Politico: We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?

It doesn’t look all that mysterious to me.

The most bitter divide is within White America. It is cultural, not economic. It is a rural vs. urban geographic division. The rift also opened up and has been steadily widening since the 1920s. It is rooted in the rise of the professional managerial class and their embrace of modernist values.

Politico:

“A big deal, indeed. But also a puzzle: If this is a 21st century version of 19th century disunion, shouldn’t it be more obvious what the war, at bottom, is all about? …

The more the vitriol has risen the less consensus there is about the origins of anger. To the contrary, there is something closer to an establishment consensus that the search for root cause is folly — the Trump phenomenon defies explanation, and the threat posed by his demagoguery makes speculation about its origins an irrelevant distraction.

Are you starting 2022 in an optimistic mood? You might take solace in the argument that it’s hard to have a real civil war without a real cause — a great question that will be resolved by the outcome. …”

A century ago, the PMC as an emerging social class was small. The number of White Americans who were college educated urbanites with modernist values was a tiny fraction of what they are today. You could say one of the most important stories of the last century was the growth of this class, their dominance of the mass media and American culture and their concentration inside the Democratic Party.

The so-called “mainstream” as it exists today did not exist until the 1920s. Its values were pioneered by the old cultural rebels against Victorianism like H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. The term itself didn’t really gain traction until the 1950s which is when this class of people became dominant with the spread of television. American culture wasn’t always dominated by a handful of metropolitan elites based in New York, Los Angeles and DC. PMCs also haven’t always dominated both political parties which was true of the Democrats and GOP in the late 20th century until Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election.

The real issue here is that PMCs as our dominant social class have been faltering for a long time. Their highwater mark passed decades ago in the 1960s and early 1970s when they pushed Nixon out as president. Distrust of these people and cultural division has been steadily rising since the 1970s. Trust in institutions which are dominated by PMCs has utterly collapsed. The “mainstream media” no longer has any buy in from the American Right which is incapable of enforcing “mainstream” norms.

The best way to think about it is taking a long view of American cultural history. We had the Victorian era which only became obvious in retrospect and which lasted from the early 19th century until around World War I. America went through a turbulent cultural revolution in the 1920s when modernist values arrived from Western Europe and became the new “mainstream.” Modernist values hit a tipping point in the 1960s and have become more pervasive since then leading to our current social cleavages.

So, if you think about it, the “mainstream” is really quite old. It is past its expiration date like Joe Biden. Just like the Victorians before them in the wake of World War I, the current political and cultural establishment has become as sanctimonious and repressive as Woodrow Wilson. Think of it as a wave that roared out of New York City in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s across the country and which is just as rapidly receding in the 2010s and 2020s. No one here gives a shit anymore about what New York media elites think in 2022. In fact, Florida is a larger state than New York now. New York City is a declining dump and no one should be in the least bit surprised that its cultural grip on the country is going the way of Boston’s before it.

It is “1/6” in the Acela Corridor. The faithful who live there are watching Joe Biden, Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, etc. in their shriveling media bubble. It is just another day in January here in the Deep South.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

13 Comments

  1. “””… it’s hard to have a real civil war without a real cause …..”””

    There might be unreal civil war. So called 4th generation war where progressives start taking down Nazis as citizen activism. This happened already with Aaron Danielson and almost happened with Kyle Rittenhouse.

    We shall not underestimate liberal religious madness when they see their world collapsing. Those managers and college students will not go silently into history. When you have MBA in transsexual dysfunction and debility., you will not accept to live in the normal society where such people are pushed into bottom of society. So they prefer to become a martyrs .

  2. OT

    She really did, and apparently either the book wasn’t edited or the editor is as dumb/propagandized as her or somehow didn’t catch the error:

    National Geographic author falsely claims that Kyle Rittenhouse killed ‘two Black men’ in new book

    She rather ungracefully acknowledges the error on Twitter (‘On p. 341 of THE GOOD KINGS I state that Kyle Rittenhouse shot two Black men when instead he shot two white men’ [ed: Jews, not ‘white men’]) by reminding everyone that ‘the white supremacy is still a problem’ and ‘the misogyny is still a problem’ — she’s getting heavily ratioed, for those who enjoy that sort of thing — countdown until she locks her account 10, 9, 8, 7, …

    Twitter/Kara Cooney

    Tell me again there’s not a problem with white women.

    • Believe it or not, Cooney is on the faculty at UCLA (link)

      Also interesting: link — there you see Glenn Greenwald commenting on a tweet by a woman (!) who claims to be ‘highly educated and reasonably perceptive’, but only learned late in the Rittenhouse trial that the two men he shot were ‘white’.

      >Tell me again there’s not a problem with white women.

  3. Yes yes yes, let us just dismiss the root causes of white grievance let us pay no attention to that elephant in the room sucking up all the air and forcing everyone to gasp for air. The Jew hatred of Christ and Christians will not go away and will be know and understood by all. It is Gods promise.

  4. “America went through a turbulent cultural revolution in the 1920s when modernist values arrived from Western Europe and became the new “mainstream.” “

    Was it Western Europe in the 20s that brought the change or the influx of Eastern European immigrants fleeing programs in the interwar years?

  5. “We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?”

    Excellent question. Both sides of politics now fully support:
    – Homosexuality
    – Negro worship
    – Jewish power
    – Israel-dictated foreign policy
    – Whites becoming a minority
    – The American empire
    – Cultural degeneracy

    I think the only major difference is that one side likes guns and waving flags while the other side likes vaccines and masks. The political divide is as sophisticated and meaningful as rival football teams.

  6. So the 1920s was when the old order tipped over for the new. What else happened in the 1920s? Women got the vote. First thing women voted for was alcohol prohibition, second was FDRs welfare state, third was divorce courts where women always win. Fourth was a massive increase in the welfare state and massive non white immigration under LBJ. That was the cause of our demise. Same in every western country.

    • @John Holmes – Women didn’t do ANY of that without male votes and male legislators putting these issues forward for a vote.

  7. It is “1/6” in the Acela Corridor. The faithful who live there are watching Joe Biden, Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, etc. in their shriveling media bubble. It is just another day in January here in the Deep South.

    We need to get rid of them. They just need to go. We can live without those states north of Maryland and the Ohio River.

  8. “Its values were pioneered by the old cultural rebels against Victorianism like H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis”.

    Mencken had contempt for the rural people of the “dark, rolling fields of the Republic” who he thought were ignorant rubes, but he also said it was the Confederates who were fighting for self-government, nor DIshonest Abe, the holier-than-god abolitionist scum and their bluebelly dupes. And he said Grant was a nonentity.

    .

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