Cold For Now

In 1932, when the leadership of the German parliament decided to try empaneling a cabinet under the leader of the largest party in the Reichstag, one Adolf HItler, one of the groups that lent the new idea strong support was…

…the German Kommunist Party.

This bit of cognitive dissonance startles a  lot of modern Ameircans, with their exceedingly pat, linear understanding of political history.  In the context of the times, it made perfect sense.  And not without reason.  The Communists believed that a coalition run by a Nazi would drive everyone in the middle to one extreme or the other – which would redound, conventionally, to their benefit.  They stood to gain from the violence they believed would ensue.

And barring a major change in German political life, it might have worked.

But Hitler outmaneuvered them Commies, and everyone else.   He promised Germans an end to politics – and, numbed by a decade and a half of depression, political violence and fractiousness, Germans bought it.  And he got the allegiance of the German Army, which allowed him to sustain his seizure of complete control of all the levers of German government.

But that was all in the future.  In the fall of 1932, the Commies beheld the spectre of (more) political violence, and chortled merrily.   Division – in the form of a low-grade, cold-to-warm state of conflict – was in their interests, or so they thought.


To the best of my knowledge, Dennis Prager was the first to call our current national impasse a “civil war”.   It’s a cold one – so far.

I despair, occasionally, of it staying that way;

He notes the propensity of today’s left toward violence:

Today, we watch leftist mobs scream profanities at professors and deans and shut down conservative and pro-Israel speakers at colleges. We routinely witness left-wing protesters as they block highways and bridges; scream in front of the homes of conservative business and political leaders; and surround conservatives’ tables at restaurants while shouting and chanting at them.

Conservatives don’t do these things. They don’t close highways, yell obscenities at left-wing politicians, work to ban left-wing speakers at colleges, smash the windows of businesses, etc.

Why do leftists feel entitled do all these things? Because they have thoroughly rejected middle-class, bourgeois, and Judeo-Christian religious values. Leftists are the only source of their values. Leftists not only believe they know what is right — conservatives, too, believe they are right — but they also believe they are morally superior to all others. Leftists are Übermenschen — people on such a high moral plane that they do not consider themselves bound by the normal conventions of civics and decency. Leftists don’t need such guidelines; only the non-Left — the “deplorables” — need them.

Like the Communists of 1932, they are hoping with every Antifa outrage, with every clogged freeway, with every mob scene in a store or restaurant or place of business, to provoke a response.   It will, they think, redound to their advantage.   Given that they control the means of information distribution in this country every bit as thoroughly as the Nazis did 86 years ago, it’s not a bad plan.

 

11 thoughts on “Cold For Now

  1. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a civil war, cold or not.
    The Left is engaging in these antics because they are losing. They control the media, academia, and big business — and they cannot hold either branch of congress or the presidency. Leftist ideas are profoundly unpopular outside of a certain social class. “The beatings will continue until moral improves” is not a winning political message.

  2. You know, after all the times the “occupy” crowd destroys storefronts and such, one would figure that big business would wise up and realize that progressives can never be their friends, and that they can never prosper with progressives running things. I guess, however, that I am dangeorusly naive in this.

  3. Oh, it’s an un-civil war, MP. And Trump is the least bad of the responses of those who have seen their livelihood and prospects destroyed by the elites. I disagree with Mitch that it’s not left-right so much as it’s workers against faux intelligentsia credentialed professionals. What the collegistas have done to the prospects of the working class via “free trade” and “open borders” has been nothing short of open economic warfare, and Trump was their method of fighting back.

    What I find ironic is that it’s an Ivy-educated, monied billionaire who was the first to openly embrace the plight of the lower class blue collar worker.

    What I don’t find ironic is that Trump, a life-long liberal had to align himself with the right to succeed. There is no way that Trump could have run as a liberal for president because of his race and gender in the corruption that is the identity politics of the Democratic Party and not the “party of the working man” it was so long ago.

    So Trump aligned himself minimally with the right, giving them say over the things that mattered more to the GOP base than to their leaders (Supreme Court nominations, for example), while keeping the things that mattered more to the blue collar folk to himself (borders, trade, economy, etc). And it shows how minimally Trump is a Republican — can you imagine a booming “Never Hillary” had she been elected? The real question, to me, is if the GOP leadership is smart enough to keep addressing the issues of the working class, or whether they’ll settle for being the non-fascist, but still elitist, party in the room?

  4. Trump’s the best liberal I’ve ever laid eyes on. Wouldn’t let him anywhere near my daughters, but he’s the best liberal I’ve ever laid eyes on.

  5. I propose a thought experiment (a popular exercise from my physics days).

    Posit: Imagine that Democrats and their adjuncts in the media had behaved typically during the election and afterwards.

    Experiment: Without a demonstrably insane opposition, would Trump have the support he now does in the GOP? Would Trump be able to command the unity and respect of the disparate parts of the GOP, and would be as wedded to the policies of the GOP as he is now for his own protection? Would he have been able to force through originalists to the Supreme Court, or would he have even been forced to nominate them?

  6. In the language of Real Estate the relationship of the Democrats/MSM (the Party / Media industrial complex) and Donald Trump is that of a landlord and a squatter. On June 16th 2015 Trump squatted in the Democrat/MSM mindspace and has been living(partying) there rent free ever since. All the efforts to date of the Democrat/MSM to evict him have failed and I see no sign that Trump intends to decamp voluntarily.

  7. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 10.03.18 : The Other McCain

  8. I can see the violence escalating into a shooting war, but it won’t be standing armies battling one another.

    More realistically it will be a guerilla war comprised of small, skirmishes waged among local combatants. The cops, and the national guard will try to keep a lid on it although I do believe some guardsmen might engage I a little side action.

    But listen, everyone is Audey Murphey until they find themselves squatting in cold knee deep water in a ditch with bullets flying. This shit would be nasty and make no mistake; effeminate leftist soy boys might not be worth a shit at first, but they’d learn enough quick enough.

    The thing I would prefer, and the thing that is not impossible, is a calm, non-violent parting of the ways. Let the reprobates have the states they’ve already turned into shit holes, we’ll take the rest.

  9. Just wait a few years, Swiftee. The feds won’t be able to afford anything but social security and medicare payouts.
    What will save the Union (and it does deserve to saved) is the fact that each state is perfectly capable of running itself as a republic — it’s a requirement for admission to the Union. Every state has an executive, legislative, and judicial branch capable of operating w/o orders from Washington. Each state has its own military and police powers. The US was not built to be a nation on the European model, where the sovereign jealously keeps everything under central control (I’m looking at you, France).

  10. MP, a union comprised of sovereign states, gathered together to assure mutual defense and commerce is just as good as a separation.

    Say, didn’t we used to have that?

    I’m a proud South Carolinian, but my enthusiasm for being American wavers when I see and hear some of the sub-human trash that calls themselves American, too.

    If California wants to let their citizens treat their unborn offspring like rotten fish, I have no problem. If they want to smoke sticky buds until they no can, I say great.

    But if they want to open their Southern border to allow a flood of uneducated, low IQ third world refugees to pick my pockets, I say hell no.

    That means an end to federally subsidized welfare, schools, medical care, housing and cell phones. If we did that, reprobate states would soon go broke, and we’d have to worry about ignorant, low IQ refugees coming into our states from the 3rd world state of California.

    I just don’t see how it can work. I want a hard border between me and anyone that wasn’t born or raised in real America.

  11. I am personally holding out hope that if we can just get a handle on illegal immigration, welfare, and the like, that things will improve to the point that even “reprobate liberals” figure out what’s going on and change their ways. I am probably wildly optimistic in this.

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