February 14, 2025

Civil War, Class War: Keeping ScOR #3

February 14, 2025

I do not believe that a second American civil war – an active, ongoing shooting war, whatever that would look like in our time – is inevitable. I fervently hope we don’t go there. But for years now, some have been murmuring that a cold civil war is well underway in the United States. I’ve murmured it myself. Now, a few weeks into this blitzkrieg against the American system of government also known as the second Trump presidency, there’s no denying that our cold civil war has entered a new, excruciatingly dangerous phase.

I won’t catalog every action by the Trump regime that has crashed through norms, laws, or the Constitution. A few that stand out: The executive order flatly contrary to the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship; the attempt to freeze payments from most government programs created and funded by Congress; the purges of FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers who worked on the criminal investigations of Trump; the order to summarily kill off the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); the move allowing Elon Musk and his minions to access the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems to do who knows what.  

Judges have blocked many of these moves, at least for now. We’ll see which of Trump’s power grabs are ultimately green-lit by the majority right-wing Supreme Court. In the meantime, JD Vance and Elon Musk, the vice president and unelected co-president, have declared that this White House rejects the judiciary’s 222-year-old role as a check on the executive branch. Right on cue, a federal judge found the Trump Administration was indeed violating a direct court order (to remove its freeze on government payments).

Legal experts are debating whether we’re careening toward a constitutional crisis or already in one. Some pundits are calling Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy and the co-equal branches of government a(nother) coup. It’s indisputably a hostile, autocratic takeover attempt.

Taken together, don’t these actions also amount to a sharp escalation of our cold civil war? Trump’s most telling salvo in this regard came on Inauguration Day: his pardon of about 1500 January 6 rioters, including leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who’d been convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States. This was an American president giving the go-ahead to anyone contemplating political violence, so long as they do it on his behalf.

Given enough such violence, heaven forbid, we’ll have civil war minus the qualifier, “cold.”

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What does it mean to talk of a cold civil war? Analysts on the left and the right have assessed that we’re in one while defining it in very different ways. Various commentators, including Carl Bernstein and Bill Maher, have used the phrase mainly to convey that Americans are really, really divided.

Here’s what it means to me. In normal politics – in a functioning democracy – citizens and politicians of all stripes, no matter how deep the differences in their values and goals, compete for power within the agreed-upon rules of the game, and everyone accepts the results. (Put aside for now whether the system produces results that reflect the will of the people. That’s another site of struggle.) In a cold civil war, by contrast, substantial forces on at least one side of the political divide have stopped respecting the game. They’ve taken to treating some of their fellow citizens not as opponents to persuade or to out-vote, but as irredeemable enemies to be defeated at any cost – including at the expense of democracy. And they act accordingly, using weapons, for the most part — since we are talking cold civil war — other than guns.

We could debate when this cold civil war set in. It’s crescendoed under Trump, but the rightwing campaign to seize power by undermining democracy goes back at least half a century, as we explored in Scene on Radio’s Season 4. The movement grew more aggressive under the Newt Gingrich-led GOP of the 1990s, with its demonization of "sick,” “traitorous” Democrats and bad-faith investigations of Dem Congressional leaders. (Jim Jordan would tear many pages from that book). Speaking to the Heritage Society in 1988, Gingrich called for a war against liberals to be fought with a “savagery that is only true of civil wars.” Later came the Tea Party Movement and the norm-shattering moves by Republicans during the Obama years – most infamously, Mitch McConnell’s theft of a Supreme Court seat. (Neil Gorsuch stepped into that seat without so much as a blush.) McConnell and many other Republicans treated the first Black president as if he’d stolen the keys to the White House. Trump is not a departure but a culmination.

There’s another war that gets less attention but is just as real: our undeclared class war.

Yes, the left has engaged in acts of civil war, cold and hot. Think of the Weather Underground, setting off bombs in the 1970s. If the Democratic machine helped JFK steal the 1960 presidential election, that would qualify as an act of cold civil war. Alongside the guy who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house and attacked her husband with a hammer, we have to mention the man who opened fire on the Republican Congressmen playing baseball in 2017, wounding Rep. Steve Scalise.

But there’s no both-sidesing this. Those rejecting the guardrails of democratic governance are overwhelmingly on the right – just as our political polarization is also asymmetrical, studies find, with Republicans moving further right than Democrats have shifted left. The Democrats’ own supporters often ridicule their fidelity to The Way Things Have Always Been Done, their habit of bringing a strongly worded statement to a gunfight.

With too few exceptions to matter, the Republican Party is now waging cold civil war en masse, embracing the kind of rhetoric that has historically led to hot wars and massacres. Trump spoke of the “radical left thugs that live like vermin within ... our country.” Musk wrote on X that USAID, the country’s foreign aid agency, is “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI Director, wrote a book that featured a list of Trump’s enemies and declared, “the manhunt starts tomorrow.” Patel also reposted a video that depicted him beheading villains of MAGA world such as Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, and Liz Cheney, with a chainsaw.

Maybe the only reason we haven’t endured a lot more J6-like political violence is that MAGA is winning without it. For the moment.

Donald Trump has staffed his new administration with civil warriors. From Vance, Musk, and Patel to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, he’s elevated people who zealously echoed his 2020 election lie – the primary Lost Cause grievance used to justify the breaking of glass to defeat and expunge the enemy. These extreme figures are now cheering Trump’s illegal power grabs and executing his purges. All but a few GOP members of Congress have signed on, surrendering their own power and that of their institution to grease Trump’s autocratic takeover.

The most disheartening reality of all? That vast numbers of regular Americans have climbed aboard. As I’ve said, I don’t ascribe consciously racist or anti-democratic motives to every Trump voter. I trust that some knew not what they did. But millions cast their ballots fully aware of what they were unleashing, and now celebrate the wreckage. Don’t those votes for Trump, in themselves, constitute shots fired in America’s cold civil war?

Parasite

There’s another war that gets less attention but is just as real: our undeclared class war. (These wars are not really separate, of course, but two fronts in a larger struggle for power, control, and money.) We know the class war has been raging for centuries and that one side — the ownership class — has seized the upper hand over the past fifty years. As workers got more and more productive, executives and shareholders took a growing slice of the spoils for themselves. The burgeoning wealth of the 1% “doesn’t fall from the sky,” as author Marjorie Kelly told me. “It’s being extracted from us.”

You’ll rarely see things described in such straightforward terms in the corporate media. Fresh off our series on Capitalism, I was struck by a pair of articles in the Newspaper of Record in early January — longish “analysis” pieces by top New York Times reporters. Both purported to look at the big economic picture with historical context. One, by Peter Baker, made the case that, contrary to Trump’s narrative, the U.S. economy was in pretty good shape. (This came after the election, mind you.) The other, by Jonathan Weisman, explored how the Democrats lost the (white) working class vote over several decades. Weisman wrote about Clintonian trade deals, plant closures and job losses, but both articles lacked any direct reference to the systematic upward redistribution of wealth since the Reagan years.

Even some on the far right talk a better populist game than the Democrats.

It doesn’t help, of course, that the Democratic Party’s leadership mostly avoids combative messaging about economic exploitation, presumably because the party relies on wealthy donors. The progressive wing of the party that does talk that talk, led by Bernie Sanders and AOC, remains small and marginalized.

Even some on the far right talk a better class-war game than the Democrats. In a recent interview with Times columnist Ross Douthat, Steve Bannon talked of “sociopathic overlords on Wall Street” and Silicon Valley “oligarchs.” “The capitalists,” he said, “are always trying to drive down wages.” Bannon called the working and lower middle classes “the backbone of the country.” This is music to the ears of some Trump fans, no doubt, but obviously a cynical smokescreen. Because for Bannon, Donald Trump is the answer. “He’s actually an incredible, kindhearted, empathetic individual,” Bannon said with a straight face. (Hat-tip to Chenjerai Kumanyika for pointing out the Bannon interview.)

From time to time, news happens and shines a light on class struggle. The surge in strikes and union organizing over the past few years raised hopes of new momentum for workers. The murder in December of a healthcare CEO, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, triggered a spate of analysis and social media posting about the depredations of the for-profit health insurance system. Millions turned Mangione into a folk hero, hinting at a wellspring of untapped anger. A friend told me she wondered, briefly, if the assassination was “the first shot of the revolution.”

Critiques of our second Gilded Age can be found in the culture, too — for example, in eat-the-rich movies like “Triangle of Sadness” and “Parasite.” In the dark comedy “The Menu,” a famous chef invites a dozen wealthy people to his island restaurant to feed them a ridiculous haute cuisine meal before killing them. At one point the chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, asks a guest, “What school did you go to?”

“Brown,” the woman answers.

“Student loans?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, you’re dying.”  

Joe Biden decided to call out the plutocracy, fleetingly and late. Biden never offered a populist narrative in any sustained way during his term, even as he got some center-left, pro-working-class policies enacted. In his farewell address, though, he warned of the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape." 

Well. That was mid-January. It feels like an eon ago, now that the Trump/Musk Administration (the Trusk regime?), dominated by billionaires, is bulldozing government agencies that, among other things, regulate and investigate corporations — including Musk’s — and stop banks and other companies from cheating their customers. Trusk has the IRS in its crosshairs, too.

A full-on oligarchy is taking shape, for real. Unless, somehow, we can stop it.

For any Republican voters who did not mean to unleash all this, now would be a good time to call their elected representatives to say so, and to encourage the surgical implantation of a spine.

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Comments are open, people. Love to hear from you. What should we do, as citizens, to fight the oligarchic takeover and prevent a deepening civil war? And/or to advance a conversation about economic injustice and its causes? What actions are you taking?

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Scene on Radio the podcast is available wherever you get your shows, and at sceneonradio.org.