The American Left Seeks Permanent Division

Unidentified Rose City Antifa members beat up Andy Ngo, a Portland, Ore.-based journalist, in Portland on June 29, 2019. (Moriah Ratner/Getty Images)

Commentary

Cynicism about the prospects for human civilization relates directly to our unfortunate propensity to wage war on rival families, tribes, nations, empires, or alliances. History often appears to be just one darn battle after another.

Foreign wars are ugly, destructive, and deadly, but within a culturally diverse state, they often improve national solidarity.

G.K. Chesterton once suggested that a patriot fights “not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

Civil War Produces Enduring Resentments

Civil war is another matter. It’s defined as a violent conflict between opposing factions in the same state and has an entirely different effect on the national psyche.

Civil wars are waged between conflicting polarities. Some have been fought by rival contenders to a throne. Others broke out between opposing religious, ethnic, tribal, linguistic, racial, economic, territorial, or ideological affiliations. A foreign war can unify a country. Civil war will almost always tear it apart.

The “first” U.S. Civil War was driven by a combination of economic and moral issues. Southern patricians who used slave labor to support an agricultural economy defended their “peculiar institution” on the basis of “states’ rights.” Abolitionists were moved by a moral code that held that “all men are created equal.”

When anti-slavery Republican President Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, seven states left the union to form an independent Southern Confederacy. Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederacy’s right to secede, and war ensued. Tragically, it took four years of bloody conflict to emancipate the slaves and restore the union.

The North–South conflict produced enduring resentment. Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial injustice prolonged division well into the 20th century. It took almost 100 years and considerable generational change for a majority of Americans to look back on the Civil War as a costly but necessary crusade to end human bondage and restore the union.

In the 1960s, an interracial civil rights movement led Congress to prohibit the practice of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination in the United States. Inspired by the examples of leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., people were ready to move on from past conflicts.

As a form of reconciliation, most Americans willingly accepted a half-century of university admissions and hiring policies that affirmatively discriminated in favor of the descendants of African American slaves.

Another Era of Discord

The launch of the Soviet Comintern and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1919 opened the door to a second era of domestic discord in America.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, a fifth column of Marxist intellectuals undermined the nation from within. Progressive professors and school teachers, militant union organizers, radical journalists and entertainers, and liberationist church leaders began a long march through America’s cultural institutions.

By the 1960s, while Americans were taking steps to heal the divisions caused by slavery, powerful political forces were preparing for a second civil war. America’s New Left advanced an ideologically charged agenda promoting resentment, wealth redistribution, reparations, and permanent revolution.

A series of leftist protests in 1968 signaled a new era of bloodletting. From that decade forward, political violence and urban riots became a common part of American life.

Always Ready to Cast the First Stone

Who’s really to blame for the present strife in America? That’s a debate that has been going on for 50 years, and the left has always been ready to cast the first stone.

Before his death in 1970, liberal historian Richard Hofstadter blamed political militancy on the character of U.S. citizens. He suggested that ordinary Americans may be “a people of exceptional violence.”

More recently, Barbara F. Walter wrote a book titled “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Ms. Walter is regarded by the left as a leading expert on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s a valued contributor to left-leaning media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and The Washington Post.

Ms. Walter depicted the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” march on the Capitol as a 21st-century equivalent of the South’s 1861 attack on Fort Sumter. She said Trump supporters smashed everything in sight and killed a policeman, which video evidence would later prove wasn’t true.

Ms. Walter also claimed that the 2016 election of Donald Trump had destroyed American democracy. Her book clearly supported the familiar neo-Marxist claim that many of America’s founders were slaveholding genocidal white supremacists and that the American dream of freedom and opportunity is a myth.

The Left’s Taste for Civil Conflict

Over the past few years, the American left has developed a fresh taste for civil conflict. The pre-election summer of 2020 was one of the most chaotic and violent episodes in modern American history.

Writing last year in The Guardian, American observer David Smith asked, “Is the U.S. really heading for a second civil war?”

Mr. Smith said President Joe Biden “had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal.” But on the “first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the president finally recognized the full scale of the current threat to American democracy.”

Also writing in The Guardian, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich claimed that “the second American civil war is already happening.” Mr. Reich asserted that America is “fast becoming two versions of itself.”

“The open question is: how will the two be civil toward each other?” he said.

By August 2022, Mr. Biden was openly contributing to the saber-rattling. During an address in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the president opened fire on people he mockingly called “brave right-wing Americans.” He said they would need F-15 aircraft to take on his government. He went on to imply that his political opponents were already shooting at police.

“I’m not joking,” Mr. Biden said.

In December 2022, The National Interest writer Niko Emack supported the Biden narrative.

“What may seem like isolated acts of violence—perpetrated by lone gunmen and far-right groups—are part of a larger movement of domestic terrorism that has the makings of a burgeoning civil war,” he wrote.

A June feature in the iconic Rolling Stone magazine asked and answered the same question: “Is America Already in a Civil War?” Rolling Stone interviewed Brad Onishi, another so-called expert on “extremism,” who contended that militant “white Christian nationalists” are acting increasingly as though they’re “ready for combat.”

Machiavellian Marxists Practice the ‘Art of War’ in America

For the “woke” left, the battle for America has begun, and they intend to win by any means necessary.

The end game of the cultural Marxists who infiltrated the United States over the past two centuries is to overthrow American democracy from within.

Their strategy is to transform society through the control of information, the media, education, publishing, and entertainment. They’re determined to grind down the pillars of society, the family, religion, traditional morality, the American justice system, and the Constitution.

Divide-and-rule has been the basis for communist power grabs since the early decades of the 20th century. Sinister allusions to civil war and exaggerated claims about right-wing domestic terrorism, MAGA insurrectionists, and militant Christian nationalists are self-serving excuses to slice up the country, suppress legitimate opposition, and punish political resistance.

This is the same “art of war” that was endorsed by the 15th-century Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli.

“A captain,” he wrote, “should endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.