The current pattern of American life seems to be experiencing a recurrence… and the recurring demon now stealing into our national life seems to be one that is disturbingly similar to the prelude of the American Civil War.
The First Ominous Parallel – Chattel Slavery / Illegal Migration
The 19th Century crisis over slavery and the 21st Century crisis over mass migration are examples of dangerously contentious issues that present a grave threat to national unity.
While 21st Century illegal immigrants do not suffer at anywhere near the level of those held in American slavery, migrants also represent a segment of the population that faces issues regarding their treatment by those with power and privilege.
Indeed, both slaves and migrants have their champions.
Anti-slavery allies in antebellum free Northern states first fought against slavery’s spread and then for its outright abolition.
Northern citizens provided sanctuary to slaves and ferried them to freedom, while Southern states decried this as the illegal theft of property and demanded enforcement of runaway slave laws. Both sides claimed to hold the moral high ground.
It is, mutatis mutandis, very similar today, regarding Migrants.
States like California, New York and Oregon deem themselves sanctuary states where Federal laws are either ignored or flouted in favor of the progressive vision of a border-free world and a moral imperative to protect the oppressed.
Contrarily, states like Texas and Florida act to uphold federal laws against illegal immigration and limit migrant access to taxpayer funded services designed for citizens (including healthcare and education.)
The Second Parallel – The Impotence of the Courts
Numerous lower court rulings and even Supreme Court decisions on divisive issues seem to settle nothing.
As in the 2022 Dobbs abortion case, they instead tend to engender more strife, conflict and violence regardless of how they are decided; the same was true of the Dred Scott case in the 1859.
UPenn research, three years after Dobb
The Third Parallel – Increasingly Violent Politics
Bloody Kansas (1856) / George Floyd Riots (2020)
How the conflict fueled Civil War tensions
George Floyd riots cause a record setting $2 in damages
South Carolina Attacks Ft. Sumter (1861) / Portland Rioters Attack ICE (2025)
Officer Injured, Portland Rioters Breach ICE building with Explosive Rocks
Federal Troops Sent to Slave States to Restore Order (1861) / Federal Troops Sent to Sanctuary States to Restore Order (2025)
Lincoln’s Presidential Proclamation
The Fourth Parallel – Insurrectionary Militias
John Brown – The Secret Six (1859) / Antifa – George Soros (2025)
The Fifth Parallel – The Collapse of Compromise
Failures of the Compromises of 1820 and 1850 / Increasing Political Polarization Constricts Bi-Partisanship (2025)
Ideological extremes: Gallup Survey
The Sixth Parallel – The Demonic Enemy Leader
Lincoln: Three assassination attempts (1861; 1863) one successful (1865) / Trump: two assassination attempts (2024)
The Seventh Parallel – The New Cultural Sectionalism
Southern Agrarian Feudalism / Northern Industrial Capitalism
Applied Post-Modern Progressive worldview / Modernist MAGA worldview
This parallel is key, because all the others are subordinate to it.
While the issue of Slavery was by far the overwhelming issue in the growing conflict, that specific dispute itself was embedded within the larger framework of Sectionalism; that is, the existence of increasingly different societies, with different values, lifestyles, loyalties, worldviews and goals, growing in different sections of the same Nation and driving it to dissolution.
The South remained wedded to the traditional culture inherited from Feudalism, which was based on a vertical, hierarchical society run by landed aristocrats at the top; feudal lords in their castles were later succeeded by landowners on their plantations.
Where lords had serfs with few rights that were bound to work land that they didn’t own, plantation owners had chattel slaves who were imprisoned on the land with no rights at all.
Where lords had their knights and their private armies, Southern landowners exercised control over their gentleman officer corps and state militias.
Where lords controlled their non-serf population with fear, plantation owners controlled their free population with economic dominance; yet both cultures rested comfortably in stable, if not inert, societies that were undisturbed by the intrusions and disruptions of technical or social innovation.
The cultural situation in the North was much different. In the first 60 years of the 19th century the North was increasingly dominated by the rapid, dynamic forces of the Industrial Revolution and had developed into a more technological, more egalitarian horizontal society.
In the North, the upper-classes were not large landowners but big businessmen, whose wealth was based on manufacturing and finance. Large cities grew as factories offered an alternative to farming; artisans were replaced by more efficient machines and low wage workers replaced mass slavery.
The Federal military was more concerned with the logistics of running and maintaining mass armies than with the feudal ethos of gentleman warriors and their ill-organized, part-time state militias.
Compare this to today’s sectional conflict, which is instead centered on ideology and culture.
Our current form of sectionalism is not between North and South but between Coast and Heartland; it is not divided into free and slave but by the divide between Conservative Right and Progressive Left politics. The West Coast, the North East and various islands of Progressive politics in between are increasingly vehement against the Conservative traditionalists, who dominate in both the South and the American Heartland.
As with antebellum America, our sectional conflict is at odds over something far more basic than simple disputes over policy or even general direction; it is at odds over the existential meaning of the Nation itself and, indeed, whether its Enlightenment heritage even deserves to continue as it is currently constituted.
Two worldviews, one traditional, one revolutionary, are waging war with each other over which one should dominate the future.
Traditionalists see the conflict as a last stand for Ordered Liberty, national sovereignty, individualism and the preservation of Judeo- Christian values; Revolutionaries see themselves as progressive social justice warriors who reject Ordered Liberty as a cover for exploitation and national sovereignty as a toxic remnant of a brutish past, which hinders the construction of a more managed, transnational society. It excoriates democracy as a mask for oppression while casting various collective identity groups as being oppressed by White supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity.
This revolutionary Left loathes the conservative Right, which embraces Modernity (the modern period which began with the end of Feudalism and which continues, albeit uneasily, today) and Modernism (an intellectual movement that held sway from ~1850 – ~1950.)
The Post-Modern revolutionary Left rejects Modernity as hypocritical and oppressive. It rejects its demand that reason prevail over culturally constructed bias, rejects the primacy of science and technology over the worship of nature and rejects those individual liberties, including freedom of thought, speech, worship and opinion, which must take second place behind Post-Modernism’s dogmatic notions of Social Justice, which are deliberately cloaked in the confusing, obscurantist language of pseudo-intellectualism.
It replaces Modernity’s moderate skepticism regarding faith, tradition and the ability to know objective truth with a form of extreme skepticism akin to Pyrrhonism, where nothing is certain and all truth and knowledge are always relative to the perspective of the culture that produced it. Post-Modernism opposes what it contends are self-serving, politically motivated discourses that are constructed by the privileged few, which forces people to accept the definitions that those privileged groups create as society’s only legitimate frame of reference. It is that oppressive discourse – that way of describing reality – that must be deconstructed.
It posits that there is no right or wrong; there is no single objective truth revealed by its relationship to reality; there is only the exercise of power.
Therefore, Post-Modernism has been applied to create a plethora of critical Theories in its philosophical wake: Race theory, Gender theory, Sexual, Feminist, Queer, Intersectional, Pedagogical and Post-Colonial theories… all of them hell bent on dissolving the traditional, normative view of knowledge, biology, capitalism, universalism, gender roles, culture, individualism and even the nature of objective truth.
Unlike traditional theory, which tries to explain things in terms of what they are and how they work, critical Theory explains things in terms of a moral vision of how things ought to be… and those Theories must be forcefully applied by activists whose job it is to deconstruct an oppressive society in order for it to become a more equitable place with diversity and inclusion for evermore specific identity groups that have been undervalued, ignored and/or oppressed by those with power and privilege.
This ideological sectionalism has permeated so much of our lives that it now occupies the core of our current domestic upheavals.
Given its inherent irrationalism, the increasing violence of the Post-Modernist Left demonstrates that these two worldviews cannot be reconciled, especially given the Left’s rejection of reconciliation itself as being weak and collaborationist, as well as its excoriation of deal-making as immoral and ideologically problematic.
Further, there appears to be a dawning realization on the Right that it cannot reconcile or compromise with an opponent that views it as morally evil and deserving of death.
The tensions generated by the struggle between Modernism and Post-Modernism are as varied and dangerous as those experienced in the immediate antebellum period… and their similarity to conflicts that existed in the prelude to the Civil War may indicate that we ourselves are in a prelude to mass civil strife.
Many may see this as an overstatement; surely, it cannot be that bad. Surely the parallels are coincidental and surely, we have outgrown such tribalism.
However, the symmetry of these ominous parallels cannot be denied, especially as they continue to manifest themselves ever more often and ever more clearly every passing day.
We disregard them at our own risk.
~~~
Antony Stark is the co-author of the book “The Seventh Crisis – Why Millennials Must Re-Establish Ordered Liberty”
That old adage, “They won’t stop until they are stopped.” Is still true today.
As I was reading the article I was wondering how come M Dowling was using a very different “tone” or writing style from what we usually see in her other articles. Only after I was done reading did I see the name Antony Stark at the bottom of the page… No harm done but with all due respect, if I… Read more »
Wow! Brilliant!
Just one little add: “in favor of the progressive vision of a border-free world and a moral imperative to protect the oppressed”
A fake imperative, for in reality they plan to use and abuse the oppressed for their own power and (often prurient) pleasure.