Tag Archives: Civil War

Politics and the Citizen

Mr. Lincoln

Politics and the Citizen – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to speak to you about the meaning of the word "political."
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Words are at the center of all our political debates. They are at the center of our lives, the core of our existence. We would not exist as we do without words. Words have tremendous power to do good, to inspire people to achieve wonderous things, to rise above what they thought possible and make a better future. Yet words are also dangerous when poorly used. They can have the effect of destroying trust between people; they are capable of breaking up families and communities. Without common words we cannot have a common society.

I was struck last week reading in the New York Times how the protests following the recent Supreme Court ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were rephrased by the far right as an “Insurrection.” That is a word that has been far more justly levied at their own faction, whose actions on January 6th last year proved their lack of faith in a democratic society. Other words and ideas have been poisoned by the same fearmongers from Critical Race Theory to the Green New Deal. These are ideas and proposals that if considered in their true meaning have merit, yet any mention of them in the political square anymore will be met with the screaming banshees in the wings whose greatest weapon and sole power is the volume of their voices.

One such word which they have demonized by their own behavior, perhaps the most critical word to our democracy, is politics. It is taboo now to be political in a crowd when you don’t know everyone else’s own political views. A professional soccer team wearing practice shirts recognizing racial inequality is dangerously “politicizing” an otherwise family event. It’s curious to me because their own use of the word “political” has no bearing on the actual meaning of the word, nor on its origins.

The word political simply refers to the idea of the city, the polis in Greek. To be political is to be a citizen, an active member of society. To be political is to participate in government through voting, running for public office, and serving the people in the public sector. To be called political is one of the greatest honors anyone can bestow, for it means you care about something greater than yourself, you care about your community and want to contribute to its future.

In the ancient and medieval context, a citizen was far more particular of a person than today. The idea of universal suffrage is a modern thing, something that has been fought for down the generations and even still is being fought over today. Today though I believe the best way to describe a citizen is simply a person who wants to contribute to their own community. They need not have the papers conferring official legal citizenship in their country of residence, for even without those individual people can make a difference to their communities.

This is intolerable to those who demonize the word political. Why else would they make such an effort to poison an entire population against such an idea that at its core is meant to better their lives? It is intolerable to them because they know their views, as extreme as they are, are in the minority among their fellow citizens. There are generations of Americans who have come to recognize the benefits of democracy, and who have pushed us to improve upon those benefits already existing, that they might be extended to more and more people until eventually some day we may have true political equity. 

Yet now, as has happened in every generation since the founding of the first English colonies on the East Coast 415 years ago the powerful voice of a small few who see democracy as a threat to their own interests has influenced the course of affairs in this country to the great detriment not only of we the American people but of humanity at large. I’m speaking of course of the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency ruling made on the last day of the recent session of the Supreme Court. In that ruling the conservative majority declared that regulation should only be conducted through legislation. This means the President and any federal agency acting under the authority of the Presidency, even if acting in the best interests of the people they are sworn under oath to serve, have less ability to create broad regulations that are not expressly allowed under Acts of Congress.

The voices of a few who feel greater concern for their profits than they do for the future health of humanity and our home planet spoke up and were heard over the cries of the rest of us. I could say let’s trust in Congress to do their part now and legislate new regulations that will replace what was stripped from those executive orders revoked by the Court but those in Congress with the power to save us are also listening to that swansong of the soloists rather than the Dies Irae being belted by we, the chorus.

Our politics are in many ways broken by our extreme partisanship. It is this word, partisan that ought to be used when the far right uses the word political as a curse. We retreat into our slogans but don’t actually talk to one another. One side hears “Defund the Police” and the other “Law and Order” and neither leaves the table any better off. Rather, both parties find themselves far less willing to talk to the other, to find things in common with the other, to learn from each other. Once again, those fissures that threatened to make two countries out of one in that messy divorce of 160 years ago that left 6% of the population dead are beginning to show. 

Do we really want to go down that path again? Do we really want to fall into such political disfunction that we cease to see each other as fellow citizens and instead as enemies? We have let the battle cry change from “E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many One” to “No Compromise”, leading us to rally ’round our own partisan flags to the detriment of our common threads. I want to cry out in pain every time I see the American flag used as a symbol by those who want to be exclusionary, by those who would see all it has stood for over these past centuries be replaced by the worst of our nature: by our greed.

2016 Super Tuesday Democrats Abroad Primary

As citizens of a democracy, we have a right to know, to understand, and to discuss these questions of who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. And, as citizens of a democracy, we do have the right to dissolve our democracy, to end the experiment that’s been running for so long. I recognize that our current federal system isn’t going to last forever, nothing does, yet I remain hopeful that when it does eventually take its leave that that system will be succeeded by something better, crafted by the wisdom and love of another set of founders inspired by the precedents set by the first, who will craft a new system with all the best traits of our own yet reimagined in such a way as to overcome the faults in our own today. Until then, we citizens are caretakers of this democracy. It’s a fragile gift passed down to us from our ancestors, which we get to treasure and improve as best we can so that when we pass it on to our descendants it will be in better shape than how we found it. Let’s do our duty.

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Federalism vs. Regionalism

Federalism & Regionalism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to talk about some reasons that I see for why we Americans are so deeply divided. You can find the editorial by Charles M. Blow that inspired this episode here.

A few evenings ago, I read an editorial by the frequent New York Times contributor Charles M. Blow about what he called the first signs of the next civil war looming on the horizon. Blow’s argument boils down to the idea that today’s political actors on the right who accept our most recent former President’s Big Lie that the 2020 Election was somehow stolen are themselves inheriting rhetoric from former Vice President, and Senator from South Carolina John C. Calhoun. Calhoun has often been called the father of secession, the one who laid the rhetorical and political groundwork for eleven southern states to leave the Union in open rebellion, launching a Civil War in 1861, 11 years after Calhoun’s death, that would lead to around 720,000 American deaths. Just as today the Trumpist faction feeds on this Big Lie of their own creation, so too the secessionists of the nineteenth century made their fateful decision to embark on the conflict that my friend and fellow historian of Midwestern extraction Josh Kluever recently termed the “Treasonous Southern Enslavers’ Rebellion” on the basis of an even bigger lie, one that contends that there are varying degrees of humanity, some better than others, and that those degrees are understood on an arbitrary designation based on phenotype: distinctions in skin color.

If the Trumpist argument has any merit it’s that it’s a reaction to a sense that some Americans feel left behind by the dominant forces in our culture and society today. As much as being American implies that we are all one people, one culture, in the same way that old caesaropapist rhetoric would cry that under the banner of the emperor of the day there was “One God, One Emperor,” so too the idea that the United States is “one nation indivisible” makes it entirely evident that we are expected to be unified not only politically but culturally and socially as well. The great façade of this line from our Pledge of Allegiance is that we have never truly been “one nation” in any more of a sense than we share some common cultural and social bonds brought about in part through the spread of American dominance on this continent through westward expansion, phantom dreams of manifest destiny, and frequent generational rallying calls of “America First,” embodied in the idea of the melting pot that boils down all of us ethnic descendants of immigrants and makes us one common people: Americans. The South, in its misguided attempt at going it alone in the 1860s, has long recognized that it has a distinct culture from the rest of the country. We in the Midwest too are different from our cousins in the Northeast, even if we generally come from the same immigrant roots as our fellow Americans in New England or the Mid-Atlantic states. Then there’s the great gulf between the east and West, which falls somewhere in the Great Plains. During my recent visit to San Diego I mentioned to my family back in Kansas City that if any part of this country could even remotely think about successfully seceding from the Union it would be California, which is geographically so remote from the still largely eastern center of power and wealth in this country that as American as it does feel, it still seems foreign enough to my Midwestern senses as to be mistaken for a foreign country.

The greatest fault that our collective popular history has perpetuated is by smoothing out the surfaces of our past to make an easy to digest collective etiological story, a creation myth of this most artificial of countries born out of a series of settler colonies founded by the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the Atlantic coast. Unlike the majority of countries around the globe, the United States is not a nation, it is a political collection of peoples living together in the same region of the globe. A nation is something far more ancient, its members share not only a common political leadership but common heritage going back centuries if not millennia. The purest examples of nationhood are countries like Iceland that have had little immigration to its shores, and thus a fairly stable population for generations. 

Considering this, by my estimation there are few nations today, instead many countries, states which represent the interests of the peoples who live in those places. Those peoples are often either native to those areas or varying degrees of newcomers. Yet the degree to which people are either native or newcomer is itself vague, after all would the old Bay Staters be considered at this point after 400 years of settlement on the shores of Massachusetts Bay native to that part of the world? Or are they, like the descendants of the Ulster Scots who were brought to Ulster in the same century still relative newcomers to the places that they have called home for generations?

Here in the United States, we often highlight the English and Dutch colonial heritage of our country while demoting the French, Spanish, and Russian colonial heritages of other regions beyond the old Thirteen Colonies. Our holidays commemorating the colonial period, notably Thanksgiving, commemorate the founding of one English colony on Cape Cod, and even the history behind that commemoration is flimsy at best. It struck me when I was walking through the Museum of Us, San Diego’s renamed anthropology museum in Balboa Park, that the most basic understanding of “us” as the intended audience of the museum’s exhibits are Anglo-Americans. I feel a sort of secondary connection to this idea of “us” as Anglo-Americans, after all I have old colonial ancestry on my Mother’s side going back to seventeenth-century Connecticut, and eighteenth-century Maryland and Pennsylvania, but I see myself far more in light of my more recent and familiar status as a third-generation Irish American. What was especially profound about this particular definition of “us” in San Diego’s anthropology museum was that it was being used in a city that was founded not by the English or later American settlers but by the Spanish in 1769. Sure, there were exhibits that included the stories of the local indigenous peoples, notably the Kumeyaay, but they were always the object of focus not the subject describing the object. In the process of conquest by the United States during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, not only were the Amerindians living in the West and Southwest subjugated and demoted to second-class citizens in their own home, so too were the Californios, Nuevomexicanos, and Tejanos, the descendants of the Spanish colonists who settled in their northernmost American colonies and would later become regional identities in a newly independent Mexico after 1821. 

Similar patterns can be seen among the French of the Mississippi Basin; it’s noteworthy that Homer Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame was seen as a free person of color within the French and Spanish racial contexts, while to the Americans any hint of African ancestry deemed him to be legally black. If you want to understand why the fight for racial justice is so complex consider that firstly race is an artificial concept that was created to promote a colonial order of hierarchy, and secondly that out of these ideas of race entire notions of identity and community have developed that are very real, very powerful, and frankly beautiful. Just because I don’t feel any affinity for my legal identification as white doesn’t mean that my relatives, friends, and neighbors who identify as black aren’t in any way unjustified in being proud of being black.

Secessionist rhetoric had power in the nineteenth century because of how new the Union was. Remember how Lincoln introduced his Gettysburg Address, noting that he spoke “four score and seven years” after the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire was made in 1776. Speaking only 87 years after the conception of this idea of a country called America, populated by a people called Americans, it makes sense that some in the South would feel far closer to their identities as South Carolinians, Georgians, and Virginians among others. Yet it is interesting to me that the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was born in Kentucky but served from Mississippi, both states that were created by the United States out of territories controlled by the Federal Government after the signing of the Federal Constitution in 1787. In short, Davis’s claim to some innate loyalty to his state before any loyalty to the Union was far less well founded than that of the father of secession, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. I’ve written before about how I argue that the moment that the United States became more important than the individual states themselves was when the United States Congress began admitting new states to the Union west of the Appalachians that hadn’t existed before the Revolution. The first thirteen states created the Union, yet the Union created nearly every state that would follow its own founding, save a few holdouts with preexisting governments that elected to join the Union, whether by popular demand like Texas or by coup and minority rule like Hawaii.

Today though, secessionist rhetoric is less well founded on the idea that the states have some precedence over the Union and more on the idea that the power of the Union relies on the states’ and by extension the voters’ full faith in the credit and authority of the Union itself. No institution exists without that most fundamental level of trust that it can do what it sets out to do. Historically, governments have been able to hold power through a combination of force of arms and public support. This is at the heart of what Machiavelli argued about how a good prince ought to govern in the sixteenth century. The definition of what it means to be American is inherently exclusive, it relies on this identity created out of the twin foundation myths of Jamestown and Plymouth. Because of this we have seen a continual multigenerational struggle to expand that definition to become inherently inclusive, that it might embrace not only the English heritage of the oldest colonies that eventually contributed to the foundation of the United States but all the other identities, whether indigenous, colonial, or immigrant that best express the intricate mosaic of what it means to be an American.

If we do have a second civil war, whether on the battlefield or in the destabilization of the authority of the ballot box, it will be because we don’t recognize the interests and needs of our myriad of different Americans. I agree with Mr. Blow that the efforts of activists and politicians on the right in the last year to take control of government at the local level, whether on school boards or in local election boards, better reflects the true battleground of this second civil war. Yet I’d take that argument one step further and say that the fact that this focus has been so intent on assuming authority over the most local of political offices reflects more than anything else how at the local level we are still divided into our own nations, whether they be as Southerners, Northeasterners, Midwesterners, or Westerners, or whether it’s even more particular that we truly define ourselves by our towns and cities, or even by our neighborhoods and blocks. The homogenization inherent in the narratives constructed around being American over the last 245 years brews conflict with this hyperlocal level of identity that is inherent not only in we the American people, but in all humanity no matter who we are.