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This seems like as good a place as any to write about something I'd been thinking about for a while, especially since it's at least kind of against your point.
Saying the Civil War was caused by Slavery never seemed satisfying to me. It's not exactly wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like it really captures the spirit of what happened and why. I think a better thesis is that Slavery was the lynchpin of the war, the thing that caused the pre-existing cultural split to become an economic split and a more specific political split, that gave rise to there being specific territories motivated to rebel.
I think the true cause is the cultural split that goes back to the founding of the nation. Albion’s Seed stuff. Borderers and Cavaliers vs Puritans and Quakers. (I've only actually read Scott's review of it, I probably should read the actual book sometime). In this view, it was the Cavaliers who really loved themselves some slavery. For reasons I haven't entirely fleshed out, the Borderers and Cavaliers came to be allied and to mostly occupy the same territory. I guess they could tolerate each other at least. Meanwhile, the Puritans and Quakers similarly allied with each other, and each side had at least a vague feeling that they didn't really like the other side and they were the Other, the Outgroup. They managed to ally with each other long enough to fight and win the American Revolution, but they never did really get along that well, not well enough to be comfortable building a more centralized state for them all to live under.
At the time of the founding of the nation, the plantation farming with slavery that the Cavaliers loved so dearly was in fact the most economically productive thing going on in the nation. This gave the slaveholder class tremendous political power, far too much to take any action against slavery. The cultures that made up what would become the North never really liked slavery. It became a rallying point for both sides - the whole proto-South became more and more into how awesome Slavery was, even the ones who would never be able to afford a single slave, and meanwhile, the proto-North became more and more into how shitty it was and how it had to go. And so both sides went on, constantly provoking each other about it. But it's just an excuse, the real cause was always the cultural split.
In the background to all this is the gigantic freight train of Industrialization. Slow moving but massive and inexorable. The proto-North and the cultures that made it up really loved them some Industrialization. They went all-in on that, in opposition to plantation slavery. It wasn't that great at the time of the founding of the nation, but it kept slowly advancing and gaining more power. That economic domination slowly but surely started slipping away from the slavers who, due to their own culture, were unable to see it coming and shift away from slavery and towards industry. But a slow shift of economic trends is tough to fight a war over. The election of Lincoln, though, that did it. A bright neon sign saying that the slaveholder class could no longer rely on their economic clout to dominate national politics.
And so, to war! A war actually motivated by that tribal hatred, but which the slavery issue had provided plenty of more rational-seeming Casus Belli.
Industrialization was still very new, and nobody really understood how it would affect war. In the old way of war, winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North. Hence why they did better than expected at first. The North was slow to understand the advantages that Industrialization gave them and how to use those advantages to maximum extent. But they did eventually. In the new way of war, non-industrialized opponents would be crushed under a mountain of manufactured goods. Individual courage and clever maneuvers mean little when your opponent out-produces you 10 to 1 or more. Parts of the Southern regime probably saw this eventually, but there wasn't much they could do about it.
Near as I can tell, the cultural effect of the war was to decisively crush the Cavalier culture for good - I don't see any sign of them being still around now. The Borderers are still around, and don't seem to have been that affected. I understand that many of them checked out of the Civil War when it really started going south for the South. Perhaps they said to themselves something to the effect of, hold on, why am I charging superior Union firepower to preserve the right of these other rich guys to own slaves? And the war and reconstruction era didn't shut down anything central to their culture. So I guess they survived.
I think this is all very relevant to today's situation. We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires. And so, it's not really clear what actually happens.
The borderers mostly fought for the union, actually- heavily borderer areas were more opposed to the confederacy.
It's certainly true that the average poor white in the south had some borderer blood, along with being descended from indentured servants, cavalier bastards and hangers-on, etc. But 100% borderer populations fought for the north.
That seems very plausible to me. Do you know of anywhere I could read more about that? In addition to the sibling's mention of West Virginia.
East Tennessee is another good example. I don't know of too many books about the subject, but here's one I have read: "War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869." There's also this article about Unionist sentiment in north Alabama: "Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860-1861."
The idea of Unionist Southerners being willing to turn on the Confederacy was prominent enough that Lincoln based Union war strategy on appealing to them for a significant portion of the war.
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One of my favorite Civil War factoids is that West Virginia actually re-seceded from Virginia to rejoin the Union.
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There’s an argument to be made that progressive gender stuff - the cluster of political/cultural issues including gay marriage, trans stuff, and abortion - are rapidly becoming the lynchpin. As the religiously conservative parts of the country becoming increasingly retrenched about these issues, it seems the progressive parts are doubling down on embracing the most extreme versions of them as a way to crystallize their differences.
In the most recent episode of Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast, her guest made the interesting argument that part of what is driving the massive and rapid proliferation of people identifying as trans/nonbinary/GNC is simply that people in progressive spheres are adopting these identities as a way to formally mark themselves as distinct from the chuds and firmly loyal to one side of the simmering cultural conflict. “MAGAts won’t shut up about how gross trans people are, how they want to infiltrate women’s and children’s spaces to rape them, etc.? Well, if the chuds hate trans people, the trans must be doing something right! Count me in!”
Similarly, women who thirty years ago would have seen abortion as a deeply tragic last resort (“safe, legal, and rare”) now seem to be flirting with embracing it as a positive good. And not just as a thing we should encourage the underclass to do - the stance of early abortion advocates like Sanger - but as a thing that even affluent high-status people should be able to do freely and without any consequences or even social censure. (No big deal at all!) All as a defensive reactionary instinct triggered by conservative overreach and aggression on the issue.
Maybe there's some of that, but I have the impression of a lot of it being driven by progressivism having nothing to offer young women other than scaremongering about 'you're gonna get raped'. Like the tradcon offer of 'you can be a housewife and have lots of kids' is at least an offer and not just a discussion about how much being a woman sucks.
Like duh, if I was a woman being told there's nothing special or different about being a woman except that it makes you a victim, I wouldn't want to be one anymore.
Sure, but you’re a man with presumably a male-brained orientation as to how you perceive yourself and your relation with the world.
By their revealed preferences when it comes to rape fantasies, true crime, hybristophilia, dark triad men and whatnot, a substantial proportion (perhaps the majority) of women rather enjoy envisioning themselves as victims, or at least potential victims.
A woman wanting to be raped by a particular man, or subset of men, does not mean she wants to be raped by whoever has the opportunity to do so. Like fifty shades of gray was pretty clear the guy was hot and rich.
“Women don’t actually want to be raped by literally every man ever” is not in the slightest incompatible with “many women genuinely quite like perceiving themselves as victims or potential victims, enjoy the social power assuming that mantle gives them over others, and will often happily recontextualise their prior experiences as victimhood in order to capitalise on social sympathy”. Given how we relate to the sexes and the amount of empathy afforded to each, the return-on-investment of damselling is probably higher for women than men.
Victimhood politics only exist because portraying oneself as a victim lacking agency can be a very useful power to wield over others. It gives one the sledgehammer of social power and moral superiority, and is sufficiently covert and by-proxy so as to allow one a huge amount of plausible deniability. Voicing one’s (real or imagined) victimhood can certainly also foster internal feelings of being Stunning And Brave.
In other words, I don’t think people actually have this aversion to victimhood. It’s a status that lots of people, and I suspect particularly women, actively seek out, at least in terms of how they are perceived. It’s probably a less healthy self-concept than viewing oneself as effectual and capable, but it is adaptive, it can be utterly intoxicating to wield, and it is often the case that telling someone that they are not in fact uniquely victimised or at risk of such invokes outrage, not relief. Non-binary identification is just another facet of these kinds of status games.
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I think I've seen this in teenage boys in white progressive households. At some point, they realize that they are becoming a straight white cis dude, and getting older by the minute. And if they've been mouthing comments putting down "stale pale male" people for years, they need to change something fast.
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