certain institutions were “above” politics was always largely fictitious. But the widespread loss of faith in the relative impartiality of judicial and prosecutorial agencies, as well as in legislators acting as a guarantor of the integrity of elections, removes an important inhibitor of impulses toward collective violence.

Like most political systems, the U.S. system was designed to avoid serious violence between groups considered legitimate. The Constitution embodied a series of historic compromises designed to head off potentially violent economic and sectional conflicts, and the major political parties long functioned as mediators of disputes between competing groups within each party-coalition. Nineteenth century elections could be stormy and were sometimes marred by fraud and violence, but their results, except in the years prior to the Civil War and during Reconstruction in the South, were generally accepted as legitimate.

He's got his list of destructive actors; no doubt there are other lists with other suspects.  Yawn.  Let's turn to the latest Letter of Richard to the Collective.

Growing inequality is a problem that neither the “Red” nor “Blue” tribe seems able to understand properly or to counteract. Conservatives can’t deal with inequality because they are pro-capitalist; therefore, they tend to convert problems like wage stagnation, job insecurity, deindustrialization, and the failure of social welfare programs into cultural identity issues. (White people – or non-Christians – or native workers – are being disfavored and “replaced,” radical leftists who hate America are out to destroy traditional moral standards, and so forth.) Liberals can’t deal with it because they think that they are dealing with it by tinkering ever so tentatively with the social system. They are pro-capitalist, too, but they believe that by increasing taxes on the rich, raising minimum wages, favoring “clean” energy over dirty energy, mending the social safety net, and so on, they can combat inequality or at least give it a human face.

Wrong! Most of the problems that generate social inequality are structural, and neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to consider solutions that are sufficiently radical to be effective. Many members of the “Red” tribe think that the “Blues” are already socialist, but they are not, not by a long shot. Socialism means using public agencies not driven by the profit motive to do jobs that profit-seeking enterprises can’t do without reproducing gross inequality. It means giving popularly elected and controlled federal and local governments the last word concerning social and economic problems that capitalist elites can’t solve. So many unsolved problems become solvable this way that it makes one recognize how little interest either Reds or Blues have in actually solving them! Both tribes would rather fight their issues out on the terrain of cultural warfare than endanger the sacred system of private profit.

Here we go again! Were socialism as easy as deploying a few public agencies, wouldn't somebody have gotten it right in the past 150 years, thinking back to the Paris Commune? In the absence of such an example, I want to volunteer for the control group.  Look carefully at this proposal for resettling illegal aliens, er, sorry, finding work for immigrants.

Get the government to guarantee wage levels and to provide good jobs to workers in areas of high immigration, and get it to ensure that the level of social services in these areas will improve rather than deteriorate as new residents arrive. The trouble is, this would require government intervention in the economy to an extent that no “Red” or “Blue” figure currently in office has been willing to consider. Or, how about this as part of a solution: have the government develop and enforce an immigration policy directing new residents to live and work for a certain period of time in regions of the country and jobs where they are most needed, instead of regions and jobs producing the most profit for a few companies. Eliminating economic stress in areas of high immigrant concentration would almost certainly lower the level of cultural stress in those same communities, and popularly controlled and funded local governments could do all sorts of things to help culturally diverse groups live together peacefully.

That immigration policy shares with the military draft, or compulsory national service, the compulsion of people to do work for which market incentives to engage in that activity are absent. And where is the funding for that "popularly controlled and funded" local government to come from, the Easter Bunny?

From there, it is a short step to the United Front politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Most of America’s college-educated population are workers, small entrepreneurs, or lower-level professionals, not members of some wealthy elite. In fact, they are often vulnerable workers, since so few are members of labor unions or other associations with real economic clout. But most are lucky, advantaged, or plucky enough to have secured employment in an industry related to new technologies rather than in older industries threatened by deindustrialization and environmental change. They tend to work with computers rather than with their hands, and they are not dependent on the price of coal, oil, or agricultural crops to survive.

Most of these newer industries are located in urban or suburban areas rather than in the countryside. That is where the newer workers live, which means that their culture tends to be urban rather than rural and often reflects values that are more modernist than traditional. In short, the clash of cultures correlates with a split in the American working class. Relative to workers in older industries, what we could call “high-tech” employees have many of the privileges that skilled craft workers in America long enjoyed. This gives some of them the delusion that they are no longer wage-earners dependent upon the vagaries of the capitalist market, but members of some sort of educated middle-class elite. Most will soon discover, if they have not already done so, that when push comes to shove, they are in the same boat with the workers that many look down on as reactionary rednecks.

To avert a new American civil war, the urbanized, college-educated workers who tend to support the Blue tribe need to see themselves as pawns of the same profit-obsessed system that turns so many rural or deindustrialized workers into gun-toting, Bible-thumping Reds.

This is the system, after all, that gives the Blues unsafe overpoliced streets, schools that don’t teach, families that can’t provide love or security, endless foreign wars, endemic environmental emergencies, and salary checks that don’t pay the rent. A few successful entrepreneurs or professionals make it into the ranks of those who can afford to purchase costly private substitutes for decaying or nonexistent public services. Most do not, and soon discover that they must run harder and harder just to stay in their relatively privileged place.

I could use that closing paragraph to suggest that the real anomaly is "What's the Matter with Chappaqua?"  The college-educated professionals and entrepreneurs are productive people who never pay enough taxes and have to be audited, in order to support social services for the chronically underemployed.  And those "reactionary" rednecks?  It's simple.  Welfare recipients don't own powerboats.  The policy intellectuals don't see the difference.  The powerboaters do.  "The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass." That's V. D. Hanson, who also notes, "So, the credentialed lost their marginal reputations for competency."

Everything else follows from there.  Rather than the Never Trumps such as soon-to-be-former Member of Congress Liz Cheney doing everything possible to punish the Republicans by ... electing Democrats ... who will simply see new sources of tax revenue, the winning strategy might be for the Never Trumps to build a coalition of the productive who benefit from tough on crime, secure borders, and sensible education, leaving Orwell's freakazoids and the welfare recipients as a rump left party.  It's really simple, as Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin put it: "Reagan didn't react to Watergate by saying 'vote for the Democrats who want to go soft on the Soviet Union.' They worked within the only party their principles had."  There's more at that thread.

I'll let Professor Hanson take us home.

When the elite peddles its current civil-war or secession porn—projecting onto the middle classes their own fantasies of a red/blue violent confrontation, or their own desires to see a California or New York detached from Mississippi and Wyoming—they have no idea that America’s recent failures are their own failures.

That is the reef upon which the united front raft shatters.