Civil War, Fascism or the Anaconda?

 “A Confederacy of Dunces?” by Hal Crowther, The Progressive Populist, 12/21

Riffing off the title of a book by John Kennedy Toole about a comedic group of louche characters in New Orleans, whose title itself is based on a line from Jonathan Swift, this article probes the question of whether the U.S. will head into another Civil War.  A topic not quite as humorous as that book.

Like most commentaries, the hook is a survey by Bright Line Watch/YouGov (who?) of Republican voters in 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Oklahoma and Kentucky.  66% of these Republican voters would ostensibly choose secession over compromise with a Democratic administration.  50% was the Republican tally nationwide.  In the same survey, 40% of Democrats agreed to, in Crowther’s words “let them go.”   

Crowther goes on to imagine a new dark age descending on this new Dixie, with millions of non-whites leaving the ‘white’ homeland, while the ‘new new South’ is still left with the worst quality of living metrics it already has – obesity, wages, health, reading, education, poverty, crime.  Right now the South is only leading in gun ownership, abortion restrictions and right-wing Christianity.  Crowther skips the blood-shed issue, as if this division will happen painlessly.  Crowther lives in North Carolina and knows of what he speaks.

Texas would be the center of this new Confederacy, as its oil and gas is the new cotton.  They still remember their Alamo days as an independent slave ‘republic.’ Unfortunately for them, at this point a U.S. military base, Fort Hood, (named after a Confederate general) is the largest employer in the state.  The U.S. military, the North and the Coasts pump more tax money into the South than the South sends out.  The whole region is actually on corporate and military welfare.

IMAGINE

Crowther is against this idiocy, so let’s do a little fictional speculating as he did, but from a socialist, not a Democratic Party direction.

It is pretty obvious that with the adoption of neo-liberalism by the capitalist elite starting in the late 1970s under Carter (a Southern Evangelical peanut farmer), the faction fight between the two capitalist parties has gradually gotten worse – as both support slightly different versions of neo-liberalism.  With the recent advent of a handful of ‘democratic socialists’ or some such thing in the Democratic Party, the John Birch hysteria of calling the Democrats ‘communist’ has reached a crescendo.  Cultural McCarthyism is rampant from Republican politicians, as if the Democrats were actually “cultural Marxists.”   The Reps wouldn’t know a real Marxist from a frog.  The Right's mirror images among ‘moderate’ and leading Democrats also spend time hating on socialism and cradling capitalism to their bosom.  On this issue both parties are joined at the hip.

Little do these poor Republican saps know that the Communist Party, for one, has voted for Democrats since the end of the Henry Wallace campaign in the 1950s.  Even present day right-wing Stalinists and Maoists secretly vote for or back their favorite Democrat in general elections as their way of ‘stopping the right.’  Ssshhhhhh… it’s called ‘the popular front.’

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, political gridlock and anti-democratic riots like January 6^th have now dropped this fake democracy in the rankings internationally.  The ‘Selfie Putsch’ was the capstone. This gargantuan imperialist has become a political embarrassment on the world stage.  The defeat in Afghanistan and the vast increase in economic inequality and debt has only heightened the effect.

REVOLUTION?

How will a revolution take place in the U.S.?  The partially archaic vision of ‘October’ occupies the minds of many leftists still living in the past.  Certainly the guerrilla victory of Castro – who was not a Communist – is impossible in the U.S. Nor is an Eighth Route Army going to thunder across the plains or fields from its hideouts in the Rockies or Appalachians in the context of a world war.  That is because the specter of neo-fascism will rear its ugly head first.  Like the Black Hundreds, the Nazis, the Blackshirts or the Francoist Falange, the U.S. will have its own plethora of actual neo-fascists defending capital. In fact we already do – and as history and the present have shown, they are most closely tied to whatever conservative Party is around.  In our present context, that is the Republican Party.

Now where is capital in all this?  Well, each present party in the ‘two-party system’ represents some of the same capitalists, but also different ones.  Each party also represents a wing of the petit-bourgeois – the middle class.  The Dems have most of the ‘educated’ professional strata in their pocket – the lawyers, doctors, engineers, techies, artists, professors, architects, journalists, etc.  Meanwhile the Reps have most of the managers, small businessmen, farmers, ranchers, landlords and ‘entrepreneurs’ in theirs.  At this particular moment most big capital backs the Democrats, but there is a faction that backs only the Republicans, usually in the carbon, real estate and retail sectors.  The vast majority of the U.S. military brass were clearly wary of Trump’s attempt to become a Francoist caudillo, and rejected his anti-democratic attempt at staying in power.  A careful analysis of donations in the last election cycle in 2020 reveals who was on whose side in that faction fight.  Trumpolini came out on the short end of the stick.

Layout of the 1st Civil War

Will anti-fascism be our version of a civil war?  At this point, the majority of capitalists don’t need open fascism, open white supremacy or anti-science nonsense to save their system.  In the future they may.  The support of a faction of liberal capitalists for the Democrats may wilt away, much as happened in Weimar Germany or pre-Mussolini Italy, as a strong socialist or working-class movement pushes up against their profit margins and power due to an inevitable and deepening capitalist crisis.

What happened in Brazil shows how the Brazilian (and U.S.) capitalists reacted to the Workers Party in power – the WP being far to the left of the Democrats.  Jair Bolsonaro was their answer, a politician who openly advocates a military dictatorship against ‘communism.’  But right now the bosses know the Democrats are no social-Democrats or laborites, even with ‘the Squad.’  The Democrats are no real threat to them.  So until a real working-class movement of the left or labor party arises, the top international capitalists won’t need fascism - unless their whole economic system crashes or becomes a zombie.  These billionaires, many of whom are part of the transnational capitalist class, or intimately connected to it,  run this system, as ultimate power is in their hands.

In a way, a second 'civil' war will really be through fighting fascism - that is how a civil conflict will take place.  The KKK, formed out of elements of the defeated Confederate Army, were the inheritors of that earlier war - and we certainly have our present versions.  Right now there is more a danger of a ‘premature’ civil war, where the crypto-fascists get ahead of themselves, a taste of right-wing adventurism, with little backing from the biggest international and sophisticated sectors of capital. It has already started to happen – look at Kenosha, cities on the West Coast, Charlottesville, Jan. 6 or the plot to kidnap the Michigan governor... though the latter has been revealed to be an FBI setup.  A real ‘civil war,’ if it actually arises, would not involve whole states in the South anyway.  It will involve mostly exurbs, far suburbs and rural areas against inner suburbs and cities.  Not all small towns and cities will be on the right, but may split.  Atlanta and Houston aren’t going anywhere near a new Dixie, for instance.  Its geography would be a patchwork - although the original civil war was a patchwork within the South too.  (See prior reviews on the opposition to the Confederacy within the South.)

ECONOMICS

Unlike the 1860 economic base of cotton and sugarcane, which knit the planters of the South together, the present South does not have a common economic base.  The rightist libertarian Elon Musk’s Tesla will be slinging electric cars in Austin at the Republican oil barons of Dallas.  The nuclear/coal/oil/gas cretins of Georgia’s Southern Company will be facing off against Atlanta corporations like UPS, Delta and Coca-Cola.  And so on.  Cheap labor, exploitable resources and a lack of social benefits are their common themes, and these are their points of unity.  These are common themes throughout the U.S. business classes, but especially in the South.

The retail segment is a key element to the southern profit-machine. A company like Atlanta’s Home Depot, supplying goods to car-bound suburbia, relies on cheap, non-union labor to make a profit for its Trump-lovin’ owner.  The super-budget Dollar Tree pays little more than $8 an hour, while being headquartered in Virginia.  The food chain Publix is based in Florida, owned by Trumpers.  They all rely on low to no taxes, cheap products and cheap labor locally and internationally. They follow retail monsters like Arkansas’ Wal-Mart and California’s McDonalds, who also need cheap wages, cheap meat and low taxes to make profits for their billionaire owners.

The South has produced many fast-food and retail chains that rely on cheap labor, as the newer South developed out of the 1950s car culture too. The brutal Southern chicken industry is a feeder ramp to the fast-food chains.  Now tech-based Amazon has superseded Wal-Mart as the country's biggest employer, paying better wages and benefits under pressure from labor and Fight For $15.  While fake noises are being made about ‘regulating’ Amazon by the Democrats, Obama’s foundation got $100M from Jeff Bezos.  So even retail is changing under the whip of technology, and they are not all on the same side of the faction fight.

Until a serious depression or war, the development of a mass socialist or Labor-Populist Party in the U.S. or large revolutionary forces - actual fascism and civil war will not be in the cards as a total response by capital, especially its international sectors… though part of one, more national, capitalist faction is organizing for it right now. More likely it will be a creeping rightist authoritarianism – on the streets, in the legal system, the Government, the police, the schools and universities, in jobs, in the media, on the internet – until the whole society is in a reactionary straight-jacket.  I call it the Anaconda plan.  It will reflect the increasing arteriosclerosis of capital – its productivity, its profits, its botched vision of ‘democracy,’ its losing confrontation with nature, its limits, its wars.  This is all happening now… the frogs in the pot are slowly boiling.

At some point, this straight-jacket will produce a mass left reaction among the population who have had enough, whose situation will be dire.  We will then see the jack-boots come out on a national level, backed by generalized capital, and an appropriate anti-fascist and revolutionary response from the Left, the ethnic communities, the Labor movement, many rank-and-file Democrats and some Republicans ranks, along with an occasional Democratic Party politician. That is my prediction anyway.

The Progressive Populist is sold at May Day, along with many other publications.

P.S. - 12/18/21 - 3 retired generals warn of a split in the military in 2024 when the winner, if it is a Democrat, is challenged.  However the actual facts the generals' mention fall far short of a major split in the military at present.  On 12/20/21 a CIA 'advisory' panel said the risk of civil war had grown to 'pre-insurgency' status, whatever that is.  In November, a Swedish think-tank called the U.S. a 'backsliding democracy,'  which has been true for years.  

P.P.S. - Commentary in the Guardian indicates many answers to polls are forms of trolling.  It mentions that the 'insurrection' at the Capitol was not really one, something reported on this blog on 1/7/2021.  The use of the term 'insurrection' is an insult to the language, something indulged in by newspapers, liberals and Amy Goodman.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/27/no-america-is-not-on-the-cusp-of-a-civil-war

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, using these terms:  "It Was Predictable,"“Drivin’ Dixie Down,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx); “American War,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court,” “Loaded”(Dunbar-Ortiz); “Southern Cultural Nationalism and Southern Liberals,” “The Bloody Shirt,” “The Potlikker Papers,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Struggle & Progress,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “Lincoln,” “Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands,” “Guerillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front,” “The Free State of Jones,” “Andersonville Prison,”

Red Frog

November 27, 2021