Political trench warfare and a Cold Civil War

Yesterday, as part of my discussion of a Gaslit Nation episode, I wrote about the Russian hack of the US government and corporations. Here’s a bit more from various things in my browser tabs I didn’t get to yesterday. A question that came up: Is it a massive hack or a cyberattack? I’ve seen both terms. I’m leaning towards calling it a hack because this Russian action didn’t cause things (individual computers, servers, or the US power grid) to stop working. The whole thing could turn into a cyberattack through the vulnerabilities this hack has revealed. Olga Lautman tweeted:

Yikes! More Russian cyberattack details: "Nearly all Fortune 500 companies, including The New York Times, use SolarWinds products to monitor their networks. So does Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, and major defense contractors like Boeing" Omg! "Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds' update server by using the password "solarwinds123"

So the hack was because SolarWinds was lazy with their security. I’ve heard a big company that got hacked is Microsoft, which seems ironic to me. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported placed that were hacked included the Nuclear Security Administration, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and national labs. Russia is looking into how US weapons are designed and built and where they are stored. A hack into the FERC is a big concern because it keeps data on the electrical grid that could identify the most disruptive locations for attacks. Such a hack would also provide info on the status of the country’s oil supplies. Russia could blackmail us by saying do what we want or we shut down your electricity and oil. Or … Ben Franklin tweeted:

Obtaining state secrets is how you blackmail an entire government. They’re state secrets because they’d cause the government to collapse if they came out. This is what the Biden admin is sailing into.

Ani Bernard added:

To preempt this they’ll have to lay it all out on the table—all the crimes and the horror.

Jonathan Zasloff is a law professor at UCLA with a PhD in American History. The title of his piece in Democracy is How to Finally Win the Civil War. The subtitle is:

The South has never believed in democracy. So it’s no wonder the GOP doesn’t. But the battle for democracy must be won.

In laying out his main idea Zasloff wrote:

In a non-trivial way, the Confederacy triumphed in the Civil War by establishing a particularly Southern pattern in national politics. This pattern rejects the fundamental tenet of any democracy: namely, multi-party competition, with various rules and informal norms designed to ensure a modicum of fairness. … The Republican Party wishes to destroy democracy. It seeks a form of one-party state: many can compete, but only one is allowed to win.

Southern politics rejected multi-party competition from the beginning. A second party could not be trusted. And race was the major reason.

A solid one-party South was necessary to prevent “tyranny” —which is to say, any threat to chattel slavery, no matter how distant.

In this case “tyranny” is anything that prevented them from oppressing – enslaving – black people.

The historian and political theorist Richard Hildreth recognized that the South’s antipathy to democracy—no matter the name of its dominant political party—drove its form of politics. He entitled his classic 1840 antislavery treatise Despotism in America, and he argued that the slave system meant war by other means. The South was a slave society, in which the conflict between master and slave defined all social relations. Thus, Hildreth observed, slavery’s permanent war footing also required a severe reduction in liberty, such that critical political and moral issues simply could not be discussed, making the minor party competition essentially cosmetic. Then the war came. As a political matter, the secession crisis was driven by the South’s basic refusal to accept the results of an election that it lost—even when it had established biased rules of the game such as the three-fifths rule. The rules were set by the Constitution, the parties agreed to play by them—and then when the South lost, it decided literally to take its people and go home. This is why Lincoln at Gettysburg could say that the “great civil war” tested whether republican government could “long endure.” Political theorists had long wondered whether it could, because it would constantly split into different factions and then into different nations. After all of the theorizing about how America was different, it turned out that it was, in one sense, not so different after all: It stayed together only through the application of four years of massive and devastating violence.

After the North gave up on Reconstruction (see Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes) the South reimposed one-party rule, which was hell for the former slaves. The South switched parties after the Civil Rights Act was signed, helped by Nixon’s Southern Strategy. For a while it seemed there might be a viable two-party system, but that lasted only until the remaining Democrats retired or died off. Even Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee in 2000. When the GOP gained control of the House in 1994 much of its leadership, including Newt Gingrich, was from the South and brought their one-party ideas with them.

Southern dominance led to a politics squarely in the Southern tradition. For Gingrich, Democrats were not simply opponents: They were enemies of the nation and civilization. McKay Coppins noted in The Atlantic that “one memo, titled ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control’ included a list of recommended words to use in describing Democrats: sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt.” … But while Gingrich perfected the language of demonization, his strategy had a long history in the South. Southern politicians had long demonized their opponents—be they the shell of a Southern Republican Party, northerners, Blacks, Jews, or anyone else—as not merely opponents, but rather threats to “our culture and civilization,” in the words of Mississippi’s Eastland. … The point was not to defeat, but to delegitimize.

That opinion that Democrats were illegitimate led to Texas re-gerrymander its districts in the middle of the 2000 decade and the GOP to do extreme gerrymandering in 2011 in all the states they controlled, including Michigan and especially Wisconsin. In that state when the voters elected a Democratic governor the GOP controlled legislature and the outgoing governor stripped the new one of several powers.

The entire point was to lock down party competition, in the best Southern tradition.

Southern politics had come North. And invaded the Supreme Court. So, what to do? We must enact pro-democracy measures.

American politics must be de-Southernized: which concerns less symbols such as Confederate flags, statutes, and names of buildings, and concerns more entrenching democracy throughout American political institutions. … The goal is, quite simply, free and fair elections, such that a majority of voters choose their political leaders.

A first step is to eliminate the filibuster. It is a Jim Crow relic. Also, because a Constitutional amendment is impossible (it would require approval from those who would lose power), it is time to add states.

The United States Senate is undemocratic by design, yet in the twenty-first century, as metropolitan regions grow and rural areas decline in population, it has reached untenable levels. In 1790, Virginia, the largest state, was 12.65 times the size of Delaware, the smallest; currently, California, the largest state, is sixty-eight times the size of Wyoming, the smallest. … The problem has already crept up on us: Democrats have won a majority of votes for Senate in each of the last two election cycles, often by very large percentages, and very likely will do the same in 2020 once all the data comes in, yet the GOP has maintained a majority throughout the entire time.

It is also time to expand – “unpack” – the Supreme Court. A majority of the current members are hostile to democracy. If we don’t do those things we will have political trench warfare and a Cold Civil War. I think the Cold Civil War began in 1994 when the GOP took Congress. It took 160 years after the South lost the Civil War to come very close to winning the country.

In 2009, Republicans repeatedly proclaimed Barack Obama to be a “tyrant” simply because he attempted to fulfill his campaign promises. Jon Stewart said in April of that year, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” Yet that is the entire point: Equating tyranny with losing runs deep within the Southern tradition of American politics, despite the constant encomia [high praise] to democracy.

In nice contrast to Zasloff is the latest edition of The Hightower Lowdown written by Jim Hightower. In the November issue he wrote about timeless truths for trying times. Hightower listed many reasons why it seems humankind has gone mad. They cheer a tyrant in the White House. There are corporate profiteers who routinely poison us and the planet and knowingly sicken thousands with the virus while pocketing billions. Proud Boys who proclaim themselves heroes for beating protesters. And much more. So here are truths about humanity. Warning: They are contrary to popular thinking. * Most people are fundamentally fair minded, kind, and generous. * The basic human instinct is social cooperation. * Only about 10% of American drivers act like they own the road. The other 90% want to drive harmoniously with others. * John Rawls conducted exercises on how people envision society. Repeatedly participants from every social status want a world that ensures the least well-off, marginalized person would be treated justly. * The Law of the Jungle? Many species are cooperative, not competitive. Even bees work by consensus. * Before the invention of property law hunter-gatherer societies had a cooperative, sharing ethic that was more successful than an authoritarian ethic could have been. Some of us (thankfully not me) have read the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding, published in 1954. It depicts a group of English schoolboys stranded on an island and their descent into barbarism. It has been hailed for its “realism.” But – it’s fiction. This is reality: Back in 1965 six boys, ages 13-16, from Tonga took a boat out to sea. They were caught in a storm and washed up on an island. They weren’t found for 15 months. They created their own democratic society. When they were rescued, all six were quite healthy – physically, socially, and spiritually. No barbarism at all.

In striving to institute a culture of justice, it’s self-defeating to assume humankind is innately selfish. Rather, we should shame the culprits as deviants and rally the majority to common-good solutions by appealing directly to their natural instincts for an egalitarian society that equitably shares both responsibilities and benefits.

There is a parable appropriate here:

An old man says to his grandson: “There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you and inside every other person, too.” After a moment, the boy asks, “Which wolf will win?” The old man smiles. “The one you feed.”