The schedule and manner of the fall
The second contributor to the Guardian’s civil war in the US roundup is Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist and essayist.
One of the surest markers of incipient civil war in other countries is the legal system devolving from a non-partisan, truly national institution to a spoil of partisan war. That has already happened in the US.
The overturning of Roe v Wade, in June, was both a symptom of the new American divisiveness and a cause of its spread. The Dobbs decision (in which the supreme court held that the US constitution does not confer the right to abortion) took the status of women in the US and dropped it like a plate-glass window from a great height. It will take a generation or more to sweep up the shards. What women are or are not allowed to do with their bodies – abortions, IVF procedures, birth control, maintaining the privacy of their menstrual cycles, crossing state lines – now depends on the state and county lines in which their bodies happen to reside. The legal reality of American women is no longer national in nature. When a woman travels from Illinois to Ohio, she becomes a different entity, with different rights and duties.
Because of the lawless refusal to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
The supreme court feels illegitimate because it is illegitimate. The Dobbs decision does not reflect the will of the American people because the supreme court does not reflect the will of the American people.
I’d add a second illegitimate move to Marche’s: the lies and maneuvers of the Kavanagh hearing, especially the bit where it was paused for a few days so that the FBI could “investigate” further, when it was insultingly obvious that the FBI did no such thing.
Elections have consequences, right up until the point when they don’t. On a superficial level, the 2022 midterms couldn’t matter more; American democracy itself is at stake. On a deeper level, the 2022 midterms don’t matter all that much; they will inform us, if anything, of the schedule and the manner of the fall of the republic.
I wish I could say oh things aren’t that bad.
That sounds terrifying.
I have no further words.
It is all pretty terrifying.
The Founding Fathers right now are probably all tearing off their wigs and stomping them into the muddy streets of Heaven.
It didn’t seem to me that a full investigation into Kavanagh would have changed the votes of any senators to not confirm him. Any Republican who voted against him would have been primaried out at the next election. (Of course in Arizona there was a chickenshit Senator who was not running for re-election who decided to vote to affirm him anyway because, well we don’t really know. Perhaps he was afraid of getting kicked out of his church.)
They fall back on “he lied to me in my office when I asked him,” but they know that the reason he was nominated was to kill Roe.
I’m partway through listening to the series “Death Throes of the Republic” about the Roman Republic on Dan Carlin’s ‘Hardcore History.
Everything it that fits what Barbara Walters was saying in her interview about Civil Wars in general.
On Kavanaugh: Amy Cony Barrett should’ve had his seat but no, gotta own the libs…
I also hesitate to try to map past history on to the US; we’re heading in to a future that really doesn’t have any precedent. Lots of people are worried about a civil war; few people actually want one. That’s important to remember, while at same time it’s important to note potential increases in political violence. The United States is a huge place with a tradition of freedom, relative prosperity, a tendency towards laziness, and a weird distribution of population that creates this environment. Whatever things are like I’m not sure Germany or Rome are instructive.
Things could be pretty bad, but it’ll be unlike anything that came before.
Indeed. Among other things, the United States is awash with high power firearms outside the control of centralized, military authority, and a nationwide system of instant mass communication that makes it dead easy to organize huge groups of people.