A House Divided

Billmon explores the issue of A House Divided. He considers the differences in US politics to be based on culture. He admits that this is a great simplication. He also considers what happened during the Spanish Civil War to be similar to the strains experienced by the USA now.

On the other hand, that America is now divided neatly into increasingly hostile cultural camps is generally treated as received wisdom. But culture is a tricky word, hard to define, and not really amenable to the kind of short-hand stereotypes (rural rednecks listen to Garth Brooks while urban liberals sip mocha lattes) that journalists like Tierney exist to propagate.

In his book The Cousins' Wars, Kevin Phillips suggested that there is indeed a deep-seated duality to Ango-American politics and culture that can be traced back as far the English Civil War. It separates high church Anglicans from low church dissenters, Puritans from Cavaliers, and merchant and financial elites from landowning and military ones. Every hundred years or so (1642, 1776, 1861) these opposing tendencies have a go at each other.

One could, I suppose, add the domestic disturbances of the late 1960s to that list. But, as the '60s demonstrated (in both senses of the word) American society and culture have changed radically since the days when British and American cousins fought their wars. So have the opposing camps. The great influx of eastern and southern immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the realignment of the South, the Vietnam War, feminism, gay liberation -- all these have stirred the melting pot, creating new alliances, new interests and, not least, new hatreds and resentments.

If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government.

These differences can also be explained by class war. The dates he mentioned were events in the struggle between Capitalism and Feudalism, and between Capitalism and Slavery.

The old ruling class does not go quietly. They hang on tenanciously to their power.

The Spanish Civil started out as a war between the Feudal landlords and the Capitalists allied with the Socialists and Anarchists but ended up as a war between the Feudalists and the Communists.

The regional differences in the US and in Spain are based on the degree of industrialisation. The more industry, the greater the influence of the Capitalist is.