It is almost a certainty that the 2010 Congressional elections, which are going to start really kicking into gear a few months from now, are going to be a nasty and partisan affair, probably something quite unlike what any of us have seen in our lifetimes. The nasty and partisan 2008 election, and the even nastier and more partisan fight over healthcare “reform”, give us some clue of what to expect. Unless an even more dramatic issue grabs the public’s attention, forlorn attacks on the healthcare “reform” bill will take center stage at the right wing carnival, with birthers, gun nuts, Oath Keepers, Glenn Beck and a whole host of other sideshow performers keeping us entertained during the intermissions. It will go down in the books as a historic election simply for the disgraceful spectacle it will present.

Since the passage of the healthcare “reform” legislation on Sunday (the quotation marks are indicative of my opinion that it wasn’t really a reform, but that’s another story) there have been disturbing reports of violence and threats of violence against Congressional Democrats who supported the bill. The list of those targeted and how is illuminating:

- Two Democratic offices in New York were vandalized. A brick was thrown through the window of the local party headquarters in Rochester with a Barry Goldwater-quoting note attached: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”

- Two more Democratic offices, one in Kansas and the other in Arizona, were also vandalized.

- Representative Bark Stupak of Michigan received a fax with a picture of a gallows and noose attached, complete with the caption “All Baby Killers come to unseemly ends Either by the hand of man or by the hand of God.” This was just one of the many charming messages that were received at his office.

- An unknown person or persons cut the gas line at a home in Virginia under the mistaken belief that Representative Tom Periello lived there (turns out it was his brother’s home; whoever posted its address online goofed up).

- All in all, ten Democrats (that we know of) have reported receiving threats or being the victim of some other form of harassment.

What saddens me is that I can believe that it’s come to this, I really and truly can. I’m not shaking my head in disbelief like some others because I’ve seen the progression that’s taken place in the conservative movement since the 1990’s. I grew up in a house with a father who hung on Rush Limbaugh’s words, I almost came to blows with the man arguing about the Iraq War. And that is why I am going to make a perfectly blunt prediction here: there will be violence during this year’s Congressional elections. Blood will be spilled. People will be injured and a few may even be killed.

Why? Because the radicals are in the driver’s seat thanks to the long-running abdication of leadership on the part of Democrats and mainstream Republicans. As I wrote in my first blog post to this website, the political atmosphere in the United States has become dangerously conducive to violence. So cynical have I become that each new revelation surprises me less and less. Something horrible is happening in this country, and it’s going to start exploding more and more in the coming months. With its failure to defeat healthcare “reform” the extreme right wing has lost its most potent rallying cry but has gained something far more powerful: the angry desperation of those who believed all their insane fear mongering over the bill.

So here are my predictions for the upcoming election season:

1) The vandalism that we’ve seen against Democratic offices and the violent threats against Democrats in Congress, especially those who supported the healthcare “reform” and other pieces of hot button legislation, will continue  intermittently throughout the spring and summer, and will increase substantially either in August (when Congress recesses and its members go home to face their angry constituents) or in September (when Americans will start paying real attention after zoning out during the summer).

2) The vandalism and threats will also be aimed at ordinary people who express themselves as supporters of the Democrats or Obama. It will be aimed at the houses of those who have pro-Democratic signs in the yard. It will be aimed against cars with pro-Democratic bumper stickers. And it will also be aimed at the safety of those who volunteer for Democratic campaigns or who otherwise make their support publicly known.

3) The vandalism, violence and threats described in predictions one and two will, on a smaller scale, also be carried out against Republicans and conservatives by groups of militant liberals who feel a more hard line is needed. We have not seen the kind of radicalization on the left as we have seen on the right, but the evidence suggests that there are those in our movement who have almost lost patience.

4) Street violence will likely occur in locales where Tea Party protesters happen to cross paths with pro-Democratic, anti-Tea Party demonstrators. Expect fistfights, group brawls and riot police trying to keep the two sides apart.

If we’re lucky this will be all that will happen. Things are clearly going to get worse in this country before they get better, and we all need to be prepared for the chaotic months that await us.

In the summer of 1858, the state of Maine – about as deep into Yankee territory as one could get – found itself host to a genteel southerner named Jefferson Davis, a former Secretary of War and a current United States Senator from Mississippi. On the Fourth of July, on board a ship near Boston, he delivered a rousing speech where he condemned the burgeoning secessionist movement. That same summer a Georgian named Alexander Stephens was finishing his final (for the moment) term in the House of Representatives, having decided that he was not going to seek re-election in the fall. Meanwhile, in Virginia, a U.S. Army officer named Robert E. Lee was taking a two-year leave of absence from the military in an attempt to salvage the finances of the three plantations that had belonged to his father-in-law, who had owned nearly two hundred slaves when he had died in 1857.

None of these three men were extremists when it came from the slavery question. Davis and Stephens were considered political moderates and Unionists, and Lee was a long-serving soldier whose loyalty to the United States was not in question. None of them would play any substantial part in the process by which the southern states seceded. Yet by 1861 all three of them were serving the cause of the new Confederate States of America as its president, vice president and military adviser to the president, respectively.

Why did this happen? While each man may have had complex reasons for why they felt they had to support the Confederacy, the short answer is that a fringe political movement took advantage of America’s political stagnation and used it create a situation where Davis, Stephens and Lee found themselves having to take what they considered to be the least bad choice presented to them. This is not to defend the actions of three men who consciously chose to commit treason against the United States of America, but it should be acknowledged that they were not the movers and shakers behind the initial formation of the Confederacy and their decision to serve it was not made in a vacuum.

Today we have the Tea Party, an angry, radical and complex social movement that has managed to vex both liberals and mainstream conservatives with its rejection of both progressive dogma and the “politics as usual” style of Washington. But in the decade before the American Civil War there was also a Tea Party, even though it wasn’t called that. It was a fringe movement whose leaders were called the “Fire Eaters” for their impassioned rhetoric in defense of slavery. Their movement made appeals based on race, much like the Tea Party now does. It advocated state’s rights, much like the Tea Party now does. And the Fire Eaters managed to split a major American political party into factions, much like the Tea Party is threatening to do now.

The unofficial but authoritative leader of that movement was William Lowndes Yancey (1814-1863), known in his lifetime as the “Prince of the Fire Eaters”. Born in Georgia but raised mostly in New York, he went to college in Massachusetts, then returned to the south and became a slaveholder through marriage. He got started with a career in journalism and then migrated to politics, where he served in both the state legislature of Alabama and in the United States House of Representatives. When secession became a reality he offered his services to the Confederacy, served as the head of its diplomatic mission to Europe during the early stages of the war, then returned to the south and served in the Confederate States Senate. He had the good fortune to die in July of 1863, thus saving himself from having to see the destruction of the nation he toiled to create.

Yancey and his Fire Eater allies had emerged as a political force during the tumultuous 1850’s, a decade that had seen both physical violence between pro-slavery and abolitionist factions in the Kansas Territory and the abortive uprising of John Brown in 1859. Yancey was a skilled orator and, although he was officially a Democrat, he made no secret of the fact that he was increasingly unhappy with the northern elements within the party and more and more thought that secession was the only sensible thing for the south to do. When the Democratic Party held its national convention in Charleston, South Carolina in April 1860, Yancey was there and knew just what needed to be done to make secession a reality. It was a commonly held view that the election of a Republican as President of the United States – the Republicans then being the party associated with abolitionism – would be so intolerable to the southern states that they would leave the Union rather than  submit to it. But in order for the Republicans, a young and not fully established party, to win, the Democratic Party would have to be sabotaged.

Back in the nineteenth century, in the days before political conventions became so stage managed that the future nominee was known months in advance, nominating fights could and did erupt on the floor of party conventions, and that was exactly what happened in Charleston in 1860. The front runner going into the convention was Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who was considered the only potential nominee who could win nationally in the fall. Douglas was a moderate on the slavery issue; he supported its continued existence but was not a fiery supporter of its expansion, and because of this it was thought he could win enough of the more populous northern states to claim the presidency. Unfortunately for Douglas, moderation on the slavery question was no longer the political virtue that it had once been.

By the end of the 1850’s the great untouchable issue in American politics was slavery, and it had become so red hot with partisan fervor that it was almost impossible to touch any other political issue that overlapped with it. The Democratic Party had made a bargain with itself to protect slavery as an institution, and thus it had appeal to both the planter class in the south and the non-abolitionist population of the north. But, with the growing rigidity and partisanship of the political system, that compromise was becoming untenable. That problem was embodied by Douglas, who had committed the unpardonable sin of supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had allowed the settlers of the Kansas Territory to decide the question of slavery on their own (which is what set off the wave of violence there), and which had essentially repealed the old Missouri Compromise of 1820. Douglas had done so by quite reasonably pointing out that in a democratic society laws that the electorate didn’t support could always be subject to repeal. Yancey and the Fire Eaters, not to mention an ever growing number of southerners in general, did not want this logic to apply to the territories. They felt that the government should guarantee the existence of slavery in them until such time as the settlers there, upon preparing a constitution for statehood, could decide one way or the other on the matter.

This may seem like a fairly trivial distinction to us as twenty-first century Americans, but there was a certain evil logic to the south’s position for, as the reasoning went, if slavery was not legal in the territories then slaveholders wouldn’t settle there, and when statehood came to that territory it would surely become another free state because there wouldn’t be any slave-owning voters. If the number of free states was allowed to exceed the number of slave states, then the fear was that the south would not be able to stop the passage and ratification of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery, or even block laws that regulated and limited it. At Charleston the question of slavery in the territories ended up paralyzing the convention when it came time for the party to vote on an official platform for 1860.

Twelve years earlier the Alabama state convention of the Democratic Party had adopted a platform that took a firm stand on the question of slavery in the territories, insisting, among other things, that the federal government had no power to restrict slavery there and that the territorial governments should not have that power until statehood. William Yancey was instrumental in the adoption of that platform. And that state platform would come to haunt the national Democratic convention of 1860. At their 1856 convention the party had adopted a platform which had stated its support for the continued existence of slavery. This platform was re-approved by the delegates at Charleston, but then things exploded over the question of additional language to be added. The delegates of the southern states wanted an additional paragraph, derived from the language of the 1848 Alabama state platform, to be tacked on to the 1856 platform.

Immediately this proved unacceptable to the supporters of Senator Douglas (who, it should be added, was not himself present in Charleston), who realized that no candidate, not even theirs, could win states in the north with that type of a platform. It was one thing for a candidate to run on a pro-slavery platform – the northern abolitionists were not yet numerous enough to defeat that – but it was quite another thing to run on a platform that pledged to stuff slavery down the throats of people who might not want it. They realized that a platform such as that would very likely lead to a Republican victory. After days of haggling over the issue the convention approved the more moderate platform the Douglas men had wanted. Then things quickly fell apart. The delegation from Alabama was firmly under the control of William Yancey, and the leaders of six of the the southern delegations had already agreed to follow the lead of the Alabamians. Upon the defeat or their platform, the Alabama delegation withdrew from the convention, followed by the six other southern delegations.

Even with many delegates gone, the chairman of the convention, Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, ruled that the nominee, who had to be voted in by a two-thirds majority of the delegates, had to be approved by two-thirds of the original number of delegates, not two-thirds of the remaining number. And after numerous ballots were taken it became clear that nobody was going to be nominated at Charleston. There were still enough anti-Douglas men left in the other delegations to block his nomination, and no other potential nominee could garner anything close to the two-thirds majority. Cushing had no choice but to adjourn the convention, announcing that it would be reconvened in Baltimore in June.

Things didn’t go any better at Baltimore. In parts of the south the state branches of the Democratic Party had named new delegations that were more friendly to Stephen Douglas. These were present at the re-adjourned convention, as were the original southern delegations they were meant to replace. Days were spent trying to resolve the matter of who should be seated, and ultimately the pro-Douglas men won and the newer delegations were seated. And once again the southern delegates started to walk out. This time the remaining delegates were able to successfully nominate Douglas, but his victory was Pyrrhic. The delegations who had walked out this time convened their own convention elsewhere in Baltimore and nominated vice president John C. Breckinridge as their candidate.

Just as Yancey and the Fire Eaters had intended, the party was split. In the north Douglas and Abraham Lincoln ran against each other, while in the south Douglas and Breckenridge competed for votes. They both lost votes to each other, and to make matters worse they also both lost votes to a candidate named John Bell of the little known and long gone Constitutional Union Party. As expected, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans won, the south seceded and the American Civil War was on.

Now, a hundred and fifty years later, it is the Republican Party – the same party which benefited when the Fire Eaters split the Democrats – that finds itself threatened by an insurgent political movement. And the issue that has been threatening to split the party is healthcare, a battle that finally ended this past Sunday when the House of Representatives approved the “reform” legislation and sent it to the president for signing. The vote was narrow and partisan (just one Republican in the House voted for it), and when it was all over the extreme right wing was stunned. The right wingers had, as far back as the town hall ruckus last August, already imagined that the battle was over with and that all that was needed was for them to drag their feet until the Democrats gave up. As the recriminations began it was obvious that many of them were possessed by the thought that this was not supposed to happen, that the Tea Party protesters, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts and the right wing media pressure on Democrats and Republicans alike was supposed to kill the “reform” dead.

While Democrats and progressives have celebrated the passage of the “reform”, the truth for Republicans and the right wing movement in general is that they have severely lost face with their defeat but have sacrificed little else. Even with the impending “fixes” added on, the final legislation is still full of heavy concessions that were made to Republican legislators. But conservative writer David Frum makes an excellent point when he says that:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

And:

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

In other words, only one House Republican voted for what was essentially a Republican piece of legislation, and the blunt fist of the Tea Party extremists and their allies in the right wing media is what was responsible. Because the political process had become stagnant, because neither the Democrats nor the moderate Republicans offered any real leadership, the debate was defined by the extremists.

And that is the lesson that we all must take from the tragedy of the Civil War and the frustration of the healthcare “reform” fiasco. Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens and Robert E. Lee each made an individual decision to serve the Confederacy, but in many ways the decision had already been made for them. It was made for them by radicals who knew that men such as they would be hard-pressed to oppose secession once it became a fact. Similarly, the centrist Republicans in the House each made an individual decision to oppose the healthcare legislation, but in many ways their decision was also made for them.

Social and political movements all seek to create their own realities, and incompetent leadership allowed the Tea Party to create the reality on this issue and led to a situation where many Republicans, men who might otherwise have voted for healthcare “reform” – I always use quotations because the bill passed is essentially corporate welfare with some progressive giveaways – felt that they could not. William Yancey and the Fire Eaters may all be long dead, but their ghosts are still haunting American politics.

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Just the other day I wrote a letter to my representative in Congress, a Democratic with a solidly left-of-center voting record. The letter was about a bill called the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 1310), which would severely limit the egregious practice of mountaintop removal in Appalachia and help ensure better access to clean drinking water. Though not an Appalachian resident myself, I live in a state – California – with constant water problems, and thus could appreciate the need for the legislation. Yet as I dropped the letter in the mailbox, I couldn’t help but feel that I had probably wasted my time with my little exercise in the democratic process. What good was my letter going to do? If HR 1310 is brought to a vote in the less gridlocked House of Representatives it will probably pass, and my representative will probably vote for it. But what chance does it have of escaping Republican filibuster in the Senate? The GOP caucus there, which has made a point of blocking almost every bit of Democratic legislation no matter how moderate, will surely not have mercy on an anti-corporate bill such as this. And when you look at it that way, the hour I spent at my computer describing the evils of mountaintop removal was an hour I could have spent doing almost anything else and probably getting better results.

The American people as a whole have far less esoteric political concerns than the environmental destruction of Appalachia, but they seem to share my feelings of despair and hopelessness over the issues that matter most to them. On every topic of relevance to the average, everyday American citizen – especially health care reform and the economy – there has been almost no movement from our perpetually deadlocked government. It has become such a regular ritual that the script for it is a cliche-ridden as any big budget summer blockbuster. Whatever the issue of the moment is, the Republicans in Congress will shriek and moan about deficits and socialism. President Obama will try to act statesmanlike and above the fray, while Democrats in Congress will try to appease their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Then, once the concessions are made, the Republicans will stop cooperating and the Democrats will be left scratching their heads as to why their friends refuse to play nice with them. To official Washington this is all game. It has lengthy written rules but comes with an unofficial strategy guide that tells players how to get the most points – er, votes and campaign contributions – by using lobbyists and the media to maximum effect. And through the ability of lawmakers to become lobbyists themselves, or to sign up with corporate America afterwords, it’s rarely “game over” even when they lose. The rest of us, those who need health insurance or who were dependent upon the continued unemployment benefits that Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) decided he wanted to block, have no guarantee of a second chance.

It is the gridlock of our political system, with those never ending games and the inability for anything constructive to get done, that breeds frustration, disillusionment and cynicism. And it is increasingly breeding violence. It is an ominous moment when a nation’s collective mood can be measured by the number and severity of violent, politically motivated incidents, and by that standard we can fairly judge the American people to be both angry at the government’s inability to get anything done and yet confused about what to do with that anger. The recent small wave of violent attacks, the latest being the March 4 attack on the Pentagon, has shown the anger that is boiling out there, but the manner in which they have been carried out – all were committed by lone perpetrators who managed to inflict relatively little damage – show the confusion, for the man who who shot two police officers at the Pentagon and the man who crashed his private plane into the Austin, Texas offices of the IRS both chose to go out like mosquitoes daring to challenge a bug zapper. Both of them betrayed, in their individual ways, a belief that that the United States was controlled by elites who did not care about the lives and well-being of common men like them. “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?  Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies,” wrote IRS kamikaze Joseph Stack, while Pentagon gunman John Patrick Bedell believed that the United States was controlled by a “coup regime” that had been running the show for decades. While Bedell has mostly been written off as a nut who seems to have suffered from mental illness, Stack’s furious actions led to praise from plenty of right wing commentators and even a sort of sympathy from many liberals.

The danger that we now face as a nation is the danger that those who are inclined to violence, those who are willing to attempt murder, revolution and insurrection, will not only realize that they can do much more damage by working together but that they will also find support from a growing section of the population. The active support of the population, or at least a section of it, has always been the sustaining force for an insurgency. And if political progress is not made, if the political system remains paralyzed and unable to address the needs of the citizens of America, radical anti-government groups will eventually find that support. We progressives can talk about racism, anti-government paranoia and religious fervor all we want. These forces may sustain the hardcore base of the Tea Party movement, but it is the sense of abject hopelessness that I felt in mailing my letter that has allowed the movement to grow beyond that core. How else do we explain the fact that Tea Party groups are full of adherents who were never particularly interested in politics, but who got involved after they lost their jobs or their homes? “…Some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party. But most are not,” wrote David Barstow in a lengthy expose of the Tea Party movement for the New York Times. “They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.”

In other words, these are people who have belatedly woken up to the fact that Washington does not particularly care if they live or die, starve or prosper. They have woken up to the fact that any initiative that benefits them is going to fail. They have woken up to the realization that anything that’s good for them is going to be blocked by the vested interests who really run this country. These are realizations that progressives have been trying to convince these ordinary people of for years. Now the extreme right wing has beaten us to it. And now, by their refusal to seriously address the problems that plague our nation, official Washington has all but handed the initiative to the extremists who increasingly advocate violence. If you are suffering from injustice, if you no longer feel that the normal mechanisms of democracy are worth anything, if you feel that your life is controlled by a cartel of elites out to better themselves at your expense, if you feel that normal political activism is impotent to solve these problems, then violence doesn’t start to look so unreasonable. We may shake our heads at the craziness of the Tea Party crowd, but the fact is that this sense of hopelessness has become prevalent within the progressive movement as well. Every progressive reading this knows what I mean. After eight years of Bush the traitor and a full year of Obama the coward, it can be expected that a lot of us feel like there is no longer any point in trying to change things through the democratic process. So the risk is not just that conservatives will turn to violence, but that frustrated liberals will eventually join in. After all, both the progressive movement and the Tea Party movement share an agreement that elites have hijacked the United States, even though we often disagree on who those elites are.

In large part it was the stagnation of politics in the United States that led to the American Civil War, for the question of slavery became impossible to resolve through ordinary democratic means. Contrary to what the grade school history books might imply, slavery was not a single issue that could be put it a box and isolated from everything else. It was an issue that overlapped with many other areas of policy. When the slavery question become so red hot with partisan rancor that it became untouchable and unmovable it was those other areas of policy that became gridlocked as well. The slavery question affected interstate commerce, law enforcement and judicial policy and even foreign policy (should we recognize Haiti, a country that gained it independence through a slave uprising?). But it was the expansion of the United States, the acquisition of new territories and the process of preparing them for statehood that caused the most problems. Keeping in mind the ability of Congress to eliminate slavery and the tenuous balance of power between them and the free states, the slave states fervently worked to make sure as many of the new states as possible became slave states. Northern activists wanted them all to be free states, but the south would settle for the addition of new free states only if new slave states were added to counter-balance them, and only reluctantly at that. The abolitionists could make no headway in eliminating slavery and the slavery advocates could only defend the status quo, and felt increasingly insecure about doing that. Even when Congress was able to enact major legislation on the slavery issue – particularly the compromises of 1820, 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 – the results still failed to placate the growing number of hardliners on either side for very long.

Through their inability to deal with the slavery problem, what the politicians essentially did was hand the initiative to the extremists on both sides, who turned to violence with the passing of the aforementioned Kansas-Nebraska Act. That legislation allowed the question of slavery in the Kansas Territory to be decided by the settlers there, with the result that the territory was invaded by both radical abolitionists and pro-slavery zealots. “Bleeding Kansas” it was called, and dozens on both sides were killed in the years that followed. One of the abolitionist fighters was a man named John Brown, who would resurface in 1859 as a failed revolutionary when he and a small band of followers seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, and was then ignobly captured by a military force under the command of one Robert E. Lee, then a colonel in the United States Army (Brown was eventually hung by the state of Virginia). Brown’s goal had been to destroy slavery by freeing plantation slaves and arming them, collapsing the economic system of the south. He didn’t even come close to achieving that with his “revolt”, but the fact that he had even attempted was enough to push the southern states closer to secession, and to spur them to start modernizing their militia system, which is considered by historians to have been the real start of the Confederate Army. It should also be noted that, like the fawning admiration over Joseph Stack’s suicide attack on the IRS, John Brown’s raid was publicly applauded by some men who should have known better.

Of course, one can make the argument that, had the abolitionists been making genuine political progress it would have simply pushed the south closer to secession earlier, or, had the south been expanding slavery more successfully, it simply would have pushed radical abolitionists to become more militant, more early. Both of these assertions are probably true, but they also irrelevant at the moment. Both sides were reacting to the fact that politics could no longer provide the means to address their most pressing concerns. I certainly do not imply any moral equivalency, in any direction, between abolitionists, slavers, modern progressives and the Tea Party movement. But what happened a hundred and fifty years ago still holds relevance today as an example of the consequences of political stagnation.

While I hate their violent rhetoric and some of their more extreme beliefs, I can’t but help admire the Tea Party movement. These are people who have realized that they are being screwed by someone and are actually willing to stand up for themselves. The contrast with our pathetic, de-energized progressive movement could not be more stark. Even if the Tea Party is blaming the wrong people for the screwing, their determination and organization has been admirable. And even though I am contemptuous towards much of their ideology, I am far more contemptuous towards those narcissistic, self-serving politicians that continue to play their games at the expense of everyone else and do nothing while the country starts to burn. As distasteful as hate and paranoia are, I find the greed and hypocrisy of official Washington to be far more loathsome. If the Republicans and Democrats don’t wake up and get the country moving again, a second civil war may indeed be our fate. Perhaps what is most ominous is the way that so many Republican leaders, in their smarmy, I-know-something-you-don’t manner, seem to gleefully regard the Tea Party movement as their ace in the hole, something that they can control and manipulate for electoral success, in spite of the fact that large swaths of the Tea Party crowd have come to (correctly) realize that the GOP isn’t really their friend. If the day ever comes when war tears across the fabric of American society, I have a feeling that a lot of those Republicans will be shocked to discover that the guns are pointed at them as well.

Our brains are not programmed to remember every minute detail of the dreams that play through them while we sleep, yet in spite of this handicap I have an unusually clear recollection of the dreams that visited me night after night during the summer and autumn of 2009. Each one was remarkably similar: the dream would begin with me traveling up and down a road that stood alongside a beautiful stretch of coastal land, a stretch which looked very much like the gorgeous Maine coastline where I grew up. These dream world travels were always at sundown, with a beautiful red and yellow sky giving a last bit of brilliant illumination to the shimmering surface of the water as it crashed against rocks and cliffs. And in these dreams there was always an overwhelming feeling of dread, sometimes given voice by another person who accompanied me, telling me that I should enjoy the tremendous beauty of this world while it lasted, because a terrible cataclysm was about the befall the land and change it forever.

It was not a coincidence that these dreams took place during the bitter town hall fights over healthcare reform, for my subconscious was taking what I was seeing and using it to resurrect a fear that had been with me since the very beginning of the George W. Bush years, a fear which had temporarily subsided with the election of Barack Obama. For a brief moment during those weeks of hyperpartisan rancor, America seemed genuinely on the verge of losing its collective mind. There were emotionally heated arguments and threats of violence at town hall meetings. Right wing media personalities were starting to openly talk of revolution and people were carrying guns to protests. The Tea Party movement was gaining real traction and there were reports that the Secret Service was receiving an unprecedented number of threats against the life of our president. And my dreams of a beautiful world about to be destroyed were manifestations of my fear that my lifetime would see the start of a second American Civil War. I am not a survivalist, a militiaman or a crazed conspiracy theorist, but it is ludicrous for us to believe that large scale political violence cannot happen here while we simultaneously wallow in a social climate that has become conducive to it.

On February 18 we got a taste of what that future may look like when Joseph Stack, an apparently mild-mannered software engineer with longstanding tax problems, crashed his private plane into a complex of IRS offices in Austin, Texas, killing himself and a federal employee, not to mention injuring thirteen others and doing considerable damage to the building. Before he died, Stack posted a rambling manifesto online that, in addition to attacking the IRS, the federal government and the bank bailouts, also betrayed a real sense of disillusionment with the American dream. “We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy,” he wrote. “Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all.  We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers.  Remember? One of these was ‘no taxation without representation’.  I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.  These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a ‘crackpot’, traitor and worse.”

It didn’t take long for certain vocal members of the right wing block to start praising Stack as a folk hero. Social networking groups celebrating his act of suicide terrorism popped up within hours of the event, and it is quite clear that many right wingers consider him to be a martyr for their cause, even though the manifesto itself reads more like an amalgamation of left wing and right wing grievances. Stack’s problems even found some sympathy with members of the progressive movement, who voiced support for his motivations even while condemning his actions themselves. “I have to admit, if Joe Stack had flown his plane into the new headquarters of Goldman Sachs, it would be tempting to label him a hero. His political leanings notwithstanding, his act clearly falls within the FBI definition of a Domestic Terror attack,” wrote one Davis Fleetwood on this very website.

The martyrdom of Stack exposes a real problem, which is that support for political violence has started to enter the mainstream of American society, and we progressives must come to terms with the following unpleasant fact: unless things change dramatically in this country, and change soon, there are probably going to be more Joseph Stacks, and a lot more people are going to die. And if things can’t change, then we may very well find that the same kind destruction and chaos that has torn apart other once prosperous societies is going to start playing out in our neighborhoods and our streets. We must not say that it cannot happen here, for, with reports that the fanatical armed militia movement is again on the rise, it is quite obvious that there are already people who are planning for it to happen here.

What we have seen since last summer has been an elaborate dance between the rank and file of the Tea Party movement, the Republican Party and their corporate sponsors. The GOP and the big money backers are both encouraging the radicalization of the movement while trying to control it and direct its actions. They have not always been successful, as the election of Democrat Bill Owens (who took a House seat in New York held by Republicans for over a century after a vicious spat between a mainstream Republican candidate and a third-party right winger supported by the Tea Party crowd) proved last fall. There is a growing awareness among mainstream Republicans that their inability to fully control the movement could be dangerous for the future of their establishment, yet they continue to support it. The dance between these players bears a frightening similarity to a dance that has taken place so often in the Middle East, where Arab governments have alternately coddled, armed, funded, arrested and militarily fought extremist groups depending on their political needs of the moment.

Militant, violent sentiment is not nearly as common on the left as of yet, but I have seen signs that there are those within the progressive movement who have started to believe that some form of violent confrontation, either with right-wing groups or with a future government that is dominated by right wingers, may be necessary at some point in the future. There is a real sense of disillusionment within our movement right now. We have been let down by the president who we worked so hard to elect. Barack Obama has betrayed the principles he pledged to fight for, and by doing so he has broken our collective hearts. There is a very real risk that this terrible disappointment will continue the process by which we lose our faith in our ability to effect change through non-violent, political means. When the political system loses its last traces of legitimacy, when people lose faith in the ability of politics to deliver their needs, violence stops looking unthinkable and starts looking necessary, even attractive. The American Civil War rose out of the inability of our political system to deal with an intractable problem – slavery – that aroused strong passions on both sides. Even before the Civil War, the abortive uprising of John Brown and the battles between pro-slave and anti-slave factions in “Bleeding Kansas” showed that there were those on both sides of the issue who were willing to kill and be killed over it.

Contrary to what the Tea Partiers fantasize, a second American Civil War will not be a replay of 1776, nor is it likely to be an exact replay of 1861. It’s little realized by some, but at the time that these events were taking place America did not have the collective national identity that we have today. In large part that collective national identity was forged from the Civil War, and even though we have seen some right wing politicians flirt with the idea of secessionism, it’s unlikely that we’ll see states breaking off in groups trying to form new nations. A second Civil War is more likely to look like an Iraq or a Colombia, which is to say a lot of guerilla fighting and political terrorism, with an occasional conventional battle thrown into the mix. Those who fantasize about such a war should carefully examine what the people living in those countries have had to endure.

I for one can imagine what such a war would look like. I can imagine being woken up in the middle of the night by mortar and artillery fire. I can imagine women and children killed by faulty intelligence that directs an F-16 to bomb their house on the belief that insurgent leaders are hiding there. I can imagine highways littered with the burned out wrecks of automobiles, destroyed by unmanned drones who detected the presence of guerillas in them. I can imagine my elderly parents and grandparents dying of preventable causes because hostile fire and military roadblocks have prevented them from getting to the hospital. I can imagine naval blockades, national parks despoiled by land mines and booby traps and communities no longer safe for habitation because of contamination from depleted uranium weapons. I can also imagine the political steps that our increasingly authoritarian government would take to combat such an insurrection. Goodbye to habeas corpus. Goodbye to privacy and freedom of speech. And hello to Department of Homeland Security detention centers, electronic eavesdropping and torture.

It is because I can imagine all of these things that I have no sympathy for the Joseph Stacks out there. In the past year and a half I have felt the sting of unemployment. I have gone hungry and I have had to self medicate for lack of health insurance. I have experienced every terrible emotion out there: fear, anguish, insecurity, depression, rage and even bitter, apocalyptic hatred for those in power who have done these terrible things to my country and my world. Because I have felt all this I feel that I can empathize with the rank and file of the Tea Party, who seem to be going through these same emotions. And I am convinced more than ever that violence is not the best way to solve our problems, and that these people are not our real enemies, no matter our differences or what they may think of us.

Conservatism is not our enemy. Does anyone really believe that what happened during those eight years of George W. Bush was conservatism? Warrantless wiretapping, torture, bailouts for undeserving corporate entities, massive government spending, massive government debt and enormous government corruption are all incompatible with traditional conservative values. “Free market” fundamentalism is not just destructive to human health, civil liberties and economic equality. It’s also destructive to traditional values, family life and religious expression, all things that the real conservatives value in their hearts. The rift between liberalism and conservatism is as old as society. There will always be those who favor the old traditional ways and those who seek to change things. Our enemy is not each other, but rather the political and financial elites who have hijacked this country. These elites have donned the clothes of conservatives and are increasingly adding liberalism to their wardrobe, but they are neither. The government under their rule has become a monster, an evil being stitched together from disparate parts meant to funnel money to the surgeons. Working alone we progressives cannot turn such a beast into a compassionate machine of social welfare any more than conservatives can dismantle it and burn all the pieces.

Although this notion runs contrary to the orthodoxy of our progressive movement, I am going to advance it anyways by saying this: our most essential task at this point is not healthcare reform, environmentalism, ending the wars or restoring civil liberties. Our most essential task is to start calling things by their proper names and identifying areas where rank and file liberals and conservatives have common interests. We need to work together. I know that this will result in a lot of eye rolling and groaning amongst progressives who read these words. “Work together? With those maniacs? They’re fanatics, they can’t be reasoned with!” I used to say that myself, but I am now convinced that there is no other alternative. The frequent disputes and changing alliances within what is commonly identified as the right wing  show that it is not a monolithic alliance, but a coalition with its own dynamics and competing values. We must make a distinction between conservatism and corporatism. Conservatism is not our enemy. Corporatism is. Only through concerted action from both sides can corporatism be defeated.

I admit that skepticism of an opinion such as mine is warranted. Let me be clear: those in the right wing block who insist that there is nothing wrong with a corporate dominated state or that George W. Bush was the second coming of Jesus are not our friends and are a part of the problem. Those who are upset with the government and the bailouts, and unhappy with the state of the economy and the country, are our friends, or at least are our potential friends, even if they hold contrary views about things like guns, abortion, religion and general morality. We must make a distinction between them and the big money elite that is running the show. And we must agree to disagree on some things. We must not proselytize or try to convert them into progressives, nor should we tolerate attempts by them to proselytize or convert us. We must also not engage in the type of faux bipartisanship that has led the Democrats to surrender their positions wholesale to the Republicans. But we must understand that there is more that unites us than what divides us. We need to talk with each other. Each side needs to see that the other side does not have horns, and is not trying to wrestle their most cherished beliefs from them.

As Joseph Stack concluded his manifesto, he wrote that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.” But I have no desire to live in a country beset by anarchy and death. If we fall into the trap of believing that civil war and revolution are the only course, and that there is no possibility of working with the other side, then it will become the only course and it will become inevitable. And Joseph Stack will be viewed not just as a sad failure of a man but as a modern John Brown who helped precipitate an American tragedy of unbelievable destruction.