History Repeating: When 'Totalists' Refuse to Tolerate

America is a "house divided" and it cannot stand

Earlier today I cited Senator Rubio's warning,

“I don't know of a civilization in the history of the world that's been able to solve its problems when half the people in a country absolutely hate the other half of the people in that country.”

I said that what I hear and see today reminds me of the national polity of the 1850s, which ended badly.

I have before called the underlying ideology of the American Left, totalism. The label was first used by psychiatrist and historian Robert Lifton. Professor Anna Geifman explains the Totalist political world view:

... Its devotees — anarchists, Marxists, or Islamists — want to impose a new order based on an “all-or-nothing claim to truth.” They operate within distinctive parameters of a “theology of Armageddon — a final battle between good and evil” – in which the stakes are nothing less than universal salvation. As outlined in Eric Hoffer’s classic, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting political grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.” [HT: American Digest]

No one gravitates to the Left in order to let others live their lives as they see fit. The beating heart of Totalism in all its forms is power and control over others. This is the raison d'etre of the entire American Left.

The First Civil War was a class war. The classes were, first of all, racial, with slave holders (Democrats, of course) vs. anti-slavery classical liberals; then geographical, South vs. North; and Constitutional, States Rights vs. Strong Federal Control. The identitarian, tribal Classist conflict was devastating. It started with the election of an "unacceptable" president, Lincoln. That event set the Democrats off like a bomb.

Today's Leftists appear to think that they have a moral mandate demanding violence, if necessary, to keep their power and narrative in total control. They showed no compromise or compassion under Obama, and they have only escalated that approach.

Whether the general population will drift into or out of Leftism is not yet determined. But the next few months will shed more light on that, as well as what must be done against the intractable, totalitarianism and Class War of the Left. Is the current environment just a huge Leftist tantrum? Or is it a precursor of larger turmoil ahead?

A very interesting time, we live in.

A final thought on Civil War I: The Democrats could have freed the slaves, hired them to work on their plantations at a living wage. They did not do that, because they could not: their embedded racism prohibited it. When they lost Civil War I, the Democrats oppressed the freed slaves with Jim Crow and KKK action against the blacks. They did not release their Class War; they redefined it and tightly institutionalized it through local law and official/unofficial violence. They are no different now.