USA's Second John Brown Moment Arrives

John Brown was an abolitionist, who thought slavery in USA could only be overthrown by armed insurrection. He was a bit early, and therefore most people considered his beliefs to be crazy. In 1859, he acted by seizing the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, failed and was sentenced to death by hanging. In the process, he accelerated the arrival of American civil war.

A few weeks back, I compared the Oregon ranch movement with John Brown’s actions. It was encouraging to find a prominent blogger writing on social events come to the same conclusion independently.

By murdering LaVoy Finicum, who was the most liked among the Oregon occupier group, Feds are accelerating the arrival of the second American civil war.

For the most authentic source of info, please check this link and related comments.

LaVoy Finicum also wrote a book, which is available from Amazon.

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What can delay the civil war? In a very thoughtful article, Archdruid argues that the election of Donald Trump as president will have such an effect.

The rise of Donald Trump, rather, marks the arrival of a turning point Ive discussed more than once in these essays already.

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To understand what follows, its going to be necessary to ask my readersespecially, though not only, those who consider themselves liberals, or see themselves inhabiting some other position left of center in the convoluted landscape of todays American politicsto set aside two common habits. The first is the reflexive resort to sneering mockery that so often makes up for the absence of meaningful political thought in the USagain, especially but by no means only on the left. The dreary insults that have been flung so repetitively at Donald Trump over the course of his campaign are fine examples of the species: deranged Cheeto, tomato-headed moron, delusional cheese creature, and so on.

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So thats the first thing that has to be set aside to make sense of the Trump phenomenon. The second is going to be rather more challenging for many of my readers: the notion that the only divisions in American society that matter are those that have some basis in biology. Skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilitythese are the lines of division in society that Americans like to talk about, whatever their attitudes to the people who fall on one side or another of those lines. (Please note, by the way, the four words above: some basis in biology. Im not saying that these categories are purely biological in nature; every one of them is defined in practice by a galaxy of cultural constructs and presuppositions, and the link to biology is an ostensive category marker rather than a definition. I insert this caveat because Ive noticed that a great many people go out of their way to misunderstand the point Im trying to make here.)

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Heres a relevant example. It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speakingthere are exceptions, which Ill get to in a momentits from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that its meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

Its probably necessary to point out explicitly here that these classes arent identical to the divisions that Americans like to talk about. That is, there are plenty of people with light-colored skin in the welfare class, and plenty of people with darker skin in the wage class. Things tend to become a good deal more lily-white in the two wealthier classes, though even there you do find people of color. In the same way, women, gay people, disabled people, and so on are found in all four classes, and how theyre treated depends a great deal on which of these classes theyre in. If youre a disabled person, for example, your chances of getting meaningful accommodations to help you deal with your disability are by and large considerably higher if you bring home a salary than they are if you work for a wage.

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And that, dear reader, is where Donald Trump comes in.

The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace of mockery. Hes figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill mockery, by the salary class. The mans worth several billion dollarsdo you really think he cant afford to get the kind of hairstyle that the salary class finds acceptable? Of course he can; hes deliberately chosen otherwise, because he knows that every time some privileged buffoon in the media or on the internet trots out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform to salary class ideas of fashion, another hundred thousand wage class voters recall the endless sneering putdowns theyve experienced from the salary class and think, Trumps one of us.

His complete post is a must read, and so are the comments.