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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Here's one thing I've been wondering about about this question, as a non-American..

You've got the paleoconservatives and the related tendencies (ie. the paleolibertarians, the more openly racist ones like the alt-right etc.) in US politics. One of the things that unifies these is that they are non-interventionist. They don't think the US should be participating in foreign wars of the sort it's done since, well, forever, or giving foreign aid or being involved in international organizations. Often they've got a precise analysis tying the US interventionism, especially after WW2, to the other things they hate, like civil rights laws or "wokeness", whatever whichever speaker in question means, or the general ballooning of the US government or so on.

Right, while I don't agree with them, this seems like one of the things that does have legs; I feel there is a genuine connection between the US becoming the global hegemon and the world policeman and with various tendecies that have contributed to American liberalism, like secularism (to compete with the Soviets for the hearts and minds of the secularized global intellectual class), quest for racial equality (to compete with the Soviets for the Third World), the Great Society and other post-New-Deal welfare programs (to present an alternative for socialism to working classes all over) and so on.

However... the same paleoconservatives also adore, love and defend to pieces the South; the region that has never seen a war fought by the US that they didn't love, expect the one where they fought against the US, and they love to dwell on that war, too. My studies in American history would indicate that whether we're talking about the war of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the World Wars, Vietnam, Iraq, whatever, the South has always been the region to fight that war, both concretely (ie. sending in the soldiers) and in the Southern political class being the one voting the involvement in those wars through and advocating for those wars.

It's the northern states that have been far more reticent to participate in foreign wars - again, whichever the war is in question. Even though the America Firsters opposing the WW2 or the college students marching against Vietnam and Iraq might have believed in vastly different ideologies, they still represented the same broad American region.

Of course, a lot of the paleo types come from the South, so there's the nostalgic attachment at the least, but many others don't. What are they also so insistent on loving the Confederacy and getting weepy about the Lost Cause?

I suggest you look at Britain for a parallel. After the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, the local conservatives of the day developed a strong sense of nostalgia for the bucolic past of the British countryside, its traditions and old way of life.

I don't mean this in the sense of conservatives (well, on the right side of conservatism, or regionally) in general admiring the South, I meant in the sense of specifically the faction associated with opposition to foreign wars admiring the region that historically has loved foreign wars and couldn't have got enough of foreign wars if it tried. British conservatives (small c or big C) have never, to my knowledge, been particularly isolationist.

Maybe Southerner white men are prone to volunteer for military service, whether that entails the real chance of being deployed in some overseas intervention or not, because they originate from a peculiar culture with a palpable warrior ethos. (I guess it'd indeed be a stretch to call them a "warrior class" though.)

It's easy to explain really. Lincoln, the GOP and the civil war are the birth of Empire in these United States.

It's the moment that marks the Unitarian nature of power in that State, the dominion of one ruling class and the primacy of the global industrial agenda thereof.

Lincoln was the US's Stalin. A hard managerial ruler for what was to become an empire backed by it's administration rather than a federation of nation-states. One that fought his own great patriotic war to settle the authority of his administration.

What is there in that that would be sympathetic to a paleocon or paleolib, besides abolishing slavery?

I meant specifically the interventionism part. Evidently US was quite capable and willing regarding fighting foreign wars before the Civil War, as evinced by the Mexican-American War, or the War of 1812.

Are these really foreign wars? I don't want to gerrymander the category but we're talking about stuff happening at the US's own borders that involves Americans pretty directly.

The break I'm talking about pretty clearly demarcates the Manifest Destiny era from the New Imperialism era. Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, now these are foreign wars.

Maybe you could find some paleos to agree that the whole Texas thing was interventionism, but I don't think you'll find as many as would condemn getting treaty ports with extraterritorial jurisdiction from China.

I'm at loss as to what really separates the Spanish-American War from the Mexican-American War, beyond one being a naval war and one being a ground war. Both lead to acquisition of new territories, though less was annexed directly in case of the first one than the latter one.

It's also worth noting that it was 33 years from the end of the Civil War to the Spanish-American War - over three decades of the supposed imperial state just chilling (and killing Indians) before it got the whole imperialism business going.

I simply can't consider the Philippines as obviously an American affair as Texas because of sheer distance.

Maybe it is just that, that you're properly an empire once you have a navy powerful enough the whole world is your business.

Conservative politics in the US is extremely Southernized - the South is cultural heart of American conservatism (especially the paleo varieties). Loving the South and Southern myths Southern iconography is very common, even if you're not from the South yourself. Attacking them is off limits.

Part of it might have to do with the Civil War and Lincoln's lasting legacy being a vastly expanded central government and greatly weakened states.

That's pretty much Thomas DiLorenzo's shtick

Right, but when it comes to the specific question of getting wars on, America seemed to be quite capable of that even without the expanded central government.

Not to the same degree. And not with pure executive control unshackled by Congress as it is now.

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