When I first started blogging about three years ago I kept hearing the name “Billmon” invoked whenever the blogospheric conversation turned to listing the best writers. I learned early on that it was usually a good idea to search for the writings of the most-repeated names. More often than not the search led me to brilliant essayists such as Barb O’Brien (the Mahablog), David Neiwert (Orcinus), Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon) and above all the sublime Digby (Hullabaloo). ÂÂ
This “Billmon” was quite elusive, however.  At that time he’d already vanished into one of his extended hiatuses, and I could not find much of anything online that could even begin to support the oft-repeated claims of his “greatness”.ÂÂ
Then he came back.  Then after a while he went away again. Then he came back again. ÂÂ
By now I have learned why the name “Billmon” (at Whiskey Bar) is synonymous with “superb” in descriptions of the truly great writers of Blogistan.  ÂÂ
Here’s why.
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn’t be blue and red, they would be “traditionalist” and “modern.” On one side are the believers in the old ways — patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians — secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren’t nearly as libertine as we’d like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government.
Those are still crude oversimplifications — although at least they avoid the inanity of making musical taste into a political philosophy. But I think they capture something essential about modern Amerrican society, which has been transformed from a still heavily agrarian provincial backwater (circa 1930 or even 1950) into the post-industrialized center of a global empire in a historical blink of time.
Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists — both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman.) The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as “multiculturalism”) coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists — as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times.
But two things complicate the schematic. One is the fact that the modern American political dialectic is superimposed on older but still extant divisions: geographic (North and South), religious (Catholic and Protestant), ethnic (WASPs and everybody else) and of course class (with the great divide in American politics usually falling between the middle class and the poor.)
[snip]
These underlying fractures, however, don’t ameliorate the kulturkampf, they aggravate it. They force politicians on both sides to tune their messages to hit the most incendiary hot button issues — abortion, gay rights, immigration, terrorism — in order to hold their disparate coalitions together.
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style — as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it — but that increasingly doesn’t exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
But this too puts a premium on hot button politics — in order to pull what would otherwise be a diverse collection of individuals with diverse interests and opinions (conservative on gun control, for example, or liberal on the environment) into one politico-cultural camp or the other. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that one of the biggest political success stories for the traditionalists lately has been the rise of the megachurches, which often draw from a broad cross section of suburban society, generally offer an extremely generic brand of Protestantism, but indoctrinate their members in a very specific brand of conservative politics, usually built around abortion, homophobia and hyper-patriotism.
The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence — a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.)
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And what does today’s divided America remind Billmon of?ÂÂ
It’s a portrait of Spain, about six months into its civil war, which resulted in the overthrow of a fragile republic and the rise to power of the nationalist dictator Francisco Franco. (And yes, he’s still dead.) The territory held by the nationalists at this stage of the war is shown in red; the blue is the area still controlled by the republic and its virtually autonomous Basque and Catalan allies.
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What makes the comparison most apt, though, is not geography but culture. Spain in the ’30s, like America in the ’00s, was deeply torn between the modern and the traditional. The big cities, Madrid and Barcelona in particular, were being “Europeanized” — drawn into a cosmopolitan culture in which fashions, ideas and lifestyles were imported from Paris and London, not the Spanish countryside. Secular and anti-clerical attitudes were spreading. The lifting of censorship under the republic had unleashed art and political expression. Radical and avant-guard publications flourished. Hollywood movies glorified sex and crime (some conservative complaints never change.) Homosexuals, like the poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca, even stuck a toe out of the closet.
To the traditionalists of Old Spain, these were abominations, made even worse by the economic changes that industrializiation and democracy had wrought. Of the old sacred trinity of church, army and crown, the latter had been overthrown while the first two appeared in mortal danger. Foreign doctrines — socialism, anarchism, communism — were infecting the national soul. The republic was viewed as an instrument of Spain’s enemies, one that had to be destroyed. Or, as the leader of the Falange (Spain’s quasi-fascist traditionalist movement) put it:
“We must kill the old soul of the liberal, decadent, masonic, materialist and Frenchified nineteenth century, and return to impregnate ourselves with the spirit of the imperial, heroic, sober, Castilian, spiritual, legendary and knightly sixteenth century.”
You know, I think he would have made an excellent speaker at the last Justice Sunday rally.
The point is obviously not that all these conditions exist in America today (I haven’t seen any Comintern organizers around my office lately, and if there are any separatist movements out there looking to peel off a few states they’re keeping it pretty quiet.) But the fundamental political dynamic of a society polarized between two broad cultural coalitions, deeply hostile to each other, but also riven by internal contradictions, does seems highly comparable. And, as in Spain, the growing paranoia of the traditionalists is being fed by an almost obsessive fear of external enemies — Al Qaeda and immigrants instead of the Comintern and socialism.
What’s most sobering about all this is what happened in Spain when the moment of truth came. Because the two sides didn’t begin the war with neat geographical boundaries between them — e.g. the blue states and the gray — the result was a chaotic bloodbath. Every city, town and village in Spain became a battlefield where old scores were settled and new ones made. Priests and nuns, union leaders and policemen, peasant activists and local landowners were slaughtered by the thousands. Those who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (like Lorca) were imprisoned, tortured and/or executed by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
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But the historical truth is that civil wars aren’t made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America’s traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process — essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups — isn’t designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.
Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far — those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It’s easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It’s up to the rest of us to keep them under control.
Read the whole thing.  Brilliance.
“El Clodillo”ÂÂ
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Posted: July 6th, 2006 under Blogistan, En El Mundo, National politics, Politics.
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