The "Hayden Christensen Airs His Grievances" Edition
Nothing against Hayden Christensen, except his acting.
The Big Idea
More Stable Union’s More Stable Christmas Tree hasn’t come down yet, so there’s still time for references to Seinfeld and Festivus. In this edition, I want to get into the meat of violent instability risks for the United States by looking at what in overseas conflict analysis we call “conflict drivers.” These aren’t too different from the “means, motive, and opportunity” you see on “Law & Order:” an actor mobilizes people to address a grievance via a window of opportunity or trigger that convinces the target population that violence is the right way to address the grievance. Without nerding out too much, some things to consider in this formulation:
· “Actors” can be an individual or a group, but the group has to be reasonably cohesive. You can call Every Town for Gun Safety an “actor,” or a particular gun control advocate like David Hogg or Mike Bloomberg. You cannot call “gun control activists” an “actor”—that’s too diffuse;
· Not all actors are bad actors, like Hayden Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker. Mobilizing people around a grievance is the essence of politics. It becomes a conflict driver when bad actors make violence an acceptable option for addressing the grievance, either through their words or actions;
· “Grievances” are not the same as “problems.” Just being poor or lacking something is not a grievance. To become a grievance, people have to believe that a problem is someone else’s fault. Most of a bad actor’s work goes into convincing people that their problems are some other actor’s fault, and we need to take violent action against them to solve our problem;
· A “window/trigger” can be a fixed and predictable event, like an election or a holiday, or it can be something totally unforeseen, like a Serbian college kid assassinating an Austrian archduke. Of course, an actor can create their own trigger with the right provocation.
Conflict experts trying to prevent conflict will focus on resiliencies. In even the most messed-up places, there’s always something less messed-up than its peers. Resiliencies are usually respected actors or institutions who, if they can be influential or do their jobs effectively, can deter people from violence by addressing grievances peacefully, or at least by persuading people that violence won’t address the grievance. When conflict experts and resiliencies work together, they can look at the same grievances, windows and triggers as bad actors do, only with an eye towards minimizing the risk of violence.
For today, I’m going to focus on actors and grievances—we’ll leave windows, triggers, and resiliencies to later editions.
Climate change arguably should be a grievance motivating people to violence, as it genuinely threatens our understanding of civilization as we know it. Income inequality, loss of trust in institutions, MeToo, and BlackLivesMatter all clearly are grievances, but are not motivating people to violence. You don’t hear of any credible national actor calling for violence to address these issues.
The Hayden Christensen* of America’s leading conflict driver is the Republican Party, which is exploiting the grievance of the end of white male supremacy, and has moved beyond a democratic political process to an anti-democratic process, with significant violent overtones.
*I am sure Hayden Christensen is a fine and decent human being, but I’m trying to reinforce just how bad an actor the Republican Party is. The “turn to the Dark Side” imagery is fitting, but incidental to the sheer badness of the acting.
This is where I need to flag I’m not wearing a tinfoil hat. There isn’t a secret volcano lair where the Kochs, Limbaugh, Trump, Hannity, and Wayne LaPierre have been plotting strategy like Palpatine—though he, too, is very old and very white. There are a number of self-identified Republicans horrified by where their party has gone who are sticking with it for conservative judges and low taxes. A whole series of choices, made consciously and unconsciously, going back to Nixon’s Southern Strategy and culminating in the Party base’s visceral rejection of its own 2012 post-mortem calling for better outreach to youth and minorities, have led to this place where the GOP no longer is a “conservative” party. Rather, it’s become a European-style “nationalist” party, like UKIP or the Front National.
This is also likely where you’re saying, “I subscribed to a newsletter to tell me the Republicans are exploiting racism?” Well, you’re getting what you pay for. What I’m trying to point out is that we all know this, yet Democratic and progressive leadership repeatedly fails to internalize it. A meme I saw this summer put it well:
Russia: We’re going to interfere again
Trump: I hope the Russians interfere again
Republicans: We’re okay with foreign interference again
Democrats: We look forward to a free and fair election in an open marketplace of ideas and discourse.
It staggers me how may Dems and progressives just keep whistling through the graveyard in the face of a Republican Party that simply is no longer playing the same game. David Frum best noted this, saying, “When conservatives realize their policy views cannot command popular support, they will not abandon conservatism; they will abandon democracy.” The GOP has completed its transition from conservative party to nationalist party, and from Plan A—free and fair elections in an open marketplace of ideas and discourse; to Plan B—an anti-democratic oligarchy that, if you squint at it, will resemble Russia, or maybe just Hungary. This is why the GOP has done a 180 on its views on Russia; it looks like an acceptable model. Donald Trump has accelerated this process, but the webs of Russian influence on the GOP go in many directions and are amply documented.
The GOP is pursuing its anti-democracy campaign on three lines of effort, actively abetted by Russia:
· Information Warfare: The mis- and dis-information efforts of Fox News, Limbaugh, InfoWars, QAnon, Russia Today, GRU cyber-trolls, etc., all drawing from each other;
· Lawfare: The abuse of all the checks and balances of the U.S. system to retain minority power, including the Senate, gerrymandering, court packing, voter suppression, and the newest abuse, passing laws constraining the powers of rival officials after losing elections, as happened in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Our system rightly built in many checks to protect minority views, but when all those checks are wielded in a unitary fashion, we don’t have un-democratic minority protection, we have anti-democratic minority rule; finally
· Warfare: The GOP’s Plan C—a nationwide cadre of individuals primed to violence to enforce their will. This is not a central, organized effort like the Nazi Brownshirts, but what it lacks in control it makes up for in deniability. Nearly every non-familial mass shooting is committed by a white male who expresses hatred of women and/or minorities. We have deceived ourselves into believing these events are isolated and apolitical acts of disturbed losers, when we should recognize them as the acts of lone-wolf terrorists inspired by an ideology, just like ISIS’s lone wolves. Beyond lone wolves, we should be alarmed at Russian efforts to gain influence in the National Rifle Association, bearing in mind Russia’s use of “little green men” and paramilitaries in its near-abroad. In many countries, it is common for political parties abroad to maintain “armed wings” to enforce loyalty and intimidate opponents. The NRA is the GOP’s armed wing.
Taken together, this combination looks an awful lot like U.S. politics in the 1850s, where the South had developed a grip on all the main levers of the government to maintain a system that supported and promoted slavery, and whenever Northerners and Westerners complained, the Southerners threatened violent disunion. By 1860, Northerners and Westerners had had enough, and elected Lincoln. Most believed the South had been bluffing about secession; a substantial minority didn’t care if the South stayed or went, so long as the North and West were finally free to pursue their own interests, such as tariffs and land grants.
Lest we get into both-sides-ism, you have to go pretty deep down the QAnon rabbit hole to get to where George Soros and Nancy Pelosi are plotting with MSNBC and Antifa in a pedophile’s pizzeria basement—I will not dignify any of that with a link, but google QAnon and Pizzagate if you must. There is no parallel on the Left to what has happened on the Right. The crazy radical socialist idea of Medicare for All goes all the way back to firebrand Bolshevik Harry Truman, and there hasn’t been a single time in U.S. history when firearms haven’t been regulated to some extent.
The takeaway for this today is that achieving a more stable U.S. can’t and won’t be achieved solely through our existing democratic political processes. This isn’t about how corrupt or ineffective those processes may be—though that’s an issue—it’s that the other side is no longer interested in those processes. The shrinking, aging white male minority that is the GOP base does not accept the legitimacy of the rest of us, and will resist the rise of a younger, browner, more female-led generation as long as they can figure out how to bolt an AR-15 onto their walkers. We have seen this play out before: white antebellum Southerners, Serbs in Yugoslavia, Protestants in Northern Ireland, Pashtuns in Afghanistan, and non-Sunni Muslims in Syria all refused to live in a state they could not control. Either they own the state, or they break it. As the first president of what is now North Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov, said during the breakup of Yugoslavia, “Why should I be a minority in your country, when you can be a minority in mine?”
So, we’ve got our key actor and grievance. Next week, we’ll talk about the most obvious window for near-term violence: the 2020 election.
Good Reads
Kudos to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam for declaring a state of emergency rather than permit an armed “protest” to take place in Richmond to oppose gun control legislation. The First and Second amendments are not good traveling companions; when you bring a weapon to a protest, it’s not a “protest” anymore, it’s a “riot” or an “insurrection,” and responsible people who care about public safety should not permit it.
MSU’s More Stable Family was on a trip during the actual Richmond rally, but from what I monitored, I was disappointed how news outlets seemed to go out of their way to find “normal” protesters who just cared about their own right to possess a gun—gay couples, African Americans, self-identified liberals and Democrats—not the “Call of Duty” cosplay freakshow. Obviously, there are plenty of “reasonable” gun owners out there, and surely many did attend the event. Fortunately, this rally didn’t devolve into a “Jews will not replace us” disaster like Charlottesville. But still, when you see a bunch of white nationalists showing up to your rally, you need to reassess your rally and your participation in it. These aren’t people you can make issues-based tactical alignments with. I was also struck by the un-self-consciousness of the progressive gun-owners; to the extent minorities in this country have achieved rights and liberties, it hasn’t been by armed violence on their parts, it’s been by the Rule of Law—the very thing rallies/insurrections like this subvert.
Related to Virginia, Note the arrest of three guys arrested by the FBI as members of a militia group that calls itself “The Base”—literally “Al-Qaeda” in English, because they respect the way AQ fights for Muslims and think white Christians need something similar. The group deliberately chose that name. My favorite, makes-me-smile-like-Baby-Yoda-songs part, though, is that one of these guys is Canadian. Thus, the two Americans face charges of… wait for it… alien smuggling. Build the wall, build the wall… on our northern border to keep white nationalists out! That’s gonna be hard to fit on a placard.
"White Replacement" is an irrational fear, but it's still a real thing. As reported by Rogelio Saenz and Dudley Poston in “The Conversation,” “The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by the middle of 2020, non-whites will account for the majority of the nation’s 74 million children.” The overall white-minority tipping point is projected for 2045. There are more white elderly people than white children today. All that said, whites will remain the largest single racial/ethnic group for several more decades after that—this isn’t going to be like South Africa. As I noted above re Serbs, Pashtuns, Northern Irish Protestants, etc., insecure plurality groups can be very dangerous—being a plurality can feel like being a majority, and make you think you should be treated as such. It also enhances fears of someday losing even plurality status. I'll go into this more in subsequent editions, but it’s not just white people who will have to get used to whites as a minority; everyone else will have to get used to the idea of being the majority, and figure out how to engage the white minority constructively.
If your nationalist authoritarianism is actually built around oligarchy, I suppose it’s only natural you’d privatize your Brownshirts. A good friend and subscriber passed me the links to www.force4america.com and its “partner,” www.force4security.com: “A Security Company Out to Take Back Our Country!” As you’ll see from the websites, these are still half-assed; F4S contradicts itself about whether it’s licensed or not. But the medieval knight iconography that suffuses both sites is deeply tied to white nationalism in Europe and the U.S. Ironically, like The Base, this is yet another copycat of Islamic extremists, like Malhama Tactical.
"He is our O.J." is the one of the most insightful statements of political analysis I’ve ever heard, from this Politico piece by John Harris. It’s not that a lot of his supporters like Trump or think he’s a good guy, it’s that he’s sticking it to people they think deserve to get stuck. Lest we get too smug about how much more enlightened our side is, Harris makes a persuasive case that a lot of this rallying around Trump resembles what Democrats did with Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Looking from the perspective of the MeToo era, can we with straight faces assert that Clinton actually shouldn’t have been impeached, even removed? Not just for lying under oath, but for the actual act of sex with a young intern?
On a positive note, Lilla Orr and Gregory Huber from Yale have published a piece in the American Journal of Political Science, “The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States.” In two slightly different studies, the researchers found that people’s expressed feelings about an unknown someone were more closely related to policy positions than to partisan affiliation. For example, they would ask something like, “If you met a person who is a Democrat, but opposes abortion and owns an AR-15, do you think you would like them or not?” Whether people answered “like” or “not,” the subject’s explanation for their feelings towards this hypothetical person tended to revolve around the person’s policy views, not their party affiliation—like, “Well, I’m a Republican, but if the person is anti-abortion and owns guns, they’re probably okay.” This pattern held on both ends of the political spectrum. If this study is accurate, it’s encouraging—when we’re tribal, everything is zero-sum for our tribe. But if our divisions really do revolve around policy disagreements, then there is still a lot of space for negotiation if we can marginalize the most extreme policy poles.
On the downside, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein have "5 Myths" on Bipartisanship in the Washington Post that includes a study that, to them, indicates tribalism is stronger than policy preferences. Subjects in this study tended to react favorably to a certain climate-change strategy until told it was a “Republican” or “Democrat” strategy, after which they’d respond to it based on their own affiliation. I’m not sure that really undercuts the Yalies; I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a Democrat or a Republican to assume a “Democrat” or “Republican” climate strategy either goes too far or not far enough. I’m not an expert on social science research, but it seems to me the Yale questions come at the issue in a more objective way. Any reader who IS an expert can look at both and send me a few paragraphs I’ll work into a subsequent edition. Mann and Ornstein’s 5th Myth, by the way, supports my view stated above that polarization in the U.S. is highly asymmetric, all on the Republican side.
Finally, the always-entertaining and insightful Angry Staff Officer loves how The Mandalorian is showing us real military skill in the Star Wars universe. To put it mildly, Star Wars doesn’t evince a lot of tactical finesse. Indeed, the only fighters to show real skill in the original trilogy are the Ewoks. The rise of military-consultant movie gigs in Hollywood has shown in Star Wars, with Rogue One in particular looking more real—partly by casting veterans as extras. The Mandalorian’s combat scenes are quite realistic as well, as ASO details with particular praise for the Episode “Sanctuary” (the one with the AT-ST walker, where Baby Yoda drinks soup). I do quibble a bit: for all the Rebellion’s and Resistance’s tactical errors, their strategic and operational conceptions generally are outstanding, which is what really counts. I can actually see why most clashes tend to be head-on melees: in the Clone Wars, you’ve got two sides with infinite resources and indifference to losses—why not just steamroller? Steamroller makes sense as well for the Empire and First/Final Order. For the Rebels/Resistance, most of their fights are either raids, or not of their choosing and with backs to the wall. For them, a rapid and aggressive attack now beats more finesse later. As a combat engineer, ASO has particular praise for how Mando and Cara Dune use obstacles in Sanctuary, and contrasts that with the Rebels defending Hoth with a poorly-prepared defense. I think his sapper bias affects him: to me, in both cases, offense would have been the better call. Mando and Cara first encounter the AT-ST while scouting and encountering it in laager with a dismounted crew; they could have taken it out right there. Likewise, with their best weapons being X-Wings and snowspeeders, the Rebels on Hoth could have wiped out the Imperial landing by attacking the landing ships during descent.
Other ideas or contributions for MSU? Send them to monganjh1@gmail.com, and follow MSU on Twitter at @MoreStableUnion. However you’re getting this, please subscribe to morestableunion.substack.com.